Posts Tagged ‘diane brennan’
After the Funeral: When Your Community Disappears
Immediately after a death in the family, there’s often an outpouring of support. Friends, family, neighbors and coworkers bring casseroles and offer to take out the trash. In the immediate aftermath of a death, our communities generally step up to surround us with love and take care of the mundane tasks needed to sustain our…
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Grief and the Overachiever
One of the hardest things when writing about grief is that everyone’s experience of grief is so different, and depend on everything from the person’s temperament, life situation and their relationship with the person who died. If you’re used to excelling in life, however, grief can pose some specific challenges might not be as troubling…
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Experiencing Grief for the First Time
Although most people will, at some point in their lives, experience the death of someone they love, the first major loss happens at a different time for everyone. Grief is still a taboo subject in our society, and many people have trouble finding someone to offer wisdom or advice about the grieving process. You might…
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When Grief is Anger, not Tears
Grief is not really an emotion—for most people, it’s a complicated package of emotions, some ra-tional, others less so. We think of grief as being synonymous with sadness… and thus think of tears as the most appropriate response. Sadness is definitely part of the grief package, but it’s far from the whole deal. Some people…
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Young Widowhood—Children
Many deaths come with a cascade of losses—the loss of hopes and dreams, the loss of specific traditions, the loss of your relationship with specific family members. When your spouse dies young, one of the biggest losses relates to children. If you already have children, you’re grieving not just the loss of your spouse but…
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Young Widowhood—Dating and Sex
Most young widows eventually feel ready to date and perhaps even marry again, but most find that everything related to dating and sex is more complicated as a widow than it was as a younger single person. In the dating world people talk about baggage—and while your late spouse isn’t a suitcase, most widows do…
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Young Widows: Preserving Memories
When you’re faced with living another 30, 40 or 50 years without the person you assumed would be by your side for decades, it’s common to worry about memories fading and/or losing your connection to your late spouse. This fear is often especially acute in young widows who have children—you feel a responsibility to keep…
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How to Support your Grieving Parent or Sibling
Supporting a parent or sibling through grief can be difficult, especially if your relationship with him or her isn’t perfect (as they often aren’t). This is especially true because if you’re in a position to support your parent or sibling through grief, you’re probably experiencing some level of grief yourself. A good place to start…
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How to Support Your Grieving Friend
When someone we love experiences a major loss, almost everyone wants to reach out and help in any way possible. When it’s a friend who’s experienced a major loss, we’re at an advantage over when it’s a member of the family, because usually the loss hasn’t touched us in nearly the same way. But helping…
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