Embracing Grief

We all experience grief. It is universal and unique all at once. Grief is devastating and grief is a gift.

My forthcoming book of poetry, The Gift of Grief, (ebook available for preorder) explores my journey through various bouts of grief. It took me a long time to embrace grief rather than fight it or ignore it or work to process it seeking an end date. Grief works on its own time. Embracing it brought me to a place where I could see the gift it brought to my life.

I discovered that grief is something we learn to live with not something we process as a one-and-done. I really wanted to check off items to show progress like it was some kind of task list. 

At times I felt like the waves of grief just couldn't end because as soon as I started feeling settled, I lost someone else, I sometimes felt like the grief was just too much. I began to realize this was probably true for many other people as well.

Between 2020-2024, I grieved the deaths of several friends, myriad extended family members, my father-in-law, my Daddy, and two cats. There were days I felt like I I grieving life itself. Or... that maybe life had become grief.

I did what I do to process pretty much anything. I wrote and then wrote some more. I researched grief, and then wrote some more. I read multiple books including The Grieving Brain by Mary-Francis O'Connor and It's Ok That You're Not Ok by Megan Devine trying to figure out why my grief wasn't finding a nice, neat trajectory.

Grief is a way to hold our lost loved ones close in heart and mind while we honor their influences in our lives.

As I wrote many of the poems in The Gift of Grief and compiled them along with others written over many years to create the manuscript for The Gift of Grief, I began to feel like my grief was a gift that allowed me to remember and to continue to love, to feel connected, and to find hope to go on. I have come to appreciate the healing nature of the grief I had worked so hard to avoid.

There comes a point in grief where we remember a lost loved one with an appreciation of having had the privilege of knowing them and loving them. When that privilege becomes more prevalent than the pain of the loss, grief can feel like a gift.

While I understand wanting grief to end, I've come to appreciate the way grief has settled into my heart and reminds me that I have had the opportunity to have a life filled with so many wonderful people and animals to love and be loved by.

And, so often when I think of those people and/or animals, I just close my eyes and whisper. "Grief brings you back to me"

The release date for The Gift of Grief is August 30, 2024, and will be available in trade paperback, hardcover, and ebook formats.

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