Death and loss are universal human experiences. You can’t control where or when we’ll face them. You don’t have to passively endure grief. You can be proactive in engaging with and healing your grief.
...The word bereavement means ‘to be torn apart.’ Grieving is the difficult, painful, and necessary journey of learning to live after significant loss. By consciously engaging with your emotions, you can find a way forward. You become stronger and more resilient. These are qualities that help you in your next chapter of life. So, each time you move through waves of emotional intensity, remind yourself: I just healed a little bit more.
...When you understand why you feel the way you do, you worry less about your reactions to your loss. You focus more on the next steps along your healing path. Only you can truly figure this out. This post gives you a practice for making sense of your grief.
...You have to feel grief to heal it. Yet the pain can be so intense, you want to get it over with fast. But there’s no quick way through grief. Instead, you have to gradually build your tolerance to it. That way, you can do the work of adapting to loss. That’s where grief dosing comes in.
...Major life transitions, such as the death of a loved one, always change us. They force us to learn in preparation for our next level of life. Bereavement research confirms that the vast majority of us can and do recover. And, we now know a lot about how resilient healers resolve their grief. Sorrow is not your destiny. Transformation is.
...My father’s passing late last year has caused me to reflect deeply on my own death. I’ve been writing a series about death anxiety, to share my process for leaning into my fear. In this piece, I share how I work through my greatest source of anxiety: fear of dying alone. In this piece, I talk about building my faith in the compassion of my fellow humans and how it will draw them around me when my time comes.
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