A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.
— Joseph Joubert
Where I grew up, a good old fashioned Catholic wake was the norm. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the tradition, a wake usually consisted of the presence of the casket in a viewing room; a kneeler in front of the casket so prayers could be said, a short conversation of condolence with family members and a Rosary led by a priest. If the person hadn’t died in an awful accident leaving them unfit to be seen, the casket was open.
I’m sure that this tradition probably evolved from the older tradition of Continue reading » Healing Kindness
When you get bad news, it’s OK to be sad… but then, what?
You wake up in the morning and you want to hide under your blanket, wishing it was still night and you did not have to face another day. …What’s going on? Maybe you have had recent grief in the family, or you are dealing with a separation, with sickness or with financial problems. Maybe there is just no particular reason…You just wake up and it’s there. The sadness. The worry. The fear.
— Suburp Blogger
Sadness is simply one of the ways we process bad news. The news I’m struggling to process is not my news, but that of dear friends… Continue reading » It’s OK to Be Sad AND It’s OK to be Glad
It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses.
— Colette
Last week, one of the women at work lost her 93 year old grandmother. It wasn’t entirely unexpected and they had been very close since my friend was a little girl. Expected or not, when someone we care about dies, it is always difficult.
Sending a sympathy card or note is what we do when a friend suffers a loss. That’s why Hallmark was invented, to help us say what we don’t know how to say ourselves. When a friend loses someone close to them, we instinctively want to provide comfort. For me, what I want is to Continue reading » Growing Up Means Figuring Out How to Do the Hard Stuff
Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.
— Elizabeth I
If we’re lucky, aging is a learning process. We all age, but we don’t all learn. Sometimes our ability to learn is determined by our willingness to see things in a new light.
All of us eventually face the decline and death of our parents. My mother died of Alzheimer’s in 2005. As you are probably aware if you are a frequent reader of this blog, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in December of last year. In addition to Alzheimer’s, Dad has also been diagnosed with bipolar disease. The health care professionals involved in his care reached this diagnosis partially based on Continue reading » The Consequences of Keeping Secrets
Send us some metaphors for your life, your trials and tribulations, your joys and your passions.
In my last post I shared a reader’s description of grief over significant personal losses:
Think of my grief as a wave and I’m on a surfboard. I must watch that I don’t lose my balance and become engulfed by the water. Water has power and can drown me. But I don’t want to drown, so I will stay on top of the wave of grief and let it carry me to the shore where I will be safe and feel stable. This wave will crash and I will have survived. I will be stronger for having made it to shore unharmed. But I will never forget the ride.
Besides touching my heart, our reader demonstrated how potent Metaphor can be as a tool for understanding and working through our personal challenges. Jose Ortega y Gasset, a prolific Spanish philosopher says this about metaphor: “[It] is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its [power] verges on magic… a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of his creatures when he made him.”
Continue reading » You Too, Can Make Metaphor Magic
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