As you might know, anxiety can be inextricably connected to grief and is considered a normal part of the grieving process. For some, it can become a constant companion in the grieving process. What is anxiety? Basically, it’s feeling a sense of worry, nervousness, unease and excessive apprehension. Honestly, it can just feel plain terrifying and awful, as though you’re going crazy…

Take a moment and imagine your life as a tapestry.

What you see depends upon which side you’re looking at.

Sometimes, you only see what looks like the back side of the fabric, with broken threads and uneven and missed stitches, the difficult painful events.

If you take a breath, give it time to unfold and hold onto faith/hope/love, you may be able to imagine the top side of the tapestry and begin to believe that your life will become upright and okay again, maybe even beautiful in its own unique, changed way. It won’t always feel upside down the way the loss of loved one can throw it.

October, and Halloween — oh what memories! Wearing costumes with a mask that you wanted to fool a friend with. In those days that was a fun kind of mask.

Now, as a grieving adult, you discover that masks take on a different purpose. Such as the metaphorical mask to avoid the sadness of grief with family and friends, when you don’t want them to know how you really feel.