Sometimes I feel really sorry for my family. They are the unfortunate souls who have to listen to my bellyaching on any given day.
The answer to the question of when you should begin the intensely personal part of your Healing Journey known as the 'go-through' is quite simple.
Although it may be tempting to do otherwise, do not choose to dwell on the unfairness of your widowhood. The unfairness is a given, however dwelling on the unfairness will not take you in the healing direction that you wish to travel.
I have always taken great umbrage at anyone criticizing, questioning or opining on how the widowed handle their grief and their highly individual and intensely personal healing journeys. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of it going on.
In what is known as Widowed World, widowhood is defined as: 'A club that absolutely no one willingly joins; a state of existence that will upend your life as you knew it and forever change the rest of your life from what you had previously and carefully designed into a scary and uncertain future.'
Lights, music, festivities, and feasts all around -- but if you're grieving the loss of a loved one, it is anything but "the most wonderful time of the year." If you're grieving and are wondering how you'll survive the season, use the following six suggestions to ease the way.
The moment has arrived to call a time-out in the game of "My Pain is Worse Than Your Pain." It is indeed time for a Widow-tude Adjustment; both within and outside the widowed community.
No one has the right to criticize how anyone suffering a loss handles anything -- from whether or not they visit a gravesite (be it sooner, later or ever) to a decision to sell everything that they own and sail around the world.
Grief is not an emotion I expected to experience in college. I struggled to discuss my feelings with classmates who had never considered their parents' mortality.
Movies are a wonderful way to begin a discussion. With children, especially little kids, it gives them an emotional vocabulary. How does this character feel -- happy, sad, confused. Here's a list of movies and five guided discussion topics.
Grief is one of the most universal of human experiences. Virtually every single person you know, including yourself, will eventually lose a loved one.
Finding solace in ordinary tasks like gardening and organizing can be very comforting and even therapeutic when people are grieving, whether it is the death of a loved one or the loss of someone to a life-altering illness such as dementia.
We should continue our cultural tradition of recognizing grief as a normal (and expected) human experience. If anything, the grieving person may benefit from support and sympathy, rather than being diagnosed as mentally ill and treated as such.
The challenges that families must face when confronted with a terminal diagnosis of a loved one are complex. They include evolving new structures and dynamics as the person they love slowly slips away.
As the year draws to a close, it's only natural to reflect back on the events that had the biggest impact on our lives. For me, it was the loss of my ...
Dec. 25 and many other holiday or "anniversary" dates can be highly significant. These include birthdays, marital anniversaries and days when loved ones died. This phenomenon, often deeply painful, is called an "Anniversary Reaction."
When my traumatized states could not find a hospitable relational home or context of human understanding, I became deadened, and my world became dulled. When such a home became once again present, I came alive, and the vividness of my world returned.
The ongoing development of sophisticated medical diagnostic and treatment technologies has led to what I have termed "the new grief." It represents a crisis that may ebb and flow in intensity over time.
I've heard time and time again there is a societal expectation to "get over" grief in six months, and at the longest, a year.
Death? How did that get in there? It is not an image that comes to mind when you think of childhood. And yet it is a part of childhood much more often than commonly thought.
We often keep a distance due to our own discomfort and a genuine fear of trespassing on mourners' privacy. But giving people space can lead to withholding the human nourishment we all crave.
