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Posted by in Events, My Book, Reclaim Your Life, Thriving after Loss, Transformation

After I began helping others to navigate their grief, I thought to myself,

“This is the life I was meant to live”;

referencing the message I heard shortly after Leah died that said, Losing Leah is too high a price to pay to not live the life you were meant to live.

About this time, I begin to hear that it was time to write my book.  I resisted writing it for all kinds of reasons. I told myself,:

I’m not an author,

I can’t write,

I don’t want my vulnerable story out there for anyone to read, and on and on.

I resisted writing my book until it was easier to just write the darn thing!

I began a writing boot camp to see if I had a book to write.  I still doubted myself, and I thought if I wrote a book at all it would be an ebook, and it would live where ebooks live, thereby not being a “real” book because I couldn’t hold in my hand.

The boot camp consisted of writing 1000 words for 10 days, and then sending them each day to my writing coach.  After the ten days, we had a phone conversation. He told me, not only did I have a book, my book needed to be a physical book I could put in someone’s hands. There went my ebook idea.

I spent the next 3 months writing my first draft, and then sent it back to him.  We had a 2-hour conversation, going over the book chapter by chapter.  He helped me to format it so it was cohesive, and gave me ideas on how to flush out each chapter.

I wrote for another 3 months, everyday, writing and editing, again and again. When it felt complete, I found someone to help me edit and self-publish it.  This was really happening!

While it was being edited, I did a lot of work to release old beliefs about my value and worth so that I cold talk about my story when my book was ready to publish.

That first year, I took my book on the road and did over a dozen events in Raleigh, where I lived at the time, as well as Chicago and Boulder. After that year, I claimed the fact that I am an author as well as a speaker.

Today, when I pick up my book and read a portion of it, sometimes I wonder who wrote it. In some ways it felt like it came through me.  While I was writing it the words flowed easily. I find that is true most of the time when I am writing. I am able to touch a place where my words describe what I am feeling, sometimes before I even know that I am feeling a certain way.

 

Writing my book was another step in saying yes to the life I am meant to live.

You can find my book here.

 

 

Being with Grief – MeetUp Group

Posted by in Grief

One of our early attempts at providing grief support out to the community was to use MeetUp. MeetUp is an online community that intends to gather like minded people together for a common activity. In our case, to create a community gathering where it would be ok to talk about grief.  MeetUp seemed like the answer to get people talking about this important subject.

In 2015, Nancy incorporated and registered Being with Grief as a business in North Carolina. We thought that MeetUp would help us get out the message that there was an alternative to traditional therapy. That talking to a couple who had had an unimaginable loss might seem more approachable for people. We felt it would meet a community need and it seemed to us as an obvious niche that we were ready to tackle.

After all we had stumbled after our own grief almost overwhelmed us.

We were not aware of the available resources and were not open to traditional therapy. We had evolved in our thinking and our practice to a place where we could talk through our pain. Our company was Being with grief and we were comfortable in holding everything we had experienced as part of our personal healing.

Making a place for people to feel safe talking about their loss seemed like a no brainer. MeetUp provided a forum for people looking for help. An app that people were getting familiar with that made collaboration and sharing information easy. It seemed like a great match.

What we failed to realize was just how reluctant people are to opening up about grief. It is difficult sharing sadness that can accompany significant loss. This reluctance is tied to many of the things we learned growing up observing our parents and how they grieved. This learned observations condition us with expectations on how we will react to similar situations.

I can’t ever remember seeing my father cry or be sad. As an army sergeant he was always on point and never showed emotion. He had a great sense of humor and a short fuse when it came to tolerating our failures or misbehaviors. He wasn’t raised that way. I learned to keep my emotions in check because of what I observed. I have come to realize that this conditioning must be one of the reasons that clients and people in general find it so difficult to open up with others.

We kept the MeetUp group going for better than 3 years.

We met in convenient places, the library, and several senior living facilities that opened their common rooms for our use. Over that time we served over a dozen people who showed up to the bi-monthly meetings that we held. What was frustrating for us was that the MeetUp app registered over 200 people expressing interest in a grief group. We held our meetings on weekends and maybe that a time when most people wanted to relax from a work week of had chores to do. Self-care and taking care of those chores are important. A healthy psyche and emotional well-being when you are grieving is also too important to overlook. Nancy and I continue to offer help to those who have felt the brokenness of grief. Our approach is to change the conversation around grief and we look forward to those heart to heart talks.

Patience

Posted by in Grief

I know that “Patience” is difficult for me. While I try to make the best of things, sometimes it is just not easy. As I count down the days to a surgical procedure, my mind wanders to all the “what if’s” and begins to spin into chaos. Thankfully, I have some tools to use to get me out of the hamster wheel of doubt and fear.

“Patience is calmly dealing with a difficult or frustrating situation.”

“Patience is a purposeful activity. When working on patience it is helpful to start with self-reflection.” How do you prompt yourself to be patient? A tool that I use is meditation. My wife and I sit each morning to focus on being present and the promise that the day holds.  I check in with where I am feeling impatience.

What makes you feel impatient? It may help to make a list of things that cause you to recognize when you are feeling out of patience. When we try to be in control and change an outcome it can cause the discomfort of impatience. Often the solution is to change your mindset about the situation.

Here are some common signs of impatience:

Muscle tension

Shallow breathing

Hand clenching

Restless feet

Irritability or anger

Anxiety

Nervousness

Making snap decisions

When grief enters your life, you may feel the need to be in control of an uncontrollable situation. Patience at this time is very difficult to accomplish. Grief can manifest in many forms like impatience, confusion, depression and many other symptoms that need our attention. Developing the necessary tools to recognize and manage these stressors can be helpful in dealing with grief. That certainly is the case with the need to feel in control when we want something to be different from the way it is it.

Why is patience such a challenge for most of us?

Being in control is often a trick we play on ourselves in our attempt to bring order to chaos. It can dearly cost you if you constantly try to tie yourself up with controlling every aspect of your life. It can lead to deeper health issues and affect our self image. Whenever we try to change and exert control it can lead to anxiety.

Anxiety is classified as a mental health disorder especially when it involves high levels of fear and worry. Generally, the feelings that occur affect behavior and emotions which may also cause visible physical symptoms these can include:

Avoiding social gatherings – Isolating

Sweaty palms, dry mouth racing pulse

Restlessness

Irritability

Trouble falling asleep

Staying awake

Panic attacks

Fatigue or tiredness

Concentration issues

Many of these same symptoms are associated with grief. When I was in the middle of my grief  over my daughter’s death, I had many of these ailments. What I learned from the Grief Recovery Method is that grief is about our uncommunicated feelings. When we take responsibility for them we can begin to alleviate the symptoms because we are engaging with our feelings rather than turning away and denying them. Taking small correct steps can make the difference. Talking about your feelings to someone can begin the process and set you on your own road to recovery.

What Does Healing From Grief Look Like?

Posted by in Grief, Reclaim Your Life, self-care, Self-Love, Thriving after Loss, Transformation

I’m often asked what it means to heal from grief.

It’s a question I’ve pondered for over 20 years, and I’m not sure even now I know what it means.

We hear often that “Time heals all wounds.”  Time by itself isn’t the only factor; it’s what you do with that time that makes the difference. If I broke my arm and allowed time alone to heal it, the bones would eventually knit back together.  My arm may not be very useful to me.  If I had it set in a cast, and then did physical therapy, my arm would then have a better chance of regaining full functionality.

The same is true of grief. If we do nothing with our feelings, stuff them in a drawer and hope they go away, what we may find is they seem to get louder and more intense.  All we want is relief from the incessant overwhelming feelings, and for things to be the way they were before we experienced our loss.

Let’s look at the dictionary definitions of healing and heal:

Healing-Adjective

  • Curing or curative; prescribed or helping to heal
  • Growing sound, getting well, mending.

Noun

  • The act or process of regaining health

Heal-Verb

  • To become whole or sound, free from ailment.

 

Looking up these definitions sent me down a rabbit hole, looking at definitions of curative, (serving to heal) mending, (an act that mends or repairs) of becoming whole, (comprising the full quantity) etc.

Each definition provides another layer of meaning, yet none fully describes what healing from grief means to me.

With each definition, I became more and more sure that the healing that is described in the dictionary looks nothing like what healing from deep grief looks like. The closest I can come to what healing feels like for me is this. As I began to emerge from the day-to-day fog and shock of my daughter’s death, what I describe as healing came in glimmers of hope.

 

  • A smile after I heard a song that reminded me of Leah.
  • A day that I didn’t sob all day long. In the early days I stopped wearing make-up because it was cried off my face before I got to work.
  • Being inspired to paint again after a couple of years of not wanting to get my paints out of the closet.
  • Sleeping better at night.
  • Wanting to eat nourishing food.
  • Wanting to get showered and dressed in the morning.
  • Being ready to go through her clothes and her room. (I did this with someone who did not know her, which made it easier for me)
  • Decorating for Christmas again. (this looked different every year, I’ll write more about this in specific blog about navigating the holidays.)
  • Being ready to move from the house we lived in with her. (after 7 years)
  • Wanting to bring a painful feeling to my heart because I knew it would shift. There were many years that I still avoided this, even though I knew it worked.
  • Being ready to write my book and share my story.
  • Being ready to speak about my story.

 

I can point to these as sign posts along the way like I was reclaiming my life, even though it looked different than it did before. I didn’t experience healing as a linear journey. There were many starts and stops, and sometimes it felt like I was taking one step forward and several backwards. The common ground was continuing to see hope and light, no matter how dim, at the end of the tunnel.

Everyone’s healing journey is unique just like everyone’s grief journey is unique. What is your experience of healing after a loss?

 

 

What Inspires Me?

Posted by in Grief, Reclaim Your Life, Thriving after Loss, Transformation

When I saw this question as a prompt my first thought was,

“No one will be interested in that.”

Then I realized that quite often, my first thought is an attempt to avoid a place that feels too vulnerable.  I wondered why I felt vulnerable writing about what inspires me.

My biggest inspiration is my family, especially Dan, my husband, Peter, my son, Leah, my daughter, and Arya, my granddaughter. Arya is the newest member of that list at little over 1 year old, and I wanted to go right to her because she is such a delight. I love watching her discover things about her world. I love her unabashed trust in all of us who love her.

I want to recapture some of her pure delight for myself.

I would not be able to appreciate her the way I do without the inspiration of Dan, Peter, and Leah, so before I continue my reflections of Arya, I will start with them.

Dan inspired me from the day I met him. He was the first person who really saw me for who I was, even though it would be many years before I saw myself that way. He was instrumental in helping me to meet that person and grow to appreciate her, and then to love her. He always gave me unconditional love at a time when it was not apparent in my life. He helped me learn to trust myself, and relax into the person I am meant to be. He opened up the door of possibilities before I even knew that there was a door.

As my firstborn child, Peter inspired me to be a better person, and a better mother than I ever thought possible. The sight of this tiny human that blessed our lives over 40 years ago made me appreciate child-like joy through play and discovery.

He inspired me to find play again in my own life.

Leah inspired me to take a stand for myself when I sought a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) birth. Peter’s birth was a C-section due to complications from a car accident. I wanted a different birth experience with Leah. We educated ourselves about VBAC, and were successful.  Leah also inspired me by the way she lived her life. (Although I didn’t see it at the time!) She was intense from day one, and always fought for what she wanted.  I later thought that maybe this was because she would be here for such a short time.

She also inspires me to live the life I was meant to live, in order to honor her life since she’s been gone.

My family inspired me throughout my life to follow my own path, and to do my inner work, so that I could provide an environment for them to do the same.

Back to Arya.  I know in my heart that if I had not done my own work, the work involved in creating a family that thrives, and the work from my grief journey that I would not have been able to be fully present to the wonder of my granddaughter. I do not have layers of protection around my heart from suppressing my feelings during my life. I learned how to feel all of my feelings, so my heart is open, and from that place I can appreciate my granddaughter with a completely open heart.

The humans that I love the most inspired me to live my best life, to meet the difficulties of my life with grace, to be vulnerable. So there you have it. We don’t like to be vulnerable, and yet that’s what makes us open to love and a worthwhile life.

I am inspired to be vulnerable.  I’ll take it!

Adoption Grief

Posted by in Grief

Here is a little known fact about me. I was adopted as an infant. My adoptive parents raised three of us in a wonderful loving home. I wish that I had been able to share with my parents, Dolores and Vincent, the profound sense of gratitude that I feel for the life that they provided me. Their sacrifices for us and the love that they gave to us, impacts me more as I grow older and observe my own family. All this came into focus for me when I decided to take the Ancestry DNA Genetic test.

What would have that life have been like?

The genetic test result revealed a very involved story. It turns out that my immediate maternal family includes two biological brothers and a brother-cousin and 2 more brothers on my paternal side. If you are wondering what a brother-cousin is; we share the same father between two sisters. It is a complicated tale that may turn into a screenplay or short story. At this later stage of our lives, we have now met, shared our stories and stay in contact as our individual families grow.

For me, this advance in genetics raises a profound grief, one that is hard for me to reconcile. This is the grief of having met my biological brothers and grieving for the “what might have been” life.

What if I had grown up with them?

It is complicated by the fact that if I had been raised with my biological brothers, then my story would have been very different. It may have also altered the biological family structure.  In my maternal and adopted family, I was the oldest child.  In my adopted family, this meant that there were expectations of what I would do with my life. In my biological family, I will never know just what or how those expectations would have shaped my life. Thinking about many “what if” moments is hard for me. The life that I have led would not have existed. I can’t imagine a different life, different friends, different schools. I cannot comprehend not having met my wife Nancy or having our children and now grandchildren. I can’t stay in that space for long before I get a headache.

In the age of genetic testing and the possibility of tracing your biological family roots, I have been lucky to find my biological brothers. I had not anticipated the unexpected sense of grief when I decided to take the test. It is a mixed bag of emotions that stems from those two separate branches of my story that will never be resolved. There will always be questions and a sense of wonder.

The 1950’s were a much different time than today. My birth mother made an extremely hard decision. Although it has taken the better part of 60 years to uncover the story, getting to know my brothers, their lives, and their families, who have been so open and supportive of me has been a wonderful journey. I appreciate my good fortune to have been adopted by my parents and the life they provided. This life of mine has been blessed in many ways.

Full Spectrum of Feelings

Posted by in Grief, Presence, Reclaim Your Life, Thriving after Loss, Transformation

I’m often asked how I can be joyful and live the life I am living when I’m doing it without my daughter’s presence in my life.

I’m asked if I have gotten over her death, or if I’ve healed and accepted her death.

I will never get over Leah’s death. I’ve had a 20-year inquiry into what healing form her death looks like, and I have a problem wrapping my head around what accepting her death means.

I’ve accepted that she is not here, and that in order to live the life I was meant to live that I had/have to find a way to honor her, and to be the best me that I can be. That has not been an easy road, and it has meant that I needed to learn how to feel my excruciating feelings of grief.

In the early days of my grief journey I used diversion and distraction to keep from feeling my feelings of grief. I thought that if I ate enough chocolate chip cookies, I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of losing my daughter. I thought that those feelings would eventually go away if I pushed them away long enough.

What I found out is that they got louder to get my attention.

The intensity of my feelings made them overwhelming.

I learned that feeling them was the way through, and when I allowed them to be met they quieted down. There are many ways to feel our feelings. My own practice of present moment awareness, Samyama, is what helped me learn to get better at feeling my raw feelings. I could bring one feeling at a time, to my heart, and my heart shifted the feeling. Our hearts are alchemical vessels that can hold whatever we bring to them. As I began to have a greater capacity to feel my painful feelings, I found out that I could also feel joy and happiness to a greater degree. I learned that I can feel joy and pain at the same time.

I like to thing of feelings as clouds.

There are different kinds of clouds, and they always move through. Even dark storm clouds move through. Our feelings are the same. They are not good or bad, they are energy that need to be met and felt, and then they move through too.

When they come back, it doesn’t mean we are regressing. When we are present to our feelings, we realize that the feeling may seem similar to feelings we have had before, yet in this moment it is slightly different. Just like no two clouds are alike.

My grief journey taught me that when we feel the full spectrum of our feelings, we can live a fuller life. When I fully participate in all aspects of my life, does that mean I have healed from the death of my daughter? That is a question that I continue to sit with. Healing doesn’t look like what I thought it would when I considered it early on. That may be a topic for further discussion.  What I know now is that when I can bring all of my feelings into my heart, my heart can hold them, and my head doesn’t have to try to figure out what to do with them.

That right there is a step in the right direction for me.

Nuances of Perfectionism

Posted by in Grief, Presence, Transformation

When I was preparing to move from Raleigh to St. Paul in the fall of 2020, there was a lot of purging of things we no longer needed. Some of these were easy to pack in boxes and take to places that were accepting donations.

Then I came across my journals.

In the course of my life I’ve been a somewhat sporadic writer. Early in my journey, I would decide that writing in a journal would help to uncover what I needed to know to work on in myself, and then I could get to the work of “fixing” it. This was all before I found presence as a practice, and before I knew that there was nothing to fix.

Whenever I made a new promise to write in a journal, I bought a new one.

I couldn’t just pick up where I left off in an old one because that represented failure to me, I had stopped writing daily in that journal (or weekly, or….) and I needed to find the perfect journal to capture the deepest thoughts that would lead to the transformation that I was envisioning for myself. Inevitably, I would not be consistent with my latest attempt to fix myself, and yet another journal would go into the pile of half started journals.

This was only one place where perfection showed up in my life. I used to think that if I could just “get it right” i.e. find the perfect combination of goals, rules, insights, etc. that I would attain what I was looking for, and I always failed. These attempts of finding the perfect combination of things out there to make me happy; always sent me into a tail spin of self abuse.

If I couldn’t achieve the perfect body, the perfect hair, the perfect disposition; be the perfect mother or wife, how could I be successful?

How could I teach my children?

How could I find fulfillment?

This cycle repeated itself numerous times before I began to unravel perfectionism in my life.

After Leah died, the fabric of my life was ripped apart. My life was cracked open. It was only when I looked at my life from that place that I knew perfectionism was not attainable. At first I thought it was because my daughter died, how could I have a perfect life without her physical presence?

Didn’t that right there mean that I had failed as a mother?

My grief journey took me to the depths of despair. As I climbed out through presence, and my Samyama practice, I began to see that perfectionism is a myth. That there is no perfect place to go; no perfect way to be.  I learned that I perfectly imperfect just as I am.

I began to look for answers inside my heart rather than outside myself. My heart would often lead me to a teaching, or teacher, yet the inspiration always came from within.  That was not an easy lesson for me to learn. The more present I became, the more I could discern my inner voice. I learned what my intuition felt like in my body. I learned to trust my full body yes.

Do I still try to find the best way to do things?  The perfect way? Yes, sometimes I do, and now know that this work is a practice, not a perfect, and I can give myself grace when I find myself heading down that particular rabbit hole.

Living my life in this way has brought more joy into my life, more inspiration, and yes, more happiness and contentment. I’ve loosened my grip on things that I thought were needed to achieve a particular way of living.  Now I allow rather than strive so hard to attain something.

Back to that pile of unfinished journals.

When I found them I read a little from a few of them and realized I am light years away from where I was when I was striving for perfection. I toyed with the idea of picking them up and continuing to write from where I am today.  That didn’t feel right to me.

Before I moved I held a ritual to burn those journals, as well as other things that helped me along the way in my journey, yet no longer were aligned with where I am today. Burning my journals released more of the hold that perfectionism had on me. I thanked them for serving their purpose when they did.

I released what I no longer needed to make space for what was coming next.

Funeral Memories

Posted by in Grief

As a young man, I was raised in a Catholic household. I attended Mass and was even an altar boy during my grade school days. Aside from my great grandmother’s wake, the funerals that I served as an altar boy was my primary exposure to how people grieved. Somewhere around the 5th grade, maybe 10 years old, I became an acolyte or altar boy. We learned the Mass in Latin and then had to learn it again in English once the Vatican changed the rules allowing the local language to be used in place of Latin.

There was a certain sincere formalness to serving a Mass in latin. All the prayers and hymns were beautiful in their archaic splendor. It captured a certain feeling that the soul was eternal and the Church was there to help the transition from the physical to the spiritual. The formalness offered relief from sadness in such a send off that must have been comforting. Yet, the comforting words that were spoken only touched the surface of what the grieving family members were going through.

Sermons meant to bring a loved ones life into focus.

After the funeral, the procession to the cemetery took place. There the final grave site prayers and goodbyes were said. This was the saddest part of the day when tears flowed and grief became a physical weight upon the family. It was the “after” service part of the day that offered a different and supportive element to the day filled with memories and goodbyes.

What followed was a luncheon/reception or family gathering to share a meal. This tradition started because people would travel distances to the memorial and prior to departing a small meal would be offered to send them off. What really happened was a feeding of the soul and the beginning to the process of healing.

It became an occasion for the church to open the doors and extend a welcome. Volunteers from the parish would prepare the meal. A much more informal sharing of grief would follow. Stories and cherished memories of the loved ones adventures and misadventures would be told. There would be laughter and a few tears but what impressed me was the sense that this gathering was a celebration of the life well lived.

Many Faiths have similar rituals that offer support to families at those moments of sorrow and grief. Just like they offer support to the joyous occasions. Our shared experiences are what begin to draw us together.  There is a balm in these moments for the sore emotions and the tired physical treadmill that are part of saying goodbye. Recognizing that with tragic moments, there will also be gentler moments. That replenishment is available and will follow when you fill empty. When we share our tragedy we don’t have to carry as much of it. It reminds us that we are not alone and that people are willing to be there to help lift you.

Is Self-Care Necessary?

Posted by in Grief, Presence, self-care, Self-Love, Thriving after Loss

Self-care is a hot topic these days.

Taking care of ourselves is important. One of the things I’ve discovered is that self-care is necessary for us to step fully into who we are meant to be in this world. This was an important lesson for me as I excavated the life I was meant to live over the course of my grief journey.

I’ve had many conversations about self-care, and so many of us, myself included, think, (or used to think) that caring for ourselves is selfish, and we must take care of others to show selflessness. Yet, if we don’t take care of ourselves, we don’t have the energy to be there for others.

That led me to do take a deeper look at self-care, how it impacts us, and how it changes as we evolve.

Our needs may sound similar of we compare early grief and preparation for a marathon; however the specifics of each one looks very different.

Self-care always calls for attention to what we need at the time, such as, the need for rest and sleep, the need for good food to nourish our bodies, and movement.

When we are preparing for a marathon, our food and movement needs are much different than what we need in early grief.

Movement in early grief helps to move our feelings through and may be gentle in nature rather than the regimented schedule required for marathon preparation.

We may not be hungry, as we emerge from grief, yet nutritious food helps us to regain the capacity to feel our feelings. Food helps to support our bodies as we prepare for our marathon.

In early grief sleep may be elusive, or we may sleep more than we did before, or a combination of each. Consistent sleep is important as we prepare out bodies to run a long distance.

As you can see, self-care shifts according to where we are in our lives, and what is going on. I’ve touched on only a few of the activities we can do to take good care of ourselves. There are many more, and each person’s needs are different.

Take some time to listen deeply to what you need emotionally, spiritually, physically, and intellectually.  Make a list of your needs in each category, and revisit it from time to time. You may discover your non-negotiable self-care rituals through this process.

Those are the things that are a necessity for you to be the best you possible.