How We Navigate Grief with Blair

The hospital floor was cold and hard. I was lying on it, bleeding. Cramps tore through me like poison. I didn’t need anyone to tell me. I already knew. I was losing my baby on November 3, 2020. An hour earlier, the day had already broken me twice. First, the news: my wasband’s father had cancer, and I was the one who had to tell him. Then my phone rang. It was my dad, struggling with his housing,...

It was very early in the morning; I was driving my new-to-me car home from the gym, testing the speakers while thinking about the hot bath I was about to take. I put on Graveyard. Hisingen Blues. It is not exactly a gentle way to start the day, but it’s one of my favourite albums by one of my favourite bands, and some mornings you need fuzz and swagger more than you need birdsong. Then “Uncomforta...

You’re standing in your kitchen. The espresso machine hisses. Your kitchen. Not a Parisian café. Not a village in Tuscany where time moves differently. Your kitchen in actual life . That’s the glitter crash. What is a Glitter Crash, Anyway? A glitter crash is what happens when your brain suddenly remembers it’s supposed to operate on normal dopamine and serotonin levels. For 3.5 weeks, your nervou...

Somebody tells you everything happens for a reason. Or your boss gives you criticism that was honestly kind of okay, and you completely melt down. Your next therapy session isn’t until next week. The next grief trip is months away. So who do you tell? That question is why Rachel and I built an online grief support group. I’ll argue that grief support which only shows up on a schedule misses most o...

I was sitting in our synagogue for Rabbi Rose’s final Kol Nidre service when I thought about my dad’s eyes snapping open. Rabbi Kliel Rose has meant everything to our family and to me, and now he’s moving to a new congregation in a different city. So I was already there holding grief. He has been a spiritual guide who’s been part of really important family events. Kol Nidre was starting, and we we...

I’ve spent years reading autobiographies, grief memoirs, and self-help books. Books to sharpen my mind. Books as catalysts. Books as work. This summer, everything shifted. I was on a grief trip when one of the women mentioned the book she was reading, casually noting it was “spicy.” I’d never considered romance novels. Not once. But I was heading to Europe for work and a soul reset, and the though...

Big Feelings Friday is here, and we are going to talk about NAMING THEM. Shout out to Sutton from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills for this epic pop culture moment - NAME ‘EM! I stopped an Instagram scroll last week, which almost never happens. The post was about Dr. James Gross, a psychologist at Stanford who has spent three decades studying emotion regulation. That is the science of what we...

The wellness industry does not sell health. It sells the belief that death is optional if you are disciplined enough. That is why the trends never stop coming. If any of them delivered what they promised, we would have stopped buying the next one. Living well is not the same as living long, and the two goals produce completely different daily choices. I still do the work. I quit drinking, I move m...

Another Big Feelings Friday is here, and it’s a doozey for me. There is a version of this post where I tell you I forgot the date. I did not forget the date. Nobody forgets the date. You can lose your keys, your job, your entire sense of who you were at 26, but the date sits in your body like a second birthday. August 18. It arrives whether or not you are ready, and this year it arrives without th...

I’m bringing back BIG FEELINGS FRIDAY, and this one has been floating around my brain for a while. If you are here because your life feels like it is coming undone, let me give you the short answer first, before the story, before the metaphors, before any of it. Sometimes the collapse is the correction. What feels like your life falling apart is often your life falling together. The structure you...

There is a moment I come back to again and again. It is early, the house is quiet, and I catch myself sighing before the day has even started. “I have to answer these emails. I have to make breakfast. I have to go for a hike.” And then something in me pauses, because I know what it feels like to lose someone who would give anything for one more ordinary morning. In that pause, four letters change....

It was April, and we were in a market in Bali, buying vegetables for a cooking class we hadn’t especially come for. That’s how grief trips work, I’ve learned. You book the itinerary as a container. You put the temple and the rice terrace and the cooking class in the calendar because grief has no shape and you need something to hold it in. Then you show up and stand in front of a pile of long beans...

There are moments when life grabs you by the throat, slams you against the wall, and says, “Let’s see how you handle this.” Loss. Grief. Trauma. The kind of pain that makes time irrelevant, food tastes like cardboard, and sleep feels like a foreign language. It’s the avalanche of “too much,” and suddenly, you’re not driving the car, you’re clinging to the bumper, praying it slows down. If you’ve e...

The last few weeks are a blur. The good kind. I flew from Winnipeg to Kamloops. I MCed a golf tournament with my friend Jeremy. Then I got in the car and drove eighteen hours each way to Sawtooth Lodge for the Sawtooth Survival Gathering in Idaho. I went as an instructor. I stood up and spoke about how to strengthen your resilience muscle, something you can only build by using it. And then Idaho d...

TL;DR: What is time? It is the movement we measure between moments. Does forever really exist? Yes, but not the way we think. Forever is not a number on a clock. It is the feeling that a love, a bond, or a person will always be here. That feeling is true right up until the moment it is not. In this post, I want to walk through what time is, whether forever really exists, and what I believe forever...

In 2019, I walked onto a stage in my hometown and shared my story publicly for the very first time. My mom was there. My dad was there. My Baba Leah was there. I could see them in the room while I delivered my keynote, and I will carry that image with me for the rest of my life. I am so grateful now that I spoke while he could still hear me. I had spent years keeping certain things quiet. And what...

Nineteen years ago, I packed up my Alero and left Winnipeg, sure that home was somewhere out west. And for eighteen years, British Columbia gave me mountains, ocean, lakes, a life I’m endlessly grateful for. But somewhere along the way I started to notice that the word “home” kept drifting east, back across the prairies, back to the place I thought I’d outgrown. Turns out you don’t outgrow Winnipe...

I am not a widow. My wasband is still alive yet, I feel the version of him I once loved is not. He breathes. His heart still beats. And yet I grieve him in a similar way that I’ve grieved the dead, in the good outfit, eating shiva loaf, being still, in the dark, in the small hours when the house is quiet, and my thoughts are loud. A stroke took him. Not all of him. Just the part I married. So if I...

A year ago today, the mountains held me. I remember the thin, bright air of Deer Valley, Utah, and the way an unexpected invitation can rearrange a life. My travel season was winding down, or so I thought, when Shauna’s message landed in my inbox. Come to the mountains. Take the stage with Sir Richard Branson. When the universe hands you a door like that, you don’t knock politely. You walk through...

Well, May. You had some high highs and very low lows. As I write this, I’m on my sister’s couch in Winnipeg, Manitoba. If I’m being honest, this is the post I almost didn’t write. It’s easier to show you the highlight reel. The stages, the microphones, the new friends, the good hair days. It’s harder to tell you that in the same thirty-one days, I had some of the proudest moments of my career and...

I stood in the doorway this weekend and looked at what’s left. Boxes stacked in a concrete room the size of a parking space, behind a roll-up door with a padlock I bought from the storage facility office. Fifteen years of a life together. And I’m not even done. Two more loads at least before I leave for Winnipeg in June. That’s the math nobody warns you about when a marriage ends. Not the lawyer f...

As a little girl, I turned to writing whenever I had big feelings. In my diary. For school assignments. In poetry. There was something about putting words on a page that made the inside of me feel less crowded. Writing helped me understand myself, and it gave my deepest thoughts a place to go, somewhere outside my body, where I could finally look at them. I drifted away from it for a long time, th...

For most of my life, I thought I knew what it meant to rest and feel calm. I wasn’t having panic attacks. I wasn’t falling apart in public. I was functioning. I was showing up. I was getting things done. And in the absence of visible crisis, I told myself that meant I was okay. I was not okay. I just didn’t know what okay actually felt like. This is the part nobody talks about when they talk about...

Kintsugi Healing: Learning to Feel Again After Grief Five and a half years ago, I made a quiet decision that would change everything. I was going to put my heart back together. Not to return to who I was, but to become someone who could feel again. To crack it open and let love back in. I couldn’t feel it. Not love. Not gratitude. Not joy. I was numb. If you’ve ever experienced deep grief or traum...

I’ve always been a treasure hunter. Not the kind with a map and an X marking the spot, but the kind who walks slowly along a shoreline, eyes scanning the ground like something sacred might be waiting to be found. Because it is. Give me a beach, any beach. Ocean, river, lake. Give me a forest floor scattered with stories, and I will find magic. A speckled rock that looks like it was painted by hand...