Life After Loss

Long ago, way back in one of my college classes on death and dying, the professor told us that our death rituals -- the funeral, visitation, etc. -- were our ways of "reweaving the cloth of our community" after a loss.

Grief has a process.  It is our internal response to loss, that is about how we move through and beyond that loss.

Yet in our culture, we tend to have an impatience with grief and the grieving.  With the best of intentions, we sometimes push people to move through their grief.  And we push ourselves to move through our grief.

We want those grieving to find happiness again.  And as we grieve, we want to stop hurting.

Which often only serves to disrupt grief, prolonging or curtailing the healing that needs to come after a loss.  In our attempts to "speed it along," we slow it down or cut it off.

My guest on this episode, Sarah Nannen, knows this first-hand.  With 4 young children, Sarah was widowed when her active-duty husband died in a training accident.

In the aftermath, Sarah had to follow her own instincts to find space for her grief... and then she found herself once again among the living.

Since then, Sarah has been helping others do the same.  She wrote a book, Grief Unvealed, and helps others to find empowerment as they process their own grief.

Who is this episode for?  If you are alive... you!  Because every single one of us will be (or have been) confronted by loss.  Every single one of us will (or has) pass through grief.

Listen below.

RELATED RESOURCES

Sarah Nannen's Website (and free Peace Meditation)

Moving Through Grief

Order, Disorder, Reorder

Grieve Losses, Celebrate Gains

Does Everything Happen for a Reason?