Marty Tousley, author of GriefHealing.com, is the giant on whose shoulders other grief blogger’s stand. Instead of our intended post, we have decided to end the year with her post Voices of Experience: 7 Things Chipper Taught Me about Life and Business.

Most of us have had our hearts broken by the loss of a pet, but I wonder how many of us have the wisdom to allow our pets to teach us how to live a richer life.

Widowed at 38 years of age, psychotherapist Megan Devine talks about grief and meditation in her post on OpentoGrief.com

Excerpt…

Does the practice of mindfulness apply to grief? I think it does, when it is disentangled from cultural misapplication and confusion. At its core, mindfulness does not try to talk you out of anything, nor does it judge what you feel. The pure practice of mindfulness is to bring your attention to exactly what is – whether that is pain or bliss, peace or torment. Mindfulness is meant to help you acknowledge the truth of the moment you’re in, even, or especially, when that moment hurts. Acknowledgment of the truth is a relief, and it heals.

The true path of mindfulness is to help you stay present to the pain – when pain is what is – and to witness it. This is especially true in grief: the work is not to overcome pain or to remove pain, but to bear it, to be strong and soft enough to be beside it, to find peace alongside it. The question is not “how can you see this as okay?” but what will you do when things are not okay? How will you stay present to yourself? How will you keep your eyes on love inside your pain? There are no answers. No real answers, no one size fits all answers. The only answer for how to live here has to come from you. One way to listen for those answers is through mindful practice: just becoming aware of what is true for you right now is healing, in and of itself.

You do not create your reality; life will be what it will be. What is in your power is how you respond to reality. A practice of mindfulness can help you respond with as much kindness and grace as you can; it can help prepare your heart and mind for living this. You are here. Where you are is not perfect. It may or may not be okay. But here you are.

Healing from loss… involves weaving together the remaining fragments of one’s assumptive world to recreate an existence that has purpose, meaning and some semblance of predictability and order.

Robert Niemeyer
Professor of Psychology & Grief Specialist (2001)

Feeling a sense of safety is a basic need. More to the point: maintaining the illusion of safety is so important that we must continually re-imagine it in order remain sane. The task, however, is getting harder and harder to accomplish in our current upside down world.

Illusion of safety is wearing mighty thin

When 9/11 happened we were incensed that anyone would have the gall to make us feel so vulnerable. Add the “great” recession, mortgage crisis, real estate collapse, unemployment, school and public massacres, home grown terrorist activity, record youth suicide rate, racial tension, cybercrime, and climate disasters, and one could say it is getting harder and harder to reweave the fragments of our world back into a state of predictability and order.

Top it off with the fact that when our financial and manufacturing sectors chose to globalize their operations, the entire world’s political, religious, economic, medical and social problems became ours as well. Therefore, it is not surprising that the edges of our peace of mind are seriously frayed.

If you have slept through the last years of assault on your lifestyle, the Ebola outbreak likely caused you to notice that the world’s healthcare system can’t handle every imaginable medical crisis.

Today we are featuring two excellent posts from the parenting blog, The Longest Shortest Time.

In the August 1 post, Hillary shares her four-year old daughter’s ideas and drawings about death. The post also includes the short video of a child named Anna that has gone viral. The questions, drawings and video are perfect examples of how children under five can become obsessed with questions about life and death – questions adults can’t always answer with certainty.

To get some help Hillary interviewed grief counselor Joseph Primo, author of What Do We Tell the Children? Talking to Kids about Death and Dying. Primo is a worthy guide and wisely urges parents to listen to their child’s ideas, respond honestly and admit when they don’t have the answer.

Might be worth saving the Primo interview for future reference.

I encourage you to read both posts:

Aug 1, 2014 – Do we become houses? + more 4-year old ideas about death

http://longestshortesttime.com/2014/08/01/do-we-become-houses-more-4-year-old-ideas-on-death/

Aug 4, 2014 – A Grief Counselor on Talking to Young Children about Death

http://longestshortesttime.com/2014/08/04/a-grief-counselor-on-talking-to-young-children-about-death/

A woman in one of my groups once commented, “There was a time when I couldn’t imagine feeling alive again, and now I freak out when I realize I haven’t thought of my partner for a couple of days.” This response is not unusual; some people say they prefer the pain of grief over the uneasiness and apprehension that comes from starting over. As frightening as an undefined future can feel, you have two choices: you can (1) sink your stake of grief deeper and live in the past, or (2) pull up the stake and transform it into a rudder that guides you forward.

The first choice allows your grief to define the rest of your life; the second requires you to actively participate in who you are to become. By choosing the second option, you are signing up for what psychologists Tedeschi and Calhoun refer to as post-traumatic growth and Tom Attig calls relearning the world. Both imply that you become a student rather than an authority.

In my experience grief group members and clients often bring up the issue of alcohol without being asked.

• They want it “out there” that they know they shouldn’t be drinking as much as they are.
• They want it “out there” that it’s hard to turn from something that helps them feel better – even if it is only temporary.
• They also want it “out there” so someone will be kind and caring enough to say “try not to overdue it, ok? I care about you.”

What’s Your Grief’s recent blog post on grief and alcohol

I have recommended the blog What’s Your Grief before and I am doing so again. Eleanor and Litsa are mental health care providers who specialize in grief and loss, and they are also good researchers and writers. I have subscribed to their blog for a couple of years and highly recommend it to clients and readers who are grieving. Their recent post on alcohol is a worthwhile read.

http://whatsyourgrief.com/grief-mindfulness-and-alcohol/