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20 Years
“She had imagined that, as time went by, the grief would shrink and become neatly encapsulated in her life, in a small and manageable way. But what happened was different. The grief stayed…
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Staying Afloat
In the years following my sister’s death, I fell, as so many people who have experienced loss do, into a dark abyss that seemed expansive, almost bottomless. Its darkness colored everything around me,…
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Sitting with It
“Sit with the pain until it passes, and you will be calmer for the next one.” – Naval Ravikant I started seeing a new therapist in the spring of 2009. I initially went…
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Stuck
A Letter to the Past Me: I see you, sitting there wondering what keeps you stuck. What prevents you from fully feeling your grief, from sitting with it and looking at it in…
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Chains
“The chains that bind us the most closely are the ones we have broken.” – Antonio Porchia I have come to imagine my grief like an iron weight I carry around with me,…
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Milestones
“The holiest of holidays are those kept by ourselves in silence and apart: the secret anniversaries of the heart.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow I think we all expect milestones to be difficult in…
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Losing Hope
“SHE’S GONE.” In that moment, my knees gave out from under me and buckled, my back hitting the glass wall of the post office entrance, where I had been shipping home boxes of…
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Cathy
“When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” – Kahlil Gibran I am going to…
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Uncomfortably Numb
In the months after my sister, Cathy, died, when I had returned home to the US and was living with my parents, when I was struggling to avoid my anger – a simmering…
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Discovering Joy
For most of my life, I had believed that happiness and joy were interchangeable feelings, synonyms for the emotion we feel when things are going well, when we are content and untroubled. They…