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I do not fear my own eventual death, instead I fear not living and loving today while I have this precious gift of another day. I fear that those who will grieve my eventual and inevitable death will become lost in that grief, and so by these writings I want more people to better understand...Read More→

The death of a loved one can quickly become very damaging to even the tightest woven social fabric of a solid family, and destructive to already worn thin social fabrics of less close families and circles of friends. For visualization, I like the metaphor that a community or family is a social fabric woven from...Read More→

When someone you know suffers a loss, many people just don’t know what to say, and this discomfort surrounding grief brings deeper silence and isolation to those grieving. So, here is my not so short guide attempting to help you to speak more effectively to grieving people, mostly by understanding things not to say. There...Read More→

In any good life filled with love there is an implied but usually not discussed acceptance of grief. We grieve because we love. No love, no grief. The longer and deeper the love the more challenging the grief. When we love someone, we implicitly accept that one of us will die before the other. Grief...Read More→

The purest forms of love are unconditional love, wide open pathways between two souls where love can travel instantly with great force and reaction. The soul contains our conscience which tries to protect us from danger, and an unconditional wide open pathway for love to flow out of our soul is a very great danger....Read More→

Content warning: This post directly addresses suicide Originally published in 2009 as a column, but it's history is deeper. Having experienced suicide as a survivor, I will try reach our to families when I hear of a suicide in our circle of friend or extended circle of acquaintances. Knowing the complexity of the immediate aftermath...Read More→

Part of the ancient human instinct for survival is to not show weakness or fear. It’s a defense against predators, to appear strong in all ways, to increase the chance of survival by fooling predators into thinking that you are stronger than you really are, hoping the predators choose weaker appearing victims. This process likely...Read More→

With a technician’s spirit, and once I had modelled my soul (see: https://distillinggrief.com/2023/04/24/a-model-of-a-soul/ ) as an invisible reservoir where we store and release love, I realized that grief had emptied me of most or perhaps all of the love in my soul. We often hear people describe grief as a dark place, and the loss...Read More→

Among emotions, grief is one of the most complex and unpredictable. Because grief is fundamentally love that has suddenly been injured and unilaterally redefined, grief is almost completely unpredictable when viewed by others. In the next few posts I will present my explanatory model for how we collect, process and share love, a model of...Read More→

Anger is a cancer of the human soul that consumes love. Anger is natural first response in early grief, and anger can become a habit or a crutch, so anger should be your early primary focus in healing grief. The process I will outline here is applicable outside of grief and works whenever you have...Read More→