Dealing With My Grief

I last saw my uncle in June of 2016. At the time he told me he had something for me but he had decided he'd wait and give it to me later. As it turned out, later would never come because he died 3 weeks later. Christmas of 2016 on a visit back to S. Louis, my aunt and cousin presented me with the item my uncle bequeathed to me... a Rolex DateJust watch. I was thrilled and nervous at the same time....

When my dad died, I was just a child t a new school trying to fit in... trying to be accepted by those who had barely known me for 5 months. And suddenly after his death I wanted to fit in even more so. I didn't want to bee seen as different. Even in high school, college, and the military I would hide that part of me that me me "different." I would become a chameleon and simply hide in plain sight...

In October of 2011 I contracted a flesh eating bacteria while watching my son play baseball. Some believe I was bitten by a spider - probably a brown recluse.  To remove the dead tissue and ger ahead of the virus I underwent 4 surgeries over a 10 day period to make sure all infected tissue had been removed and that the virus/bacteria had been completely removed. But part of this process involved p...

Happy 2020! A new year, a new decade. As I mentioned previously, I have not been able to keep up the schedule for the podcast. I've been playing catch up with the other aspects of my life and just haven't been able to devote as much time to the podcast's production. Hopefully, that is all behind me now and I can get back to the regulaas schedule for the show. As I look back at 2019, I realize that...

I am focusing on making new traditions... or at least getting back to old ones this year. The last month and a half have been emotionally draining, mainly dealing with cleaning out my mom's house. Now that it's over, mentally I feel like I'm recovering at a decent pace. I've been able to start enjoying things I used to do with mom... like eating Cream of Wheat again which is something she made on...

I have been AWOL 3 of the last 5 weeks. Putting the finishing touches on getting mom's house cleaned out was a bigger challenge than I thought it would be... and more emotional as well. I'm exhausted... I'm drained. I can take solace in the fact that Christmas is around the corner and I can visit homes where some of mom's things now reside. I am grateful for this. I didn't think that the house wou...

I realize I have been away from a few weeks... I'll talk about that in next week's episode. I spent the week before Thanksgiving 2019 finishing up cleaning out my mom's home for it's new tenants. It was an emotional experience to say the least. You can complete your holiday shopping on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2OOJOCy Subscribe to this podcast by using one of the following: Click here to subsc...

A few weeks ago, the Washington Nationals celebrated their first World Series Championship by having a parade. While the entire city was happy and festive and celebrating with the team, I was not. In order to get to the World Series, the Nationals had to beat my home town team, the St. Louis Cardinals... and they beat them in convincing fashion, winning the best of seven series four games to none....

As the calendar tuns to November, I am reminded that this is National Children's Grief Awareness Month. As such I wanted to call attention to an organization that is helping children deal with grief. This is extremely important to me as I lost my father when I was 10. Rays of Hope Children's Grief Centre is one of the only of its kind in the nation. It is a safe, neutral place for adolescents to d...

As I prepare for an annual photography gig I have in the next few weeks I am reminded of just how similar putting the pieces back together after losing someone is just like putting together a photo shoot. The event I'm photographing is an annual event I've done for 4 or 5 years now and even though it's different each year, there are certain elements that stay the same. The program is the same, put...

I have been asked how I try to move forward as quickly after a loss. I have learned ho to compartmentalize things in my life. to put things into categories and not let them interact with other. But in theis episode of the podcast I come face to face with the fact that doesn't always work. Announcement: I have a new podcast coming out with the hosts of the Grief Dreams podcast call Grief Cafe where...

Sometimes when we lose a friend we are driven to write a song about them. Rachel Leycroft began piano lessons at seven years old and found her voice through songwriting at thirteen. Her lyrics became her diary for expression and healing, rarely shared with anyone outside of her notebook pages & piano keys. Sixteen years later, upon the sudden death of a dear friend, she felt the undeniable need to...

I have mentioned that I am also a photographer who mostly takes pictures of jazz musicians. One of the questions I am often asked is whether or not I play and instrument mysels. I simply say no. This is not entirely true... When I as in 5th grade, about 7 months before my dad died, he bought me a guitar and would take lessons after school. I continued to take lessons after he died until I entered...

"I don't think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains." –Anne Frank This week marks the one year anniversary of my mothers death and as I have tried to figure out what I'm going to do on October 2 I am reminded of a question that comes up often in grief forums I belong to: How do you mark the time since your loved one's passing? For me, I don't... I can't - not if making the time me...

What happens when a widow establishes a relationship with the hospice social worker responsible for making her husband as comfortable as during his final days? They create a game designed to allow people to have tough conversations around death and dying, course! LORI LoCICERO Lori LoCicero is a freelance writer and the co-creator of The Death Deck. A creative storyteller and eternal optimist, Lor...

When I'm not working my day job, I usually have a camera in my hand taking pics of allkind, either jazz musicians or anything I find interesting on the street. Facebook reminded me that I took a picture of a homeless man 3 years ago. While the photography industry seems to look down on taking pictures of the homeless I look at them in the same light as children on the sindes of milk cartons. See,...

I went through what I went through because God told me to go through it. - Allen Iverson Two weeks ago, I questioned why people do the some of the things that they do... like go to church. I theorized that this was done because someone (our parents, probably) took you church at an early age and you got baptized (or went through whatever right of initiation your church has). At some point you recei...

Today I have a follow up conversation... a sort of health and welfare check with my good friend Shelby Forsythia.  Shelby Forsythia is the author of Permission to Grieve and podcast host of Coming Back: Conversations on Life After Loss . After the unexpected death of her mother in 2013, she became a "student of grief" and set out on a lifetime mission to explore the oft-misunderstood human experie...

  With the deaths of several people in early August 2019 in the events that took place in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, I reexamine my view on gun gun control and what different wys in which I think we as a society can make a difference when it comes to mass shootings. Are guns really the problem? Let me know your thoughts Subscribe to this podcast by using one of the following: Click here to s...

With children returning to school, how can we prepare schools to deal with children who've experienced loss over the summer? I've received some listener feedback from a lady whose husband has died over the summer and their child is returning to school in a few weeks. she'd like to know how best to prepare her child. In my opinion it's best to prepare the environment first. Here are just a few thin...

Today I welcome Alyssa Budinock to the podcast. Alyssa is a Kripalu yoga instructor, podcast host, and end-of-life doula in training. She lives in Rochester, New York with her fiance and their beloved dog Blue. Between 2017-2018 she experienced 5 significant losses in her family that ignited her deep curiosity in how people grieve, how they die, and how they live. She's a sucker for beautiful thin...

One of the things I don't say enough is that I don't have any formal training in grief. I am not a therapist, psychologist, or grief counselor. All I have is my many experiences of dealing with loss in my life, beginning with the death of my father. As I have so often stated, grief gives you an opportunity to learn more about yourself than you ever wanted to know. One must simply put aside their o...

This past week I lost  a little faith in humanity. Let me explain. Early in July 2019 a person I served in the army with lost his son suddenly. Unfortunately, after spending so much money trying to keep his son alive, he need money for whatever final arrangements the decided upon for his son. So the reached out to family and friend on Facebook and started a fundraiser.  Well, someone decided that...

  This week, I have a conversation with Melissa Lynne. Melissa's mother died in March 2014 and everything changed in that instant...her priorities, her career, her purpose and passion, her outlook on life and death. She crumbled into a heap under the blankets and shut out the world, where she stayed for almost a year. The thing that brought her back and kept her going was returning to the page, re...

The internet makes finding answers to answers to any question you could possibly have very easy to find... just type your question, hit enter and in milliseconds you have more answers than you might ever imagined. When it comes to grief. looking for answers to questions such as how long will it hurt this much or what can I do to make the pain go away will give you various results that all worked f...