Feeling Anguish?

Listen to Your Body. Not to Other People.

An exploration of different ways exercise and movement can be used to help with grief, trauma, or any other kind of big emotion.

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The body says what words cannot. — Martha Graham

I love swimming in Austin’s amazing Barton Springs Pool — it’s cold and enlivening. Most of the time I swim there three times a week, year round.

But last year my dad and my dog died in the depths of winter.

It doesn’t get that cold in Austin, but it takes much more mental discipline and grit to jump into the cold spring water when it’s 25–45 degrees outside than when it’s 95!

When my dad and my dog died, everything in me demanded that I pull in, curl up, and treat myself tenderly. Treating myself tenderly did not include swimming in the cold. It was hard to allow myself to give in to not swimming for an indefinite period time, especially during a phase of my life when I’m not getting any younger so exercise is essential for maintaining my energy and health.

Yet I remembered something crucial I’d learned about grief back in 1992 when my first husband died. After living all the way through that hell (and after helping many of my clients live through grief), the most important thing I’d tell my 1992, 30-year-old self from here is:

Pulling in, curling up, and convalescing will allow your grief to heal you. You will regain your energy over time, especially if you treat yourself tenderly now.

So last year after the deaths, I listened to my past self and surrendered to the urge to stay in where it was warm and to snuggle into my soft sheets. By summer, I was still sluggish and weighed down by grief, so I gave in to the urge to remain in the dark with the blinds drawn (instead of swimming) even when the summer sun beat down at 99 degrees.

(Note that I was not depressed. I didn’t feel bogged down and paralyzed with depression’s deadness. I was simply grieving. I can tell the difference. I’m going to write an entire post about discerning the difference between grief and depression soon.)

Even though I had learned the hard way that listening to my body in grief was the most useful strategy, I hadn’t lived through another big loss myself since learning the lesson. Living through fresh loss with insight gleaned from my past loss was like carrying a mini-mentor with me through the whole process. So I held onto faith that my body was telling me what I needed.

Thus it seemed miraculous to my present self that listening to my body’s need to lie around and restore during the most ripped-open phase of my grief did indeed allow me to heal and restore:

On my birthday in November, eleven months after my losses, I spontaneously needed to swim. Hard. In the cold water.

My body and soul needed to move — to expend energy, to feel blood pumping through my veins and cold water on my skin — in order to affirm my gratitude for still getting to be alive to mark another year while people I loved were no longer fortunate enough to have bodies that could know such joy. My arms reached and my legs kicked, and I felt at one with all the people I love, past and present. My heart burst wide with wonder as I felt it all.

Swimming on my birthday reignited my desire to swim regularly, so I picked it back up again, at the beginning of winter, without any hesitation. My body guided me through the whole process, down and through, and back up again. Amazing.

(Not that I’m “finished” with my grief, and not that I don’t still have sluggish days. It’s just that the phase of needing to pull in constantly has moved through, at least for now…)

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If you’re grieving your own loss, or experiencing an intense emotional situation of some other kind, your body might tell you something similar to what mine did during this time of my loss. Or it might tell you something different. Every loss and every body is unique.

When my first husband died in 1992, that loss was a traumatic loss — sudden, unexpected, out of the natural order of things. The losses I experienced last January were different. They were in the natural order of things as my dad and my dog were both old and weakening — extremely painful but not traumatic. They were two distinct flavors of loss.

In 1992, I not only lost my husband in a devastating way, I also lost my entire identity and way of viewing the world. Nothing made sense any more. I was entirely disoriented and shattered.

So my emotions then were explosive, roiling, fierce. Sadness would practically knock me to the floor with its force. Rage at the universe over injustice burst out of my chest and throat. When I tried to rest and pull in, anguish pushed me to kick and scream. The feelings were so potent I needed to move them through my body.

I was a runner back then (before I blew out my knees), and running saved my life.

I buckled my year-old baby into our blue running stroller and ran until I couldn’t breathe. The pound, pound, pound of my feet upon the earth rattled the overwhelming feelings out of my body and into the earth. The earth absorbed them without complaint. Sweat poured down my chest and ragged breaths tore at my throat to match the intensity of my emotions, and helped me regain my sanity.

I’d arrive back home, fall onto the driveway, and sit on the blistering concrete while my son toddled around filling buckets with water from the hose. My breath would settle, and I’d feel able to make it through a few more hours.

Then, I could pull in and rest for a few hours after my boy was in bed. Before the roiling began again. At 2am. Every day. For a very long time.

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There’s a whole lot if information I have about why movement and rest of different sorts help with intense emotions such as grief. I’ll write about that in another post.

But here I’m offering my own stories to give you permission to listen to your own body, to allow it to guide you through whatever kind of physical activity or rest will help you the most during your grief or other kinds of difficult emotions right now.

Unfortunately our culture is full of shoulds and prescriptions. People will tell you that you MUST move to prevent depression, or to pull yourself out of the (very normal) sluggishness of grief. Others will tell you that you MUST get your rest and not push yourself so hard.

In 1992, I definitely needed to learn the difference between listening to my body’s need to move for emotional expression, and my fear of sitting still to allow myself to rest. We all need some of both. But that was my lesson to glean. A lesson that was presented to me as a f***ing opportunity for growth within my grief. Not something that someone else could prescribe to me.

I wouldn’t have such faith in what I learned if I hadn’t wrestled with the difficulties myself.

I want you to know that your body is the container for all of your grief emotions, so your body will tell you what it needs. We’re socialized out of listening to our bodies, so it can take effort to learn to listen to the natural signals we’re getting. But I’m hoping that by hearing my stories, and having me articulate for you that both rest and movement of different sorts are extremely useful and natural ways of tending to your grief and other emotions, you’ll feel free to experiment.

Listen to your body.

Listen to your feelings.

Your grief is unique to you. Your loss is like no other.

Movement and rest both help, in their own ways, in their own time.

Let me know what works for you or what doesn’t…

Complete Article HERE!

Death at a young age compounds the intensity of grief


Many people out there are suffering because of the death of a child.

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A kind reader has reminded me that in a recent column when I gave examples of sad losses, I did not mention the loss of a child. She was right. I didn’t, although I have written about the death of a child in the past. I suppose it was not on my mind because we aren’t supposed to lose our children, not before us. I’ve corrected this in recent columns.

But as I thought about it, I know it happens more often than we’d like to think about. In just the last few months, several readers have written to me about their grief over the premature death of grown children in their 30s or 40s — one from the flu, which was particularly bad this year. Another was from a car accident, but it could have been a motorcycle crash, opioids, a heart attack, cancer — or war, mass shootings, anything that causes young deaths.

It feels both tragic and all backward when someone loses a child, no matter what age, whether young or adult. With our heightened expectation that life expectancy here in the U.S. is quite long, most of think we will live to be real old, and that modern medicine can cure just about everything.

Many of us are baby boomers, where we feel we will live just about “forever,” even though we really know life is finite. So a young or middle age death just doesn’t fit. We are truly caught off guard. It just seems wrong.

Recently a friend mentioned she was still “trying to get her head around” the sudden death of a 30-year-old friend. One reader who lost a 45-year-old son explained that part of the grief is the loss of family legacy, and all the bright future and promise of their lost son. It’s heartbreaking.

It also happens that people sometimes lose their spouse in their 40s or 50s, left not only alone but often with young children to raise as a single parent. This means somewhere there are also parents grieving over that death; the spouse was their grown child. So any death at a young age very much compounds the intensity of grief.

Some people have lost another young adult they were close to — a friend, a neighbor, a niece or nephew. To the bereaved, these young people could be so close they seem a lot like their own children. And to complicate matters further, such grief may be pretty much “invisible” because most people think intense grief is reserved for immediate family members.

Another type of invisible grief is over a miscarriage or infant death. This is virtually never mentioned in conversations, even among close friends and family. And if someone says something, it can be hurting or inappropriate rather than comforting, such as “there will be other babies,” or some similar unthinking comment.

So the point is: There are many people out there suffering because they have lost a child, and many have lost adult children. They need our support. One’s child is always our child, no matter what age. And some of this grief is rather “invisible” for several reasons — sometimes people just do not realize how heavily the death is weighing on their friends or relatives. They just don’t understand.

Some of it is long-term grief that will never go away. I don’t believe we need to dwell on grief all the time, but do try to be as supportive and as understanding as you can, even though it’s not something people usually discuss in everyday conversation.

Complete Article HERE!

Our Experience of Grief is Unique as a Fingerprint

David Kessler on the Difference Between Mourning and Grief

By David Kessler

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.
–Elie Wiesel

Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.

This need is hardwired in us, since our emotions bind us to one another, and in those bonds is the key to our survival. From the moment we’re born, we realize we’re not alone. Our brains are equipped with mirroring neurons, which is why when the mother smiles, the baby smiles back. This continues into adulthood. I remember walking down the street one day and a man said to me, “Howdy.” I’m not usually someone who says “Howdy.” But I instinctively said back to him, “Howdy!” This is more than copying each other’s expressions. It’s also about the emotions underlying the expressions. The mirroring neurons enable mother and child to pick up on each other’s emotions.

Dr. Edward Tronick is part of a psychology team that made a short video that shows what happens if babies do not feel their emotions reflected and acknowledged by those around them. First we see a ten-month-old sitting in a high chair, eyes wide and happily fixed on his mother’s smiling face. The baby and mother mirror each other as I described above. One laughs, then the other laughs; the baby points and the mother looks in the direction in which he’s pointing. But then at the direction of the researchers, the mother turns away, and when she turns back to the baby, she has a blank look on her face. The confused baby does everything to try to get a reaction out of her. He cries and screams in distress. This is an innate reaction, because children know on a subconscious level that they need others for survival. If their survival is dependent on someone who is unable to be truly present for them, they suffer.

The same is true for adults. If they are grieving, they need to feel their grief acknowledged and reflected by others. But in our hyperbusy world, grief has been minimized and sanitized. You get three days off work after a loved one dies and then everyone expects you to carry on like nothing happened. There are fewer and fewer opportunities for those around you to bear witness to your pain, and this can be very isolating.

I was touring in Australia when I met a researcher who told me about the work she was doing to study the way of life in the northern indigenous villages of Australia. One of the villagers told her that the night someone dies, everyone in the village moves a piece of furniture or something else into their yard. The next day, when the bereaved family wakes up and looks outside, they see that everything has changed since their loved one died—not just for them but for everyone. That’s how these communities witness, and mirror, grief. They are showing in a tangible way that someone’s death matters. The loss is made visible.

In this country, too, it was once common for us to come together as a community to bear witness to the grief experienced when a loved one died. But in our current culture, the mourner is made to feel that though his or her own world has been shattered, everyone else’s world goes on as if nothing has changed. There are too few rituals to commemorate mourning, and too little time allotted to it.

Grief should unite us. It is a universal experience. If I’m talking to someone with a physical ailment, I can listen and empathize, but I may never have that particular problem. When I’m with someone whose loved one died, however, I know I’ll be in their shoes someday and I try to understand what they are feeling. Not to change it—just to acknowledge it fully. I feel privileged when someone shares their pain and grief with me. The act of witnessing someone’s vulnerability can bring the person out of isolation if the witnessing is done without judgment.

Too often outsiders who may have the best of intentions will suggest to a bereaved person that it’s time to move on, embrace life, and let go of grief. But grief should be a no-judgment zone. Those who understand what you’re going through will never judge you or think your grief is out of proportion or too prolonged. Grief is what’s going on inside of us, while mourning is what we do on the outside. The internal work of grief is a process, a journey. It does not have prescribed dimensions and it does not end on a certain date.

When people ask me how long they’re going to grieve, I ask them, “How long will your loved one be dead? That’s how long. I don’t mean you’ll be in pain forever. But you will never forget that person, never be able to fill the unique hole that has been left in your heart. There is what I call the one-year myth—we should be done and complete with all grieving in one year. Not remotely true. In the first year of your loss, you’re likely to mourn and grieve intensely. After that, your grief will probably fluctuate. It will seem to lessen, then something will trigger it, and you’ll find yourself back in the full pain of loss. In time it will hurt less often and with less intensity. But it will always be there.”

From Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, by David Kessler.

That’s about as specific as I can get in answering the question. As vague as it is, it still doesn’t cover all the possibilities. Over many years of grief work, I’ve come to realize that if I’ve seen one person in grief, I’ve only seen that one person in grief. I can’t compare one griever to another, even if they’re in the same family. One sister cries a lot and the other one doesn’t. One son is vulnerable and raw. The other just wants to move on. Some people are expressive. Others shy away from their feelings. Some have more feelings. Some have less. Some are more productive and practical in their grieving style. They have a “buckle down and move on” mentality. We can mistakenly think that people who show no visible signs of pain should be in a grief group, getting in touch with and sharing their feelings. But if that is not their style in life, it won’t be in grief, either. They must experience loss in their own way. Suggesting otherwise will not be helpful to them.

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In our modern world, our grief is often witnessed online. When I post quotes about grief on social media, I notice different kinds of responses. If I post hopeful, optimistic quotes about healing, they give hope to many people, but don’t resonate with others. Those who are in a dark place aren’t ready to hear about hope, often because they’re at the beginning of the grieving process and their grief is too acute to allow for any other emotions. They just want the darkness of their grief to be seen and acknowledged. Their tears are evidence of their love, proof that the person who died was someone who mattered deeply. If I post something like, “Today it feels like the pain will never end,” or “Grief feels like a dark cloud that encompasses the whole sky,” that will resonate with them. It mirrors and validates their feelings, which can be far more consoling than trying to find something positive in the situation.

Some grieve with darkness, some with light, some with both, depending on where they are in the cycle of grief. It would be a mistake to conclude that one is better than the other or that there’s a right way to grieve. There are just different ways to grieve, different feelings evoked by loss. This is also true of our relationship to hope. Hope can be like oxygen to people in grief. For others, however, especially in the early stages, it can feel invalidating. “In my sorrow, how dare you want me to feel hopeful . . . about what? Do you need me to hope to make you feel more comfortable?”

Hope has a very close relationship with meaning. In the same way our meaning changes, so does hope. Sometimes when I work with someone stuck in grief, I will say, “It sounds like hope died with your loved one. It seems all is lost.”

Surprisingly they perk up. “Yes, that’s it.”

They feel witnessed. I often say, “A loved one’s death is permanent, and that is so heartbreaking. But I believe your loss of hope can be temporary. Until you can find it, I’ll hold it for you. I have hope for you. I don’t want to invalidate your feelings as they are, but I also don’t want to give death any more power than it already has. Death ends a life, but not our relationship, our love, or our hope.”

Sometimes I meet someone in grief who tells me that a family member or friend said something terrible—which often turns out to be some variation of “time heals all” or “be happy your loved one is at peace now.” Such statements can make the bereaved think that their feelings have not been witnessed. Most of us want to say something helpful, but we may not realize that our timing and delivery are off. If the griever needs to remain in a dark place for a while, then trying to offer some kind of cheer will be very hurtful. We must really see the person we are trying to comfort. Loss can become more meaningful—and more bearable—when reflected, and reflected accurately, in another’s eyes.

We also have to remember that our own thoughts about the one who died are irrelevant. Maybe we think our friend’s mother was so awful that she wasn’t worth grieving over. Or we know that our sister’s husband had been unfaithful and wonder why she is nonetheless sobbing over his death. What we think has nothing at all to do with the feelings of those who are in grief, and they will not be comforted by hearing us criticize their loved ones as not being deserving of their sorrow.

People who mourn the loss of their pets often comment on how little people understand about their grief. In the months that followed the death of my son, one of my dear friends experienced his own loss. His beloved dog died at the age of 16. When I reached out to him to express my condolences, he was taken aback by my concern. “Your loss is so much worse than mine,” he said. I couldn’t see his tears and think that his loss was any less painful or meaningful than mine. Every loss has meaning, and all losses are to be grieved—and witnessed. I have a rule on pet loss. “If the love is real, the grief is real.” The grief that comes with loss is how we experience the depths of our love, and love takes many forms in this life.

Complete Article HERE!

How to Help Your Partner When They’re Grieving

Psychotherapist Megan Devine on the impossibility of taking pain away from your partner, the difficulty of two people grieving one person, and how loss can impact sex.

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Like so many people, I’m fascinated, consumed, and appalled by death. I read books about it, I occasionally write hypothetical eulogies for loved ones in my head, and I even have a tattoo that says memento mori—Latin for “remember to die.” And as part of my preoccupation with death, I’ve found myself wondering how my boyfriend and I will handle it when one of us inevitably loses someone.

How partners show up—or don’t—after a loss can profoundly impact the relationship, either strengthening it or exposing the cracks. Ideally, a partner knows what to do and say, but many people struggle with exactly how to respond.

I asked friends who’ve lost someone about what their partner did that helped and, on the flip side, what really didn’t. When my friend Sam’s grandpa died, her ex was pretty reluctant to engage with her about it at all. “Anytime I would bring up my grandpa, he would seem visibly uncomfortable, like he was not excited about the emotions he was going to have to respond to. We unsurprisingly broke up,” she said, citing these stilted conversations as a big part of that decision.

Another friend of mine, Glenn, gushed about how wonderful his partner, Rob, was when his mother passed: “On the night she died, when I called, he didn’t say anything. He came over and just held me as I cried, laid in bed with me so I wasn’t alone. He never offered any platitudes, or really condolences in any typical way. He gave me the space to reckon with a loss that each person can only figure how to handle in their own way.”

In long-term relationships, chances are that one or both partners will experience the death of a loved one; knowing how to support one another as best as possible is invaluable. So I spoke to Megan Devine, psychotherapist and author of It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand, about how to support your partner through grief.

GQ: Both my partner and I have older parents—and very different relationships with our parents—so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what we’ll do when the time comes and how we’ll help one another.
Devine: That’s good that you’re already thinking about that! Most likely, your parents will die before you. The time to have conversations like this is before anybody dies. We practice fire drills, so that in the event of an emergency, these things aren’t new to us. It’s really hard in fresh grief to have a high-level, highly skilled conversation about your emotional needs. That’s asking a lot of a person when they’re in pain.

You can make some good guesses, but until you’re in the situation, you won’t know. But by opening those conversations beforehand, you’ll be able to say things like, “I know we talked about this and I thought I was going to need this, but this is different than anything I expected. Can we try this instead?”

So, what can a partner’s role in a time of grief be? Can they actually do anything?
Well, yes and no. We look at the people we love, and we see them in pain and we want to take that pain away from them. That’s a normal human response. But, you can’t. It’s not actually possible.

All the things that we normally think of to say to do that, like “Your dad wouldn’t want you to be sad,” or “Your mom lived a nice, long life” don’t work. Look at the second half of that sentence, or what I call the ghost words. There’s an implied “…so, stop feeling so bad.”

If I see you and say, “What’s up?” and you say, “My dog’s really sick, and we don’t know if he’s gonna make it,” and I say, “Well, at least it’s sunny out!” I just completely dismissed what you just told me, even if I did what I think I’m supposed to do, which is cheer you up and tell you to look on the bright side. The biggest thing for people to remember is it’s not your job to take away somebody’s pain. It is your job to accompany them inside it. And what that looks like is going to be different for everybody.

So, are there concrete, universal things that someone can do to help their partner?
When someone’s person dies, life around them still goes on. There might be kids that need to be taken care of, laundry that needs to be done, a dog that needs to be walked—whatever you can do to take over the daily life activities for that person to give them the space to fall apart, or be quiet, or slow down.

A lot of people feel like, “If I’m not cheering them up, what am I supposed to do? Let them be sad?” Well, one, yes. But two, it’s not that you do nothing—it’s that everything you do is in service of making things gentler for that person. Taking the trash out. Ordering a meal-delivery service. Offering to take care of pets. Picking up dry cleaning.

What is something that’s difficult about grief, particularly in romantic relationships? I imagine that loss is either a binding agent of sorts or a massive stumbling block, and it can really go either way.
When you’re talking about romantic partners, sometimes they’re grieving the same person. A really big thing to remember is that everyone grieves differently, and even when one person dies, you’re each grieving a different person. You lost two different people.

This is very gendered, but often the male or male-identified person feels like they need to be strong or brave for the family or keep their shit together. The female-identified person can feel like, “Why don’t you have any emotions around this? I can’t even get out of bed because I’m crying so much, and you seem to be stoic and fine.” One person cries, one person doesn’t cry. Any expression of grief is normal. Everybody has the right to grieve differently.

So what do you do when you’re both grieving the same person?
Ideally, if you’re the one grieving, you’re able to say, “My dad died and I want to acknowledge the fact that your father-in-law died, and this is going to be impacting you too. I don’t know how available I’m going to be to talk with you about that, but I want to let you know that I see it. And to the best of my capacity or ability, I’m willing to listen to what this is like for you.”

What would you tell couples, then, about what might help them both go through the grieving process?
The time to prepare for these things is in daily life before grief. This means having challenging conversations about what you need, don’t need, and how to manage that together. Those are not easy conversations. This is why I really stress getting accustomed to what therapists call “process conversations,” outside of an emergency, like the loss of a loved one. Many people have an aversion to these types of conversations because it’s not normal for us.

To ask you to suddenly learn how to use really grown-up, ninja-level communication skills amid an already challenging time is asking a lot of people. But if you’ve started, it’s easier to lean on that in times of need.

Exactly. Grief brings up all these feelings that we have limited experience talking about. Especially for couples, it dramatically alters daily life, and little things we take for granted can become really fraught. For example, when is it okay for me to start trying to initiate sex again? In a month? The next night? Should I actively try to engage my partner about what they’re feeling? Wait for them to bring it up? We don’t know what we’re doing.
Yes! “When is it okay to invite my partner to have sex again after their dad dies?” Well, we don’t know. But you know what you can do? ASK! These are questions that we should be talking about more. You can say something like, “I’m not really sure what your clues are that you feel ready for me to initiate. Can we talk about that?” Being willing to have a conversation about it is the key. Have the conversation!

In my experience, people are really afraid to sound foolish or weird. I’m a strong proponent for prefacing conversations like this with “I know this might sound weird, but…”
Precisely. You might be scared that it’s going to be weird or awkward, but sweetie, it’s all awkward. You can either ignore the issue, potentially allowing things to get worse, or you can address it and feel weird and have a much better chance of things smoothing out and resolving. Both paths are awkward and uncomfortable. Only one sets you up for potential success.

Okay, I’m sure there are 5,600 things, but what is something that our culture misunderstands about grief?
Because we don’t tend to talk about grief at all in our culture, we have really skewed ideas of what’s normal. The first thing is that grief lasts as long as love lasts. When your dad dies, there’s not going to be any time in the future when you’re going to stop missing him. He’ll always be your dad. As long as you love your dad, there will be grief present. Grief will shift and change—it’s not that you’re gonna be rocking in a corner wearing all black for the rest of your existence.

There’s nothing wrong with grief, and I think that’s surprising for people. We [preach] these transformative narratives of the cranky old widower who is only cranky because he hasn’t found a new love, and once he does, everything is okay again and grief goes away. That’s just not the way it works. That’s not reality. Because we don’t talk about grief as a normal part of relationships, we don’t know what’s normal and healthy, and everybody grieves in a different way. Somebody might find comfort or solace in humor, while someone else might not. Just because grief can look messy and emotional, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.

Complete Article HERE!

The superpower that comes while grieving

There are pages worth of downsides to the grieving process, what is often not talked about though is the secret superpower so many get.

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I was talking with a friend last month as the one year anniversary of her husband’s passing was approaching, “Noelle, I feel like I’m in a freaking movie, like it can’t be real. All the stuff happening.”

She went on to explain people who seems to come into her life daily during the last year as if on cue to give her a message or sign. The perfectly accidental meeting of others with stories to share for her benefit. Odd meetings that she would have brushed off in the past, now she was hyper-focused on allowing them to unfold. I couldn’t help but nod in agreement. Yes, I knew exactly what she was talking about. It’s the grieving superpower.

After losing someone who was a part of your daily life, there is a time that follows that event where life feels like it has been busted into millions of pieces. Every daily routine now altered, every holiday forever changed.

Imagine yourself in a tunnel, with laser like focus on processing one thing; grief. All attention is on trying to understand the loss, remembering your loved one, and figuring out how to move forward. All other sounds are now muffled in the background, things that seems to matter before often seem frivolous during this time. This time, although a time I wouldn’t wish on anyone… does bring it’s own gifts as well.

If you are in the midst of this time… I’m sending you so much love. It’s hard. It is full of unknowns and times where the floor feels to drop out from under you. Here are 7 ways to honor the superhero grief period:

1) Write in a journal – during this time of intensity it can feel as if things will be this way forever. Write things down. Write your feelings, write your memories. Write all that you notice. Signs from spirit, dreams, the kindness of others. Write them all down. Continue writing when you feel anger, sadness, fear and yes, even joys. During this time of hyper-awareness and simplified life it’s the time to capture what you can to gift yourself with later.

2) Know that you are not alone – find your people. Sometimes those around us are understanding and can be an incredible support system. Others are not that lucky and don’t have people around that are able to support you. Find online grief groups, read blogs, read books (mine is coming in 2020). You do not have to experience this time alone. Being so in tune with grief and our loss it can leave everything else as a blur. Don’t be afraid to find help to rejoin and bring focus back onto that outer world as well.

3) There is no proper timetable for grief – I’ve heard too many stories of a boyfriend or spouse expressing frustration that “your not over it yet”. In-laws who don’t get it. Friends who seem annoyed that all you talk about is your loss. Family who wants you to move forward and quit “moping”. People try to understand but we all handle things differently. My advice is this: trust your knowing. Find people who can help you move forward and honor your grief. If you are not able to handle your career, your kids, your life then I encourage you to find help. Find a counselor, pastor, or therapist who can walk you through honoring your grief while also honoring your other life commitments.

4) Gather wisdom from this time – I have always tried to gather any nuggets of wisdom or purpose from all hard times. Is there something you could take from this unthinkable time that could help others? Is there a new perspective you’ve gained? Finding truth and wisdom doesn’t mean you are glad the event happened. It means that if you have to walk through this fire… at least try to harvest what you can from it so you can reach out a hand to the next person to help them through the fire as well.

5) Find a way to honor the memory of your loved one. There are many options, find one that resonates with you or your memory of your loved one. Write about them, create a photo album, find a creative outlet such as drawing or singing, crafting, cooking or even redecorating. When my mom passed my sisters and I gathered up all her favorite recipes along with photos of her cooking with her grandchildren and put together a cookbook. That following Christmas we gave those cookbooks to all my mom’s siblings and our for each of us. It was a therapeutic process creating that book and allowed us hours of conversation and reliving memories of our mom in the process. Even 11 years later I can now share those recipes and memories of my mom with my son who never go to meet her.

6) Honor your knowing and the signs – don’t waste your energy trying to convince others of your beliefs or experiences that have happened. The night after my mom passed away I had a very clear dream that turned out to reveal a place that we later held her funeral. I also got signs almost immediately from her. I kept a journal where I wrote about the dreams and signs. I made a decision early on that I would be open about my experience but I really didn’t give any care to whether anyone believed me or not. I knew what I knew. Just as my friend shared with me about her experiences, pay attention to those who enter your life and gift you with conversations and perspective.

A feather that appeared on my paintbrush while creating a painting to honor signs from spirit.

7) Take photos. I wrote about this extensively here but I’ll sum up my point with this: If I could tell every person who has just lost someone dear to them one thing it would be, “take photographs”. Go into your loved one’s space and take a photo of the way the reading glasses are sitting on the side table, how the spice cabinet looks or the jacket hanging on the hook. Photograph the wall of framed photos, the collection of ball caps or figurines. Capture the yard, the tools on a workbench in the garage, the view from the kitchen table, even your favorite chair.

In the year following my mom’s death the walls were repainted, furniture replaced and passed down to us kids. Slowly my mom’s decorating style and personality were taken out of the house. I’m so grateful to this day of any photos I have where I can see parts of her decorating and style in the background.

This time will pass. Grip it with all you can while you are in this sacred, painful, hyper-focused emotional and mental place. Even though you’d never choose to be in this situation… someday you’ll look back and realize that this hard time was sacred. There was a bond still to your loved one in your daily thoughts and activities.

Sending you much love and wishes for healing and the gift of memories of your loved one. I hope you find these 7 tips helpful. What would you add? It’s a beautiful thing when we can all help one another navigate through grief. While I certainly don’t have all the answers, I happily share what I can in hopes that even one thing can help someone else who is experiencing a world shattering loss right now.

Best wishes to you, Noelle

Complete Article HERE!

A Year of Mourning and Reading

By

My grandmother died from metastatic breast cancer a little over a year ago. At nearly 93, her death was not a surprise, exactly, but I just never actually thought she would die, much less from the invasive cancer that she had overcome once before. Even her oncologist had told me at the beginning of her recurrence that the breast cancer wouldn’t kill her; old age or her heart disease would. We were wrong.

My grandmother was the last living grandparent I had. At the age of 38, I knew I was lucky to have any grandparents left. But when she died on January 30, 2019, I wasn’t prepared for the devastation that snuck in—gradually, and then very suddenly.

Grief can be decimating. But as everyone knows, time doesn’t stop for your pain. It doesn’t even slow down, no matter how much you want it to. The kid still needs to be washed and fed and taken to preschool, and you still have deadlines to meet, work to produce, and days to get through.

After my grandmother died (even a year later, those words just don’t look right; they can’t be right) it was hard to write non-work things, but one thing I was still able to do was read. I read and read and read. I read over 250 books in 2019. When my son went to bed for the night, I’d finish up any work from the day and then sit down with a book or three. On the page, I found escape. I found story and distraction.

When it had become clear that my grandmother was in her last weeks, I turned to Joan Didion, as I had in the past when other family members were dying. The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights were familiar in their grief; in their measured examination of liminal spaces and how life changes in the ordinary instant.

In the past, being a medical/healthcare person and one who loves oncology, there’s a chance I would have dived into medical books. But this time, I just couldn’t. I had books come across my desk about hospice, a “good death,” and dying, and if I’m being honest, I would often really want to read these, but could rarely actually do it. A few months after my grandmother’s death, I read Edwidge Danticat’s slim volume of The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. I wanted to know how to write about this—and this book was perfect. A mix of memoir, craft, and instruction, it was just the amount of each that I needed.

As time went on, I read some books about death and cancer. Sunita Puri’s book about becoming a palliative care physician, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, was a fascinating read. I approached it as research for a potential project, so I was able to read it with a bit of detachment. The Undying by Anne Boyer, a memoir about breast cancer, was a bit harder to read. The prose itself is brilliant and strong, and I often had to pause and think about what I had just read. But it also cut a bit close to the bone, and I took much longer to read this one than I normally would have. Once More We Saw Stars, by Jayson Greene, was a book that I gravitated to early on, but when the ARC arrived, I was consumed with ambivalence. It took weeks to get through the first 20 pages. As the mother of a toddler, as someone still reeling from the loss of a loved one—it may not have been the best choice of a read just then. But I was eventually able to steel myself and get through, and it was a deeply raw, haunting book that I still think about today. I found threads of connection in it and held on.

I was sent a copy of In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez when the 25th anniversary edition was released. I’d somehow never read Alvarez before. The story about living under a dictator, political tyranny, and rebellion felt especially necessary, and her prose is gorgeous, with the characters well-drawn and pulling you in. Every time I put this book down, I resented having to leave the pages and rejoin the outside world. It was a much-needed escape.

I read memoirs that turned the genre on its head like Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz,  How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones, and Girl on Film by Cecil Castellucci. I read genre-defying, beautiful books like PET by Akwaeke Emezi and quietly haunting novels like The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake. I would read and reread sentences and pages of these books because the prose was so precise and cutting, or because it was so inventive and tumbled off my tongue, creating whole worlds in my head as I moved through the stories. Life was packed onto every single page of so many books I read this year, and maybe there’s something to that when you’re dealing with grief—seeing pages that can barely contain the story of a life reminds you of how much living there’s still to be done.

Looking at my reading in 2019, I read many fantastic books—books that took me out of my comfort zone and made me think. But I also used books as escape and distraction. If I was reading, I couldn’t dwell on how much I missed my grandmother and wished she could see what my son was doing now. I couldn’t think about how much I missed going to dinner with her multiple times a week, or how many times I would go to call her and then realize it was useless. Does this diminish the books I read this year? I’m not sure. I think I’d be better focused now than I was last year, and I plan on rereading some of my favorites to see what I might have missed the first time around. But reading, as it always has been, was a balm. It helped me get through a difficult year. For that, for the stories I savored and the characters I met and things I learned, I am grateful.

Complete Article HERE!

‘Talking Out Loud’ About Sex After Loss

Author Joan Price’s new book focuses on intimacy after grief

Author Joan Price

By Tina Antolini

In the difficult months after her husband Robert’s death, Joan Price found herself confronted with a veritable mountain of self-help books about grieving. None of them touched on the subject that would preoccupy her for the coming decade: What about sex?

Price is a sex educator, with an emphasis on older people, so perhaps she was primed for this question. But others have noticed this glaring absence in the literature of grieving, too. “The unspoken message, as I received it: keep your mouths shut about sex,” writes Alice Radosh in Modern Loss: Candid Conversations about Grief. “I turned to self-help books for widows, and found that there, too, discussions about sex were pretty much nonexistent.”

Price is used to older people’s sex lives being ignored. “I call it the ‘ick factor’ our society has,” she tells me, when I meet her near her Northern California home. “Eww: old people having sex, wrinkly sex!” she giggles to herself. Price says this ageist notion prevents older people from enjoying their sexuality, a vital part of being human, however old one is.

“We have internalized this ‘ick factor,’” she says. “We see ourselves as undesirable, as over the hill. We see ourselves as needing to say goodbye to sex when things don’t work the way they used to.” And therein lies Joan Price’s mission: to “talk out loud about senior sex,” even in life’s hardest moments. Her new book, Sex After Grief: Navigating Your Sexuality After Losing Your Beloved, seeks to fill the void in grieving literature.

A Life-Changing Love Affair

Seeing Price now, you’d have little external indication that she spent years struggling with the weight of bereavement. The first word I think of when I meet her is “spritely.” Just shy of five feet tall, Price has a twinkle of a laugh that frequently punctuates our conversation, and a playful, vibrant sense of fashion. Her fingernails are painted the purple of grape candy, and she’s wearing dangly earrings of bright, geometric shapes.

At 76, her calendar is filled with giving talks on sexuality, reviewing sex toys for her blog and teaching a bi-weekly line dancing class at a local fitness center.

It was at that line dancing class that a couple of decades ago, Price met the man who would become her husband, an artist named Robert Rice. “He walked in, and I forgot how to breathe,” she tells me. “As soon as he started moving his hips, I lost my place in the dance I was teaching. I just couldn’t take my eyes off this man.”

Price was in her late fifties at the time, already in her second career, having left a job teaching high school for one writing about fitness. The last thing she expected was a life-changing love affair. The blossoming of her romance with Robert nurtured yet another new area of work for her: writing about sex.

“It was an amazing revelation because sex was fantastic with him, but it was not the same as younger-age sex,” she says. “There was much slower arousal… It just took a lot of earnest effort on his part… It was very different. But I was feeling that sex at our age was better, that that wasn’t a defect.”

She wrote a first book, Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty, celebrating that discovery. A second book, Naked at Our Age, sought to answer the questions and resolve problems that older people were experiencing in their sex lives, from what position to use when pained by arthritic joints to a definition of sex that didn’t center orgasm as the only worthwhile goal.

It was when she was just starting to write that book, that Rice was diagnosed with cancer. “I put a hold on everything,” she says. When he died in 2008, Price was completely undone.

“I thought because I knew Robert was dying, that I was getting prepared for it,” she says. “You can’t prepare for that. You cannot know how that bludgeons your brain and your heart. It was all I could do to remember to brush my teeth.”

She would cry all day, pull herself together to drive to the health club, and teach her line-dancing class. Then she’d resume crying in the locker room, and weep all the way home.

A Difficult Subject to Discuss

For months, Price writes, her sexuality was dormant. That period of deep grief was followed by the fits and starts of trying to find her way into a new version of her romantic and sex life. This became the fodder for Sex After Grief. Price wanted to give other grievers a manual for navigating the tangle of experiences they might have.

“Some people feel frenetic sexual energy and yearn for a sexual outlet right away,” she writes. “Some start dating immediately, some gradually, some not ever. Some withdraw from sexual possibility. Some share their bodies but not their hearts. Many give themselves sexual release to the fantasy of their lost loved one.” All of these different responses are normal, Price insists. There isn’t one right way to move through it.

In keeping with the absence of sex in the literature of grief, there’s been very little scientific research into it, either. One of the few studies of “sexual bereavement,” as its authors term it, came out in 2017 in the journal Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters.

The study revealed that 72% of respondents (who were women age 55 and older) anticipated missing sex with their partner, and that 67% would want to initiate a discussion with a friend about it. But there was also a disconnect: 67% reported that it’d be difficult to discuss sex with a friend whose partner had died, attributing that difficulty to embarrassment.

Price addresses that embarrassment head-on in her new book. She dives into the thicket of myths and taboos of sexuality after loss — from questions of loyalty to one’s deceased partner to how long grieving should last — offering readers scripts for how to respond to advice that doesn’t resonate with their experience.

“Because in the moment, you know, you think, ‘Oh my gosh, am I supposed to take that on?’” she tells me. “’Am I supposed to be embarrassed? Am I supposed to be shamed? Am I doing the wrong thing? Am I doing grief wrong?’ You’re not doing grief wrong.”

Price’s message is clear: our sex lives don’t have to end as we get older, or when our partner dies. Whether we’re having partnered sex or not, she advocates, our sexual selves continue.

The book delves into the practicalities of solo sex, as well as various approaches for dating and different relationship models for older people who may not want to follow a marriage with another long-term relationship, but still want to remain sexually active.

Price is an advocate for thinking about a trusted “friends-with-benefits” arrangement, and quotes a 2013 “Singles in America” study from Match.com that revealed 58% of single men and 50% of single women had had one, including one in three people in their 70s.

‘You’re Not Making Any Kind of Commitment You Can’t Reverse’

She writes about how she kept two journals: one to chronicle the difficulties of grieving and another to record treasured memories that kept her husband alive for her. She writes about feeling out her own personal timetable for when to start having sex again, and with whom.

Price had some false starts, which she found instructive. “If you don’t know if you’re ready to date, it’s okay to try it and then put dating on hold if it feels wrong,” she writes. “You’re not making any kind of commitment you can’t reverse. The same is true for sex. You can explore, then change your mind at any point.”

Price’s own story is one of persistence, of refusing to allow society’s derision of aging bodies to stop her from enjoying her own and of not allowing even the tremendous loss of her loving partner to stop her from engaging with her sexual self. The story, she says, is always continuing.

In the past couple of years, it’s had yet another twist. Price put up a profile on OKCupid, and, after more than a few disappointing dates, she met a retired anthropologist named Mac Marshall who lived nearby. Marshall had recently lost his long-term partner to illness. They shared their grief stories amidst a flurry of other information on their early dates, and in emails.

Price dedicates Sex After Grief  both to her husband Robert, “who lives in my memory and in my heart,” and to Mac, “who shows me that joy is possible after grief.”

Complete Article HERE!