Survive Your Grief

How to Survive Your Grief When Someone You Love Has Died

Grief and Grieving -The Irony of Moving On

In grieving circles, people rail against any hint of pressure to move on, and rightly so.grief and grieving

The irony in all this pressure to move on is that we are moving on. Like it or not, life continues. Time doesn’t stand still. Stuff continues to happen…little stuff like going to the grocery store and big stuff like a medical crisis. Life just keeps happening whether we want it to or not.

The real question is not whether we move on but how do we move on?

 

Read Grief and Grieving -The Irony of Moving On


Photo Credit: juliaf

 

 

The Prize for Bad Journalism - Woman eats dead husband's ashes to cope

Twenty-six-year-old Cassie lost the love of her life when Shawn, her husband of two-and-a-half years, died from a sudden asthma attack. Cassie mourned and her grieving soon took a strange turn.

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Cassie, of Fayetteville, Tenn., who was featured on the season finale of the TLC series My Strange Addiction, found she herself eating her husband's cremated ashes as a form of comfort.

At first, Cassie carried the ashes around with her wherever she went, including the grocery store, the movies and resturants.Things turned more strange when some of the ashes spilled on her fingers and she didn't want to wipe them off. So instead she licked them and she became hooked on eating her dead husband's ashes.

Since then, Cassie has eaten about a pound of the six pounds of ashes, despite their taste of "sandpaper, sand and rotten eggs."

Experts say the real harm is that cremated ashes contain chemicals known to bring on psychosis when ingested.

At the end of the TLC series Cassie had checked into a inpatient care facility for treatment, sans ashes.

via news.google.com

This one takes the prize for bad journalism. So far today I have read about the mother who can't get closure after 30 years and several news reports preying on the recently bereaved. The media is in a wonderful position to educate people on grief but instead publicize the most extreme and bizarre responses. Any wonder people are afraid of grieving when we're confronted with this junk on a daily basis?

Stopping for Funeral Cortege is the Customary Thing to do

In a culture that has lost so much social courtesy, it's nice to see this one respected.

Dear Abby quoting Emily Post...

"If you encounter a funeral cortege (signaled by a line of cars with headlights or flashing hazard lights on), it's respectful to pull over to the side of the street until the cars have passed. Waiting at a green light while a cortege passes is also expected, even if someone behind you is honking to proceed."

Stopping for Funeral Cortege is the Customary Thing to do

Song of Songs Poetry for Jewish Ritual Cleansing

Beautiful, don't you think?

The Jewish religion has a ritual for washing and dressing the dead for burial. This ceremony, called a tahara, is conducted by volunteers with the Chevra Kaddisha, which translates to “sacred society.” During the washing part of the ritual, there’s a beautiful Jewish tradition to read poetry from the Song of Songs.

The poems are different for men and women. Both use loving descriptions to evoke images of the human form in the prime of life. These poems are recited as water is poured over the body.

Read  Song of Songs Poetry for Jewish Ritual Cleansing

Grief is to be trusted not treated

Some are better than others, but I think this is a great blog post if I do say so myself. Let me know what you think.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the study of grief is best left to the poets and mystics among us.

Grief has more in common with love than with any diagnosable disorder. With every attempt to define grief with symptoms and timelines, we end up diminishing our understanding of the grieving process rather than deepening it.

Read Like Love, Grief Belongs to Poets and Mystics