If you’re grieving the death of your spouse, it may sometimes feel as though you’ll never heal. But as the days and weeks and months and, yes, even years go by, healing does occur. One essential part of the healing process is gratitude. In the early days of your grief, gratitude might also seem like an emotion you’ll never experience again. If you make a practice of gratitude, though — expressing it even if you do not wholeheartedly feel it — you may just find that gratitude helps you heal.
(818) 788-HOPE (4673)
Grief Support Groups Serving West Los Angeles, Encino and Agoura Hills
Grief Support Groups Serving West Los Angeles, Encino and Agoura Hills
First Person (Page 3)
At HOPE Connection, we have a tradition that we encourage every group member to participate in. It is the simple act of saying goodbye to other group members and the group therapist when a member moves from one group to the next. We continue that tradition when a member graduates from Group Five. The following is a poem that Lynne Goldklang wrote and then read to the entire HOPE Connection community as she said goodbye.
I have been listening to versions of Turn! Turn! Turn! since Pete Seeger took the much quoted biblical passage from Ecclesiastes and made it into a song in the 1950s. In 1965 it became an international hit as recorded by the Byrds.
As a young woman, I felt the power of the song lyrics as I examined my life and looked toward the possibilities with so many years to come.
I eat dinner standing in the kitchen
Because that’s now what I do
When I sit at the dining room table
I still expect to sit down next to you.
You’re invited!
Leo Baeck Temple, 1300 N. Sepulveda Blvd, Los Angeles 90049.
9:30 a.m. Coffee & Pastries. 10:00 a.m. Film Presentation of Eve
Please join us on Wednesday, March 13 at Leo Baeck Temple for a screening of the short film, Eve, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Susan Bay Nimoy and HOPE Connection’s Executive Director, Dr. Jo Christner.
Members of the HOPE community may be especially interested in Eve because the filmmaker, Susan Bay Nimoy, found inspiration to create the film following the death of her husband, renowned actor Leonard Nimoy. “It was a profound loss for me,” says Nimoy, “I sunk into a deep dark hole, and I didn’t want to live. I wanted to die. And I actually kind of did.”
Don Phillipson is a writer who lives in Thousand Oaks. He was a HOPE Group member until October, 2018.
I sit in a darkened theater, beautiful blue velvet curtains, having just
descended, guard the stage.
The curtain has just come down after the third act, and I sit stunned, dazed.
Five feet tall, forty years old, a steel witness to a life no more. I open the four drawers and pull out the files. Some slim and clean, others heavy, showing their age. They store happy memories of travel around the world, celebrations of birthdays, and anniversaries, the joy of remodeling the house, receipts for various acquisitions, utility bills and bank…
Jess Womack is a lawyer from Sherman Oaks and a HOPE Connection alumnus.
November 26, 2018, marked the sixth anniversary of my wife’s death. We were married for 43 years, 4 months and 2 days, and I loved her dearly. Six years later, I am still in love with her and with my memories of her. I have not deified her in death. She was human and as a human a flawed, mortal soul; but she was a very lovely, loving mortal soul whom I still love and miss, terribly.
“It’s the Circle of Life and it moves us all through despair and hope through Faith and Love.” — From The Lion King These are soulful words though not typical of how we move through life. Our lives are usually experienced in a linear way — on a path that goes on and on until it fades away or ends abruptly. We count and…
When the dead return they will come to you in dream and in waking, will be the bird knocking, knocking against glass, seeking a way in, will masquerade as the wind, its voice made audible by the tongues of leaves, greedily lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue is a turning and returning, the dead will not then nor ever again desert you,…