SOLACE: Soul + Grief

Send us Fan Mail Grief can feel like wandering off the road without noticing, then looking up and realizing it’s dark and you don’t know how to get home. That’s the emotional weather we step into today as I share a short, dreamlike excerpt from John Fosse’s novel "A Shining", chosen because sometimes someone else’s words can carry what we can’t say out loud. The reading follows a son who...

Send us Fan Mail A single word can quietly rewire an entire faith’s imagination of death. We start with Sheol, an ancient Hebrew concept that originally meant the realm of the dead, a shadowy destination shared by everyone rather than a place of reward and punishment. From there, we follow the translation trail that turns Sheol into Hades in Greek and infernum in Latin, and how that collapse of di...

Send us Fan Mail Grief can change what you believe and how you talk to God, even if you never stop believing God exists. Candee sits down with Sandi Moran Brafford for a candid, tender conversation about faith after devastating loss: Sandi’s son died, and only a few months later her husband died too. What follows isn’t a clean spiritual comeback story. It’s the honest middle many people live in, w...

Send us Fan Mail Grief can be hard enough when it comes once, but what happens when it hits again before you can even catch your breath? We pick back up with SandI Moran Brafford, whose year of loss includes the death of her son and, just months later, the sudden death of her husband Jim after a stage four cancer diagnosis and a surgery that was supposed to “help.” The speed of it all leaves no ro...

Send us Fan Mail One small decision can become a lifelong memory. I sit down with Sandi Moran Brafford as she returns to the days surrounding the sudden death of her youngest son, Rich, and tells the story with a honesty that’s both tender and blunt. She shares what it felt like to cancel a simple lunch plan because she was new at work, then wake up to a family emergency that would change everythi...

Send us Fan Mail Some losses don’t arrive like a thunderclap. They slip in quietly when you realize you don’t live there anymore, you don’t talk to those friends anymore, or you’ve outgrown a version of life that once felt permanent. That kind of change can bring real grief, even when nothing “tragic” has happened.  Spend time with words that help many people breathe again: readings from Khalil Gi...

Send us Fan Mail Death has a brutal way of time-traveling us back to the losses we swear we’ve already “made peace with.” I’m joined by my friend of more than 60 years, Sandi Moran Brafford, a writer who has been blogging for decades about the stories we carry and the ones that break us open. Sandi reads a short, devastatingly honest blog post she calls “Sad Stories,” written after the loss of a d...

Send us Fan Mail Grief advice is everywhere, and a lot of it sounds comforting until you try to live inside it. We keep hearing that grief moves in stages, that time heals all wounds, that you have to “let go” to move on, that grief only counts when someone dies, and that strong people stay composed. Those ideas can turn a natural human response into a private test you feel like you’re failing. He...

Send us Fan Mail A line of fire trucks and police cars can feel like “something happening to someone else” until it’s parked on your own street; a stunned neighborhood, and a question that wouldn’t let go: what happened across the street, less than fifty yards from our ordinary lives? I share the story of a little boy who suffered in ways no child should, behind a house that looked like any other...

Send us Fan Mail Some of the most common grief “comfort” assume faith, and when the person you’re supporting doesn’t share that worldview, those attempts can land like distance instead of love. Learn how to show up for non-religious grief with honesty, steadiness, and zero agenda. I Discover who secular grievers are and why this group is growing, then name what can be missing when religion isn’t p...

Send us Fan Mail Love shows up most clearly when it hurts. When grief strips away the noise, we’re left staring at the one thing we can’t measure and can’t replace: the love that remains after someone is gone. We welcome you back to Solace, Soul Plus Grief with a gentle invitation into prayer, reflection, and spiritual companionship for the grieving heart.  We move through a poetic meditation on t...

Send us Fan Mail What part of grief are you learning to meet gently? Grief can make you feel like you’re failing at something you never volunteered for. When the tears rise up, or nothing rises up at all, the mind starts grading you: too emotional, not emotional enough, too attached, still stuck.  Those familiar thoughts offer a different frame, inspired by mindfulness teacher Sean Fargo: grief is...

Send us Fan Mail Grief can make you feel like you’ve been exiled to a place no one else has ever been. When people try to help by saying “I know exactly how you feel,” it can land like a second loss, because your pain is not a template. I’m Candy Lucas, a chaplain and spiritual director, and I want to slow down with a part of the Bible that refuses quick fixes: the Book of Lamentations. We walk th...

Send us Fan Mail Grief shows up like a power outage in the middle of ordinary life: the silence after the phone call, the empty chair, the moment you realize the world has kept moving while yours has split open.  We turn to theologian Karl Rahner for language that doesn’t flinch at that darkness or try to hustle you into feeling “better.” He offers a way to tell the truth about love, death, and th...

Send us Fan Mail Sometimes grief has a way of making us feel like we’re doing faith wrong, especially when we can’t “move on” or wrap our pain easily. On Good Friday, refuse to rush. Sit at the cross and let what is heavy be heavy, making space for the losses that can be named and the quiet ache that cannot.  Start at a tomb in John 11, where the shortest line in Scripture becomes a lifeline: &quo...

Send us Fan Mail There’s a word for losing a parent. There’s a word for losing a spouse. But when a sibling dies, many of us are left with a strange, aching blank, and that cultural silence can make the grief feel invisible. We sit with that truth and name what so many people carry quietly: sibling loss is not “less than” other losses, and it deserves space, language, and care.  Why are siblings o...

Send us Fan Mail You know that split second after a vivid dream where it still feels real, like the person is still there? That’s the doorway we walk through today, because grief often behaves exactly like that: irrational, symbolic, and completely untethered from clocks and calendars. I We talk about how both dreams and bereavement collapse time the past becomes present and the dead feel alive. R...

Send us Fan Mail Grief can be loud, but it can also be quiet enough to hide in plain sight. Sometimes it settles into the corners of our lives like dust we promise we will deal with later, when we have more time, more strength, or fewer responsibilities.  What happens when we keep postponing mourning, and why the “later” we wait for rarely arrives on its own. Start with a simple image that opens a...

Send us Fan Mail Grief rarely follows our plans, and neither does love. We step into scripture using Ignatian imaginative prayer and walk alongside Jesus as the caravan grows, the chores pile up, and friendship matures through late-night talks and hard truth. When a stranger brings the unthinkable news—John has been beheaded—the scene turns to lament: a howl in the dark, a body received with care,...

Send us Fan Mail Happiness showing up in the middle of grief can feel like a breach of loyalty. We talk honestly about that knot in the throat—the moment a new baby, a friend’s engagement, or a quiet sunrise stirs warmth while your heart is still heavy—and we offer a way to hold both truths without apology. Drawing on Scripture and lived experience, we explore whether joy follows sorrow, lives ins...

Send us Fan Mail What if the center of your grief isn’t emptiness, but a voice that calls you "Beloved"? We explore a quiet, radical shift inspired by Ruben L. F. Habito’s Zen and the Spiritual Exercises , bringing Zen attention and Ignatian prayer together to meet sorrow without shame. Instead of ranking life by wins and losses, we invite you into a gentler metric—inner freedom rooted i...

Send us Fan Mail Grief can make the world feel loud and far away, yet there’s a quieter path that helps us hear what the heart is trying to say. We invite you into a reflective, conversation inspired by Mark Nepo’s "Seven Thousand Ways to Listen", exploring how care and kindness live beneath the ideas of fairness and deserving. Rather than trying to outpace loss, we focus on how love ask...

Send us Fan Mail Loss can make the world feel smaller, but something larger than sorrow keeps breaking through: a steady love that refuses to leave. We open a gentle path through grief by walking the terrain of Lent and Easter—naming the desert honestly and listening for the first hints of dawn. Along the way, we draw on Rumi’s striking line about love and separation and on Romans 8:35, asking wha...

Send us Fan Mail Some losses hit the national bloodstream and leave us reeling. The impact ripples beyond family and friends to anyone who sees their own hopes reflected in that life. We sit with that shock and name what it does to trust, to community, and to our sense of moral ground. Rather than drowning in  numbness, we slow down to ask what faithful, human grief looks like in public. We talk f...

Send us Fan Mail The bells are quiet, the colors turn to green, and the calendar says ordinary time—yet your heart still feels anything but ordinary. We lean into that tension and talk honestly about the everyday weight of grief: the way a scent can stop you in a doorway, how an empty chair can crowd a room, and why the ache itself can be a sign that love is alive and doing its work. With clear, g...