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Posts from 2015

There’s A Flame

Music has the power to heal and help you find peace. Steve McPeters, a friend of HOPE Connection and a member of the band, Cadoan, composed a beautiful song called “There’s A Flame,” which is both healing and peaceful. It was featured in the award-winning documentary “Inside Peace,” which documented a workshop that began in a Texas prison and helped prisoners transform their lives.To listen…

Answers To Questions About Grief

I am alone and lonely with no one to turn to. Often I am afraid when thinking of my uncertain future… getting old and sick in a hospital or nursing home with no one to hold my hand and comfort me. Could you give me some feedback on this concern. When you get stuck in your fears about the future, you probably…

Demoted To Lunch: The Underbelly of Grief

Laurie Burrows Grad’s husband, Peter, died one month ago. She writes, “The hardest thing about grief is to see life going on. People all around me continue to do their daily routines. The stock market keeps functioning; meteorologists predict the weather; time marches on. I cannot understand how I have lost Peter and the clocks have not stopped.”She also writes about other…

Healing One Day At A Time

Grief itself can be and usually is overwhelming. Dealing with grief — healing — can be equally daunting. That is why Martha Whitmore Hickman’s beautiful book, Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief, is so valuable. In its very structure — daily meditations — the book gently allows the reader to face a range of emotions in kind and manageable doses,…

“Falling In Love Is Wonderful.” Or Is It?

We all remember falling in love. We all remember those wonderful feelings we experienced when we fell in love. And if we experience love again, later in life, we become reacquainted with feeling alive and exuberant, like the teenagers we once were. Falling in love is especially shocking when it happens after the loss of a loved spouse and no one is…

Writing & Grief: Meet Yourself On The Open Page

Grief is a strange landscape: The world is the same, but you are not. You are still you, but the world is not. Everything has collapsed and gone cockeyed and reassembled in ways that only you can see. Even those who have lost the same person have still lost someone different than you have. It’s easy to feel like Alice, dropped down…

What Not To Say To The Bereaved

Though it has been discussed many times publicly and privately, it bears repeating from time to time just so that people don’t forget. There are some thoughtless and inappropriate comments that people say to the bereaved because they:

A) Don’t know what to say

B) Don’t think about what they’re saying

C) Are uncomfortable with their own vulnerability

D) Just don’t understand. It is just not part of any experience they have ever had; therefore, they are unable to relate.

When the person closest to you dies, it is not only

One life — Two losses

Years of companionship, adventure, striving for understanding two souls grew together. The initial natural attraction maturing over the years into deep and lasting love creating a shared identity.   We imagined we were in the indian summer of our years. Dreams of an undefined future together hand in hand abruptly ended when one was taken too soon.   That loss brings tears.…