,Day 65: After a series of heavier posts, I offer up an ode to one of the wisest grief companions in my life: our Holland Lop, Snowball.Seriously—he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t offer advice, he wants to be close, he is ridiculously soft, he is consistent and simple in his demands, and his downfalls are minimal (carpet chewing and feet licking).An important part of being able to move through grief is to oscillate-meaning coming up from the existential dread, deep missing, and the pain once in awhile. This is not distraction. This is honoring the natural rhythm of grief.We all have different ways ..read more

Day 64: Hard Grief Truths So much of my personal and professional work exists in the realm of building tolerance—tolerance for distress, tolerance for sitting with the unknown, with what doesn’t make sense, with what isn’t fair, and with what we cannot control and fix. On its face, this might sound like a dismal pursuit and job. Yet, it is not. For I believe we humans are all capable of expanding our tolerance—because we really don’t have much of a choice. To expand our ability to sit with these hard truths is an act of survival, an act of exercising our resilience, and a way forward. And, th ..read more

Day 63: Why does it feel harder? One of the hardest things about grief is how it can feel like it’s getting worse, seemingly out of the blue—a rawness that strikes a few months out. One way I speak about this experience is to acknowledge that it’s super common. Second, I believe this to be a grief transition point during which our brain “knowing” and heart “knowing” begin to align to absorb a new level of reality that wasn’t available in the beginning. While there tends to be a benevolent fog in the first several weeks and months after a loss that limits our grasp on the gravity of our new wo ..read more

Day 62: The “Who-to-Tell” Pyramid As I reflect on the early days of my own acute grief, I remember the hazy quality of everything—the air, my thoughts, other people’s offerings of condolences. There was a benevolent fog over everything. I remember needing to not talk about anything related to my dad’s death, except with my daughter, mom, and sisters, for about two weeks. My system couldn’t tolerate expanding this circle, and I honored that. My clients often describe something similar AND one thing I hear about often is how the story of their loss gets disseminated—and how involved or uninvolv ..read more

Day 61: The Missing Keeps Happening Before experiencing acute grief, it’s hard to conceptualize the level of missing that grievers live with. Let me try to break it down: when a person you love dies, they continue to stay dead--every. single. day. My clients warned me of this. And now I know what this actually means. The missing doesn’t go away. In fact, it is cumulative. It adds up. It’s a lot of days that keep happening to miss someone AND it’s a lot of days to ponder how you’re going to navigate the future without them, carrying all of this missing. All I know is that somehow, somewhere al ..read more

Day 60: Pause. Get Quiet. Get Still. Drink a Paloma. Turn Inward. Shift. I am living what I have witnessed so often—the increased rawness of grief, sometimes beginning a couple months after the loss. It’s the moment when people begin to stop asking about it/you/the person who died as much. And it is also the moment (for me) when it no longer feels healing to speak of the experience out loud, as much. I feel more protective of my grief—not because it needs to be closeted—more because it seems to need more quiet. I will honor that. Because I know grief, in and of itself, is wise. Brutal. Yet wi ..read more

Day 59: How Does a Therapist Grieve #12? PLAY Yep. You read it correctly. Even after my marriage died, then after my dad died—even after Buffalo and Uvalde, the assault on Roe-v-Wade, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Gorge Floyd, Jan 6, the wild fires out west—after each of these onslaughts—I tried to play. This is not an act of forgetting. Or being flippant or disrespectful. It is an act of connecting. An act of defiance and refusal. It doesn’t mean that playing feels wonderful and that I always have the capacity for it. But I try. To move my body like a kid. To dance to Whitney and Tina and Lizzo in t ..read more

Day 58: How Does a Therapist Grieve #11? Knowing the Differences between Empathy and Compassion This may be a controversial topic because there is so much out there that tells us we lack empathy in the world. I don’t necessarily agree (mainly with the semantics of that). I think there is a lack of the ability to tolerate an empathetic connection beyond 4 seconds. Empathy is a feeling with—one human’s nervous system connecting to another’s to take the perspective and feel the emotions of another. @brenebrown speaks of empathy as a skill set—something one can learn and grow and build on. I defi ..read more

Grieving a child is barely survivable. I see it everyday. As I am with people trying to survive the unimaginable, I spend a lot of time with them in the why. Sitting in the why is torture AND a necessary stop in grief. Sitting in the why of yesterday needs to happen. I don’t believe there is a simple answer to why it was these 19 children who died, instead of my own child ….but THERE IS A WHY to sit in and be acknowledged for the fact that another massacre happened. We are way beyond a “bad things happen” moment. That is no longer acceptable. That is no longer relevant. These massacres happen ..read more

Day 59: How Does a Grief Therapist Grieve #10? Allow the Absence to Take Shape The grief is taking up residence. It has moved in. It is taking shape. It’s been about 2 months and my grief is no longer diffuse and hard to pin down, like it was at the beginning. Instead, it has weight and shape to it—even a sharpness that I don’t want to admit feels harder to bear than at the beginning. There is so much irony in this grief process—allowing the grief to take shape, and to acknowledge that, means feeling that sharpness, and knowing it is part of me now--part of my story. I also know that allowing ..read more