It’s important to never judge another’s grief, methods, trajectory, or results. The exceptions to that are if you have reason to believe that they are at risk of harming themselves or their future, or if they specifically ask you for your help.

When helping or mentoring those who are grieving I have a simple policy of being open and accessible, but waiting for them to ask as specific question, and then answering questions with my experience and from my perspective. Because my paths through periods of very different grief were each decidedly non-linear, I bounced around and circled often, so I generally have more than one perspective to offer on any question asked. It’s important to inform, it’s important to empower, but all choices of direction, timeline and actions must be the free choice of those who are grieving. There is no one correct road in grief.

Death of a loved one is naturally very unsettling. While we may logically accept that death is inevitable and therefore unavoidable, when it comes to the lives of our loved one, many will see that death of a loved one as a punishment or a betrayal of our own trust in how we believe life will or should be. This perspective is especially the case in what we see as an untimely death. We naturally and easily judge untimely as life being unfair.

I have made the case elsewhere that both love and fairness are living human constructs that require the ability to feel, to experience emotion and to have memory and history. I also make the case for the difference between the physical existence we are born to and the metaphysical or emotional life that we build for ourselves and others with shared love.

Our physical body has no capacity for emotion and no innate capability for a sense of fairness. The sacred part of us, the human mind, is where all emotion is built and stored. The end of our physical life’s existence is determined by the rigid mechanics of our universe, not the brilliant lights of our mind’s emotions and memories that build the life we love living or the lives around us that we love loving.

I will start by saying that for those we love, every death will seem both untimely and cruel. Death will always seem unfair, untimely death will seem even more unfair. We have an emotional expectation of some quantity of life granted to us by birth, and our trust in that expectation has been broken when a life ends.

Even the death of someone suffering tragically from a painful debilitating terminal disease or a centenarian who has outlived all realistic expectations will somehow seem unfair. Another year, another day, another breath, surely our loved one deserved that. These feelings are rooted in the value we each give to life, and are especially powerful in those of us who most love life and those around us. Those who love many others, those who love their life will generally be hit harder and deeper by grief when they lose a loved one. Remember: no love, no grief, deep love, and deep grief.   

My brother’s death in 2000, by suicide at age 43, was without prior warning or visible evidence of mental health struggles. Can a self-inflicted death be judged to be untimely? Suicide is an especially challenging betrayal of our trust in the value and sanctity of life, a value that we expect of ourselves and others around us, especially family and friends. Suicide is a challenging grief, because suicide challenges us to understand how someone we knew and loved came to the point where they no longer loved their life even enough to live another day. Another breath, another hour, another day and they might have avoided irreversible self destruction for the rest of their life. How is that fair?

Our son’s death in 2005, at age 20 in a firefighter water rescue training accident, was certainly untimely. He had a joy of life and an exceptional future ahead, and was suddenly taken from us. Human error and lack of proper training, planning and oversight by the department and municipality were reported as the official causes of an avoidable accident. Had he been slightly less kind, had he not switched seats with another firefighter who wasn’t comfortable, he would still be alive and another family would be grieving the loss of their child. How is that fair? His last act of kindness was his fatal decision? Had he been much less kind, he would never have chosen to be a volunteer firefighter, he might have been having a beer with friends instead of dying. His life of responsibility and kindness, his love of our community, drove him to be a firefighter, and being a firefighter caused his death. How is that fair?

My late father, a man whose life teachings to his children were rooted in the concepts of fairness, honesty and hard work, a man who had lost a son at age 43 to suicide, a man who had lost a grandson to an accidental death at age 20, lived most of his last two decades diminished by grief and unable to fully quench the anger from those deaths he judged as unfair.

As I watched grief diminish my parents, as I did my best to try to change their perspective and help them heal, I used the example of their struggles as lessons to guide my own healing from the same losses that left them perpetually wounded by grief. They did their best, they chose what they could choose, and they lived with loss uncomfortably resigned and silently. They sadly remained stuck in an exhausting isolating grief peppered with anger for the balance of their lives.

Looking back, I don’t feel that those who get stuck have somehow failed; I feel that their losses have caused them damage beyond the capabilities of their own love of life to inspire them to rebuild and to heal more fully. My parents both had carried unhealed or partially healed grief from some other past life events when these untimely deaths happened. It was indeed too much for them to heal, and they remained reticent and resistant to professional help.

They never lost a desire to live, but they lost a desire to love their life as they aged. As I watched my parents survive grief, but never thrive again, my resolve to heal more fully became stronger, and my desire to love my life again life became stronger than it had ever been before these losses.

My search for comfortable perspectives on grief has widened over decades of writing and talking on grief. My underlying understandings of my own life, purpose, love, death and grief have evolved to provide me much greater personal comfort.

We can get stuck

As an evolved emotion, grief protectively freezes and immobilizes us for a time after loss. I believe that this part of grief evolved to protect us, but also to force us to slow down to take a period of reflection while we slowly absorb the totality of the damage this loss has done to our soul and also to begin to plan our redefinition. We’re stuck in grief from day one; we must each find our own unique path to become unstuck and moving back to a life we can love again, without the physical loved one we have lost. For some grief is like quicksand, they sink slowly and can’t move or climb out of the hole they sink into.

In some discussions, I liken their early grief to a forced march around the loss. They’re always facing the loss, never allowing ourselves to look away. They step sideways, back and forth, around and around seeing nothing but the loss. Over time they wear a circular groove around the loss, sinking deeper and deeper until they might completely lose sight of the horizon where our present life is. If this circling the loss goes on long enough, the trench they wear around the loss may becomes too deep for them to climb out of without some help. Most often, they aren’t in danger, they simply can’t turn away from grief, they are afraid to walk away even for a few hours. Making grief the central focus of one’s life may become a habit for fear of forgetting, and the habit may be hard to break.

Spiritually, we need not fear forgetting, we will always have the memories and carry that love of our loved one. We may lack confidence in that spiritual connection, perhaps we’re not confident of our own soul, and so we simplify and are prone to connect ourselves and our focus to the physical body of the person that we love.

The loved we shared is based on emotions and experiences that grief will allow to remain alive and reachable inside of ourselves. The physical person has died; our love for them lives on, and a different but similar piece of that love is in each person who loved them.

Many who freeze in grief will see mostly the pain, focusing on only the short painful moments, perhaps days or months, around the death and not the entirety of the life that they loved living and being loved. People may remain frozen in grief closely surrounded by that unresolved pain and anger of early grief, as my parents did, until they themselves die. Becoming frozen in grief will make returning to loving life again more challenging or, in some cases, impossible.

Grief is never zero risk; we grieve as a small community of those who have loved someone, and we really need to remain aware of each other as we travel grief. Grief that seems untimely or unfair, such as the loss of a child, increases the initial shock and pain of grief, and increases the possibility of someone becoming stuck or even frozen in grief.

Untimely or unfair grief also increases the possibility that many of your social circle will pull away, reduce interaction or disappear over the first few months and years of your grief. No judgment, they were not prepared, equipped or comfortable enough with mortality to find ways to stay involved. Some people may have simplistic views or no actual experience with grief, some may have too much of their own grief to involve or invest themselves emotionally in your grief, and for others your grief may be their biggest fear (Natural in both loss of a child or suicide).

Remember that getting stuck in early grief is a natural result in every death of a loved one, and even long expected deaths can leave people stuck firmly in grief. Moving water never freezes solid, so often I see the aim, when helping to improve grief’s trajectory is to generate movement, but to try to avoid that circular movement where we’re always facing the loss and slowly sinking.

Be well and peaceful. Keep moving in grief, move away slowly, one step at a time. Never lose sight of the past with your lost loved one or hope for your future.

I wrote this over five years ago, answering a question, “What should you do when you feel life is pointless?” posted on Quora. Five years later I still get new thanks for it.

Breathe life into Loss

I lost a beautiful brother to suicide at age 43 in 2000. We had no advance hints. signs, cries for help. We were blindsided. He left behind a widow, two preteen children, two living parents, three siblings, and hundreds of family and friends. He was successful in the physical world, but somehow he felt enough pain to choose to kill himself. I imagine he felt buried in hopelessness at a moment in time that he lost sight of everything he had and everyone he loved. I healed my soul, my parents never managed to heal their souls.

I lost a perfect 20 year old son in 2005 to a firefighter training accident in our small hometown. Our souls were ripped apart and our lives drained of love. Breathing hurt, the next minute seemed impossible, the next day seemed unfathomable. We had our hopes and dreams shattered.

As the minutes became days, then weeks, then months and now years, we healed in ways we never imagined. It took a long time and a lot of work. We have each patched our torn and tattered souls, we have each filled ourselves with a love of life again and most important we love each other and carry the love for our son forward in our daily lives.

We healed because we have always had and taught the purpose to love life and love each other. My brother’s suicide awakened me to fundamental importance of love; my son’s death opened a deep spiritual well and beliefs that I would never have found without loss.

Only if you are in good physical health, try this please:

Take a deep breath and hold it for as long as you can without breathing out.

When you want to breathe again, keep holding it. Hold it until it hurts, until your body craves air. Keep holding it as long as you can. Be tougher than you thought you could be.

When you finally give up holding that breath in, you’ll will need to breathe out before you can breathe the air you need back in. Gulp it out, gasp it in.

Gasp for air, take some deep breaths and relax and understand:

Your body and soul want to survive. They will let you suppress hope for a time, but eventually our need to live and our purpose to love will come to our rescue and override almost any unconscious action that we might put in the way of our life.

As you gasp for air, resolve to do your part in finding a purpose in your life. Find your soul’s passions and build love for yourself and for life.

There is just never a lack of hope for us in this world as long as we know and seek love as our purpose. Your body and soul fought you when you held your breath. Your body and soul want you to breathe, to live and to love the gift of today.

Let your soul speak, it speaks quietly with the wisdom of generations if you can find the quiet to hear it.

When you can listen to and understand your soul’s purpose of survival, you will always have the purpose and gratitude which are the fundamental keys to loving your life and building love in our world.

Now, please go hold your breath past the point of pain and start listening when your soul steps in to save you.

All these years later, well healed and loving life, some mornings I still hold my breath to help remind me that I am alive with this gift of a new dawn.

My apologies for lack of new posts. I have been consumed in other parts of my life. I needed a break as the world processes dramatic political changes, a grieving process in itself. I have finally missed writing about grief and will try to write more soon.

Grief is a living thing

We lost our twenty year old son James to a firefighter training accident on June 6, 2005.

I write this as we approach, in June, the 20^th anniversary of James’ death, and as we approach a day of balance on August 21, 2025 which is the day that James will have been physically dead for as long as he once lived and walked among us. Anniversaries are milestones along or road through grief, times when we confront or ponder about or grief, times we are often forced by the human construct of a calendar to feel our grief.

In the years since James died, I have openly shared my very personal thoughts on life, death and, of course, grief.  Grief is universal to those in a good life full of love, because without love there is only existence, but no grief. With love, existence becomes life and there always be some grief in and around every good life.

Each year that passes brings a special few who find the strength to reach out and engage with me on a most personal level about their grief. We become, for a few weeks, or in a few cases for many years, casual pen-pals in grief. Most of these contacts are people struggling in early grief, universally they seek from me some magic nugget of wisdom that will catapult them to some comfortable end to their grief, a solution that they imagine must exist.

There is no such magic nugget of wisdom to fix grief. Through grief, each of us will become wise in different ways, because true wisdom only comes from resolving pain from loss or failure into understanding and acceptance, and removal of any anger left behind. Becoming wise from grief take time, it is a process of distilling the value of that love we have shared in life into lessons of how to better love the life we each have left to us after loss. This distillation happens in many stages over many years, and each year the spirit of love that we feel in our souls for our lost loved ones can become deeper, more pure and more fulfilling. How we move through grief is contingent on us wanting to move and allowing ourselves to grow around the loss.

Perhaps because I have lost a son, and my grief has now matured over 20 years, I have compared the timelines of grief to the life of a child.

Like a baby, early grief has no language that we can understand, early grief is all emotion. And using child raising terms, usually, early grief is very colicky and unsettled. Early grief will keep you up at nights and demand your constant attention, to the point of exhaustion and beyond. We seek ways to make ourselves comfortable with early grief, but in essence, we have no idea what we’re doing and why our lives are so disrupted. Like a new baby, early grief consumes all of our time, emotions and energy.

Like a child, a year later grief learns to crawl and then to walk. When we suddenly lose sight of grief, we panic. We now can’t imagine a life without grief, we become frantic and we don’t want our grief to disappear or hurt itself. As a result, wherever we go in daily life we have this invisible grief toddler strapped to us. If no one notices our grief child, we might become offended or angry that people are insensitive to our grief. But to the world around us, after a year of grief, our grief child is invisible. We’re now a year or two into grief, and we still don’t understand the words grief speaks and more importantly, we can’t yet speak our own language of grief.

At around the second year, grief enters the terrible twos. Our two year old grief child now often has terrible irrational tantrums. Two year grief swings its fists and hits us if we don’t pay enough attention. Two year grief stumbles and falls a lot, and cries out for attention. But two year old grief now actually speaks the words “I love you”, and cuddles into you as it falls asleep at night.

By three years, we may start dreaming of a future with our growing and maturing grief. Three year grief still brings tears, but three year grief makes us laugh and smile more than we ever imagined we might again laugh and smile. Because early grief is a desert of happiness, these laughs and smiles are new for us and confuse us.

By six years, our grief is now speaking to us in full sentences and bigger words, more complex questions and answers. We see hope that this grief may mature into a loving productive companion fo the rest of our lives.

By the early teen years, we’re talking to our grief about its future, about what it wants to be and where it wants to go in our lives. Many of us will talk with pride of the loved ones we have lost. Some of us will help guide and mentor others through early grief. Some of us will still struggle, some may never find comfort. Grief is unpredictable, some never find comfort, and some may never learn the language of their grief.

It is important to never judge or compare your path with grief by what you see in others who are grieving. I know that the vast majority of us will not speak of grief with those we don’t know well enough to trust. And so, I respect and value immensely those who share their grief with me quietly while seeking their own paths.

At twenty years, my grief for James is a valuable and comfortable part of my daily life. I begin each day with a few minutes thinking about what James would have been, because those thoughts have guided me to be more like who James would have been. James was kind and would have wanted me to try to help others find their way through grief.

To those new to grief, know that you will distill and purify your grief over many years ahead. Know that each year that passes, the grief will become more pure love and less anger, until one day a small sip of it each day will satisfy you and fortify you for whatever life brings you.

Be well, seek peace, learn the language of your grief, talk to your grief as much as you listen to it, and build love of life together with your grief.

It’s Christmas tomorrow in the Christian world. A time of love and hope in a world with seemingly endless problems.

We had the joy of loving our son James for 20 Christmas celebrations, and now 2024 will be our 20^th Christmas without James.

We will celebrate as a family, our daughter, her husband, and our two grandchildren. James will be here with us in each of our hearts, each of our souls, and we will speak of James often. What I celebrate most is the resilience that I found deep inside of my soul, what I believe is a genetic predisposition to loving others and life itself. That resilience gave me a path to walk back towards loving life and each other.

When I help others find their own path, or simply encourage then to try, this is James speaking thru me. When I had no footsteps to follow, I would ask myself “What would James want me to do?”. It was always to relearn how to love life.

When I was mentoring James over 20 years, I cautioned him to choose his dreams rationally, aiming high but choosing from the available or attainable choices for today’s happiness. And so, as I rebuilt life around loss, I could no longer touch or hold James, but chose to continue to love James, and also to learn to love life and those around me again. I knew that’s what James would have wanted me to do.

In grief, everyone seeks an easy path, a fast path thru and back to life. Grief is an evolved process that forces us to feel the pain of loss, to stop, reflect, relearn, redefine and rebuild a big part of our soul. When we grieve, we teach ourselves resilience and deeper meaning to our remaining life. This is the love we shared with our lost love one guiding us forward, one step at a time.

It took a long time to heal, to become comfortable with life, to trust life, and to eventually love living life again. But looking back, this profound grief has been the most rewarding and empowering journey of my life, and it continues to guide and power me.

It’s natural to look at what you have lost from a death, I encourage you to look at what you have gained by sharing a significant part of your life with someone you have loved deeply. In grief, waiting to be found again, is the fundamental purpose of the gift of this life, to love others and to love yourself.

Don’t give up, step forward always tethered to the memories of the past loves of your life. It’s what James wanted for me, I’m sure it’s what your loved one would want you to find from their death.

This may not be the Christmas of your dreams, but be resilient and dream and love life from the best available options of today, and dream of building a better tomorrow.

Be well, seek peace, build love, share love, love the life you live today.

Merry Christmas 2024 to all.

Today we celebrate our 46^th wedding anniversary. Sixteen thousand eight hundred and one days married. Our nineteenth anniversary, seven thousand seventy six days,  since the death of our son in a firefighter training accident.

We have shared a destiny of a lifetime love chosen by two, built by two, respected by two. Lived one day at a time, thru the best and the absolute worst, always looking forward, always wanting to be closer.

Many things can destroy a marriage; few are more capable of destruction than travelling the shared grief of losing a child. The loss of a child causes a massive destruction and eventual rebuilding of the souls of both parents. We become first unrecognizable to even ourselves, and slowly we become two completely different people, assembled painfully with the bits and pieces of our blown apart souls.

We become distrustful of life itself when we lose a child. The inherent promise of life, that we should not outlive our children, has been broken for both parents. We see and feel our own pain, but we also see and feel our lover’s pain. For many, it’s just too much to travel this painful road together and marriages fail.

In simplistic terms, over years, we each fell apart, we each reassembled ourselves into very changed people, and as we slowly fell in love with life again, we slowly fell in love with each other as two different people.

The scars on our souls have intertwined as we helped each other to heal, and as we have healed, those scars shrink and have pulled our two souls closer together.

To those couples who have recently lost a child, please be patient and kind to each other. Even if nothing about today reminds you of love shared, be patient, hang on to some small bits and pieces of each other. When one sinks, swim down and pull them back up.

It is a great challenge for a marriage to survive the loss of a child. Every anniversary like today will be a reminder of that loss, but also a reminder that love has conquered that loss and kept you living and loving together. If your marriage does eventually fail, at least be able to say that you both tried and you both failed.

Be well and peaceful, build love around loss towards loving life again, towards loving each other again and deeper.

See also:https://distillinggrief.com/2023/11/30/grieving-the-loss-of-a-child-as-a-couple/

Many, perhaps even most, deaths involve some measure of human error. These deaths appear, in perfect hindsight of grief, to have been absolutely avoidable. They weren’t caused by a bolt of lightning, flood, or an earthquake, they were caused in some part by the action or perhaps inaction of another human.

Grief becomes very focused and complicated in the most personal ways when we know, or believe that we know exactly who to blame for our loss and the resulting grief. Grief from day one is a cold dark place that has been emptied of the warmth of our lost loved one. In darkness, anger flames up easily and we are drawn to the light and heat of the fires of our anger.

I have written a lot about anger being a cancer of the human soul that consumes love. One of the first things I ask people who struggle with grief is “what’s making you angry about this loss?”. The simple reason for that is that I have come to understand that when we remain angry in grief, we fuel that fire with pieces of our own soul and we hollow our soul out until it is a thin empty shell.

In a way, anger in grief is like being lost at sea on a broken wooden ship in deep winter. We make the decision to build a fire, and start burning the deck chairs for light and warmth.  As time goes on, we have burnt all the loose pieces of wood, so we start taking wood from the structure of the ship to stay warm. All of our energy goes to maintaining the fire, little of our energy goes to finding a way back to safety. Months or even years later, we have eaten everything we had on board, we have burnt the entire ship except the hull, and we are still adrift in a cold dark place.

In grief, this same process happens because we took found comfort and took refuge huddled in the warmth of our anger.

There is probably no human error that is harder to forgive than the suicide of a loved one. I first came to understand anger as a cancer of the soul after my brother’s suicide twenty-four years ago. My parents both found unquenchable anger in the loss of their youngest child. I would speak to them on the annual days, birthdays, death days, and holidays. Over decades, I could sense that their souls were more and more fragile, and the anger would flare more easily. I would bring love and understanding hoping to extinguish the anger for them. They spent emotional energy stoking that fire; I eventually came to accept that they would die with that anger still burning and they never did let it go until their own death brought peace.

In the process of, my grief for my brother’s suicide, I taught myself to forgive him for the mistake of taking his own life, and to forgive him for the irreparable damage he left behind, and for the scars left on those of us who found ways to heal.

Forgiveness is in fact a selfish thing we do. We forgive others to better our own life. We forgive others to leave the responsibility for their wrongs to those who have wronged us. We forgive others to relieve ourselves from the self-destructive anger we host in the fires of anger eating our own soul from the inside. We forgive so that we don’t hate, so that we can love life again. We forgive to find life again after loss.

Five years after my brother’s suicide, our twenty year old son died in a firefighter water rescue training accident in our small community of 5200 souls. Not one, but a long series of many human errors set the stage for the death of a firefighter. The chaotic random events of the Universe put our son on the boat that would kill him, in the seat of the only firefighter ejected from and killed by the boat during a pointless and unplanned demonstration of a high risk maneuver, at the sole choice of the young firefighter driving the boat.

It was a national news event in a small town. I was inexperienced with media, but the media needed a parent or loved one to comment. Home from the hospital the night before, a sleepless night crying as a couple, crying with friends of James in the driveway before dawn, a house filled with caring friends and family, and before noon a wall of media at the end of the driveway wanting a statement.

Honestly, grieving my brother’s suicide had taught me well. Had I not had that experience, my words would have been destructive, angry and would probably have ruined more lives than needed to be ruined that day. Media these days seeks anger; the media prefers a grieving parent in anguish to a calm forgiving rational understanding.

I spoke about love: James’ love of life, his many academic and social successes that included firefighting. I spoke about the love James had for his fellow firefighters. I spoke about the love of community that had James helping to raise funds for the boat that was needed to save life, the boat that ironically took the life most important to us. I spoke of finding the causes of the accident, but also sharing the blame for any human errors across our community and the obligation to learn for the mistakes to prevent future deaths.

I did that with a soul full of the immediate fires of anger, knowing that if I opened the gates of my anger it would catch like wildfire and spread to the souls of many others. Privately I asked the driver of the boat to remain as a firefighter, to become the best trained and safest firefighter in the community, to save lives where he could with knowledge and skill that he lacked in this accident. He did all that, and tears later, he married and had children and bought a house just up the street from ours. Some or all of that might not have happened without forgiveness.

There is a dangerous age for young men, between approximately ages 15-25, when the addictive powerful hormone of testosterone flows freely and the brain has not yet fully developed critical thinking skills. Irrational macho bravado and impulsive unreliable ego driven decision making can combine in any instant to cause more avoidable deaths by human error. The car full of kids driving too fast leaves the road and kills some or all occupants. The skier feeling peer pressure who tries to tackle a slope beyond his skills and is crippled or dead from that decision.

When the death of a child is caused by suicide or their own human error, or the human errors of a group of friends, the fires of anger are especially intense and doubly destructive. The longer they burn, the deeper the damage, and in many cases the anger effective ends much of the possibility for joy in your own life. In these cases I look at intent and try to respect the intent as a guide.

My brother’s suicide was intended only to end his own pain, not to cause the resulting pain among his family and friends. Our son’s death happened in his pursuit of giving back to his community, the best possible of human traits. I respected that by trying to do as little damage as possible the the community and friends that James loved.

So, as you grieve a loved one lost to human error, ask yourself if there was intent of damage to your life as a survivor or was this death an accident that unintentionally wasn’t prevented. Minimize the accidental collateral damage to your life by forgiving those who have been human in their errors.

 Be well, heal a broken soul by seeking the glue of love to reconnect the shattered pieces of your soul, enjoy the gift of today’s dawn by forgiving the darkest of days past.

After promising to be more attentive and prolific writing on this blog, I appeared to fall off the face of the Earth. I have a good excuse, as well as a fresh journey through grief where no one died and it all ended pretty well.

Achilles had his heel; apparently my tragic weakness might just be my eyes. In 2020, during Covid I was losing visual acuity in my right eye. I’m of that age, and we’d been watching cataracts develop slowly, so a referral for evaluation. Then we moved in the middle of Covid, and re-started the months long process of finding an ophthalmologist. It wasn’t a cataract, it was something called an epi-retinal membrane and needed a retinal surgeon’s skills. More month of following, evaluating and finally in Fall 2022 I had surgery. The results weren’t stellar. I have a full field of vision, but fluid build-up in the critical parts of the retina leave that eye very challenged for reading.  No disability, great vision in the left eye. In Fall of 2023 I had cataract surgery on both eyes, all went well and I had the best vision I had had in years, thanks to my “good” left eye. April 2024 and annual retinal follow-up disclosed no issues of concern.

A weekend away with friends and I golfed worse than usual. Driving home I struggled to read small signs. Monday I woke up and struggled to read a computer screen. Emergency eye clinic disclosed seven issues with my “good” eye which had formed its own epi-retinal membrane. Friday a huge amount of laser work was done to reduce the chance of a full tear of the retina in preparation for surgery. Follow up three weeks later and I was nearly blind in my left eye, could read only large test with my bad eye, so quickly losing functions of daily life. My epi-retinal membrane had advanced at the fastest pace my doc had seen in ten years, so I jumped to the top of the list and was operated on August 29^th.

After this surgery, it takes a week or two before basic vision comes back. No pain, just inconvenience, physical limitations, some physical irritation and lots of emotional irritation.

It’s been a full blown grieving process on a roller coaster of fear and hope. Losing the ability to drive is minor, but I spend a bunch of time writing and blogging, so I felt isolated. There is an aura of positivity around you, but it’s sometimes hard to feel that from inside the problem.

I preach that anger is a cancer of the human soul that consumes your love of life. But anger is essential to defining grief, so on any great change in life I give myself ten minutes of anger to define what I must or might need to grieve. My initial comment when this second eye epi-retinal membrane was diagnosed was that this was my worst nightmare. Within minutes, I had slapped myself and realized that I had had and survived worse nightmares when I lost a brother to suicide and later our son to a firefighter training accident.

I believe that, in life, we should hope for the best but be prepared for the worst just in case. I know someone who lost most of his vision, and gained enough of it back to function pretty well after more than a dozen eye surgeries. He found inspiration that if I had survived the loss of our son, he could survive the loss of his vision.

Now twenty days post-op, the results so far have been pretty spectacular. I’m rolling back font sizes and screen magnification and writing this comfortably. When this hit, I was in the middle of building a deck, paradoxically I could work slowly with vastly diminished eyesight and mostly finished the deck before surgery. It will be weeks before I can get back to it, but having that project was exhausting and encouraging and it kept me busy doing something. I developed methods to measure and cut accurately without great vision, I adapted. Now that I can see it, it’s maybe some of my best work ever. It kept my mind off the possibility for worse outcomes.

I often say that once you’ve lost a child and figured out how to love life again, the rest of your life will be easier. Even facing near blindness and a lack of function was easier than I expected. I’ve answered all of the self-centered “why me?” questions before, and am comfortable that life is just chaotic and random and lacks evil intent.

I am now building a visual bucket list of road trips to visually spectacular places that I really want to see before I die, or perhaps before another eye crisis makes sight impossible. Because, much like losing a loved one, I know that I can visit memories that have been important parts of loving life even if I can’t touch or see them. It’s important to make those moments happen in your life, to populate your soul with positive emotions and experiences while you can. And, in grief it’s never too late to visit and activate the memories of our loved ones.

I will once again commit to trying to write more often, barring another Achilles issue.  Thanks for your patience.

Be well and peaceful, build love in your life, for your life and the lives of your loved ones.

A post of mine first on Quora over four years ago. I will never forget the struggle at times to live breath to breath in fresh grief.

Just Breathe

I lost a beautiful brother to suicide at age 43 in 2000. We had no advance hints. signs, cries for help. We were blindsided. He left behind a widow, two preteen children, two living parents, three siblings, and hundreds of family and friends. He was successful in the physical world, but somehow he felt enough pain to choose to kill himself. I imagine he felt buried in hopelessness at a moment in time that he lost sight of everything he had and everyone he loved. I healed my soul, my parents never managed to heal their souls.

I lost a perfect 20 year old son in 2005 to a firefighter training accident in our small hometown. Our souls were ripped apart and our lives drained of love. Breathing hurt, The next minute seemed impossible, The next day seemed unfathomable. We had our hopes and dreams shattered.

As the minutes became days, then weeks, then months and now years, we healed in ways we never imagined. It took a long time and a lot of work. We have each patched our torn and tattered souls, we have each filled ourselves with a love of life again and most important we love each other and carry the love for our son forward in our daily lives.

We healed because we have always had and taught the purpose to love life and love each other. My bother’s suicide awakened me to fundamental importance of love, my son’s death opened a deep spiritual well and beliefs that I would never have found without loss.

Do this please.

Take a deep breath and hold it for as long as you can without breathing out.

When you want to breathe again, keep holding it. Hold it until it hurts, until your body craves air. Keep holding it as long as you can. Be tougher than you thought you could be.

When you finally give up holding that breath in, you’ll will need to breathe out before you can breathe the air you need back in. Gulp it out, gasp it in.

Gasp for air, take some deep breaths and relax and understand:

Your body and soul want to survive. They will let you suppress hope for a time, but eventually our need to live and our purpose to love will come to our rescue and override almost any unconscious action that we might put in the way of our life.

As you gasp for air, resolve to do your part in finding a purpose in your life. Find your soul’s passions and build love for yourself and for life.

There is just never a lack of hope for us in this world as long as we know and seek love as our purpose. Your body and soul fought you when you held your breath. Your body and soul want you to breathe, to live and to love the gift of today.

Let your soul speak, it speaks quietly with the wisdom of generations if you can find the quiet to hear it.

When you can listen to and understand your soul, you will always have purpose and gratitude which are the fundamental keys to loving your life and building love in our world.

Now please go hold your breath past the point of pain and start listening when your soul steps in to save you.

Some mornings I still hold my breath to help remind me that I am alive with this gift of a new dawn

Apologies, I have not posted in several months. I have changed my routine to allow a much needed serious focus on physical fitness, yet another of a life long series of rebirths of my too often ignored aerobic capacity. That rebirth has been wonderful and welcome; the human body’s capacity to rebuild physically is quite unbelievable. But, my call to writing got pushed to the side. It was emotionally a much needed break; writing about grief can be intense and consuming. I have missed writing, and so will seek a better balance of my time and energy.

Metaphysical Therapy

We come to grief frightened and expecting to suffer. We’ve been taught that by generations before us, and by our own observations of those grieving.  

Grief is a highly evolved and automatic emotional human response, a process that we seem to have little control over. That which humans can’t control usually triggers a response of anger or fear. Anger over the pain and inconvenience of the changes we can’t deny or avoid, and fear that grief will somehow change us for the worse. In early grief, these are intended and rational responses that we should not fear. When we have little experience with grief, or the specifics of the grief we must process, fear is a natural and necessary trigger to the actions that incorporate loss of a loved one into our ingoing lives.

I watch people’s social media posts on grief and see many who openly struggle with apparent pain and anger for a very long time. Naturally, we will each resent the changes that the death of a loved one brings to our life, but I believe that while the fiery anger of early grief is a natural as an evolved and purposeful call to action for our souls, that resulting anger and pain is not meant to be a lasting of our life after loss.

Today, I would you to consider grief as Metaphysical Therapy. To make that more relatable, I will draw some simplistic parallels to Physical Therapy that we use to heal our body after injury or surgery. I have done some significant physical therapy in my life for injuries sustained in the passionate and sometimes immature seeking of physical fun. Physical therapy usually requires the intentional acceptance of inflicted pain with the end objective to heal and reduce future pain or to minimize ongoing disability. Physical Therapy also requires work, exercises and stretches that we do on our own that may cause discomfort and pain, always with the objective of healing. If we don’t force ourselves do the work of physical therapy, the consequences to our life will be less function and more pain for the rest of our lives.

And so it is with grief, if we don’t grieve with the purpose of minimizing the disability that it causes, we will emotionally limp through the rest of our lives.

I believe that our soul is a metaphysical part of humans that processes the energy of love. We can’t see it, we can’t image it. Our soul is a library of experiences, emotions, and responses to life. When injured our soul calls out to us with that great emotional pain of grief as well as a sense of panic. The loss of a loved one is a traumatic metaphysical injury to our soul, and grief is logically a traumatic and painful metaphysical injury.

Our bodies, within limits know how to heal themselves back to function, often well enough to forget the pain of the original injury. If the injury is severe enough we may be limited for life with reduced function, a limp, loss of range of motion, or ongoing daily pain.

The same way, your soul knows how to heal itself fairly well. In fact grief is a regular part of normal daily life, often we heal small losses so easily that we don’t notice or connect is as the grief of, for example, an accident or loss of a job.

A common point I make when discussing grief is that choosing to allow ourselves to heal it important. It confirms a healthy desire to return to a more normal, pain free life that has comfortably incorporated the loss of a loved one. However, the path through grief is confusing and there is no singular map or solution, because each person who grieves a loss will grieve differently, because each has loved differently.

A common fear of healing is forgetting. Some feel that if we eliminate the pain of the memory, we will eliminate the memory. The reality is that if we don’t eliminate the pain, we can only see and remember the painful part of the death, effectively blocking our view of the life and love we shared. We remain focused on the end of the life, not the totality of the love.

Pain causes anger to linger. Anger is a cancer of the human soul that consumes the love collected there, hollowing out life out and returning us to an empty existence. It’s natural to lose love in early grief, sometimes we empty our soul completely. If we allow pain and anger to linger, we might lose all of the love we gather in daily life and remain empty of love and in angry pain for a long time.

Grief can become a habit as it redefines us. As our soul consumes love from anger and pain, we feel empty of love and crave the sympathy and attention that others compassionately grant to those who are grieving. People circulating in their daily lives grant that attention and compassion in hope of helping those who have lost to begin healing.

Grief is meant to force us to redefine ourselves incorporating the love we shared and the lessons from that love into the rest of our lives. To redefine ourselves we need a goal, or a statement of purpose that gives us a direction and purpose. Failing that direction and purpose, we wander aimlessly within the loss, rather than exploring purposely within the love we have valued. Here’s a link to my grief, a process that took me many years of wandering to define: https://distillinggrief.com/2023/06/22/gardens-for-grief/

If grief becomes a habit, you may have become defined by your grief, defined by your loss, and then perhaps you have accepted to become your loss and to emotionally limp through life. People around you, people who love you will see the pain and have a sense of missing of emotional parts of you, perhaps with pity as some might see an amputee in a wheelchair.

If your grief has become a circular painful habitual way of life that you wish to change, you must work to make those changes. Perhaps you might need some professional help, perhaps you need to begin to eliminate the anger around the loss in hopes of reducing the loss of love from your soul. If all of the love you acquire in daily life is consumed by the anger of loss, you will remain hollowed out by this loss and be less able to love your life.

To heal from loss, you must look grief in the eye and confront it until you no longer fear it. If you run from grief, know that grief is a skilled stalker, a hunter waiting to pounce at your weakest point emotionally. It’s much better to seek ways to learn from grief, to walk alongside of the inevitable griefs that love and a good life will make necessary.

Find your destination, make a goal, and plot a path in that direction, then start taking small steps away from the pain and damage of the loss towards a metaphysical garden filled soul with memories of love you have shared.

Love is life, loss is the inevitable loss of a physical life we have loved, not of the love we have shared in life.

Be well and peaceful, extinguish anger, grow around loss.

Grief is a lonely place. For a time after the loss of a loved one, we have lost our own sense of self and to varying degrees our trust in the fundamental natural order of the Universe. We change in our ability to interact socially; our more casual friendships are hard to relate to because they may struggle to understand the changes we are undergoing.

In many ways, we feel more comfortable with those people who have experienced significant loss that bears similarities to our loss. We may write about our loss on social media, both to offer the support of our experience and healing, but also to find others who have lost as we have. We need to develop the comfort of being able to speak of our loss to both friends and to people we meet through life.

There is a process we go through to learn to talk about our loss socially, because we won’t deny our loss in conversation, but in the early days of face to face conversation we just can’t complete a sentence about our loss without breaking down. Social media is a seemingly ideal place to explore and become comfortable with what we say, and how we present our loss to both friends and new acquaintances. We can take our time and craft and edit our message, and then post it.

The most common misconception when posting about loss is that we post about our loss to gather sympathy or condolences. In my case, it’s about sharing the experience I have with incorporating multiple losses into my life. Tips and thoughts that have worked for me, gathered over more than two decades of experience with multiple losses. Those thoughts fill my blog and writings with positive outlooks on understanding and managing grief. My blog is non-commercial and self managed. With my blog, I can post a reply with a link to one or several of my posts on specific topics. Because the answer is complex and can never fit in a small post of a few characters.

And so, my timeline is filled with people who post about their loss, about their journey, about what they want people to be aware of. It ranges from childhood cancer to neurodegenerative diseases like ALS. I am inspired by how strong people become through ALS and I mourn their loss when it is posted because I have followed their journey and been inspired by them. I am inspired by the stories of battles with cancer, the human spirit shines through in our will to live.

Within the community of those who post about loss and battles for life, there are always stories of negative comments, random people who complain about your posts on loss. Every social media platform has blocking and mute functions that allow people who don’t want to see these posts to block or mute them. Yet, a tiny percentage of people choose to be nasty, angry or hurtful. They seemingly can’t help themselves.

Let’s be clear here, loss strips your soul naked and makes you vulnerable. We you post and are attacked for posting something vulnerable, you did nothing wrong. Any abuse you received is from an abuser, not because you spoke your heart. The vast majority of people confronted by an angry abuser will question themselves first. That’s where abusers gather power. The abuse you may receive randomly on social media is NOT YOUR SHAME. I have seen it on every social media platform I have written on, a tiny percentage of angry nasty humans who feel empowered when hiding behind an anonymous profile to hurt someone. These are social vandals, in some cases psychopathic social vandals. When confronted with such abuse, use the tools of the platform to block, mute, or report the abusive behavior.

I want as many people as possible to better understand the highly evolved process of grief, and our soul’s innate ability to recover and grow around loss. If you haven’t yet experienced profound grief, then only luck has kept you away. Everyone who loves passionately will experience loss and the ensuing grief.

Grief is never a failure. Grief can only happen when we have loved well, so grief is an affirmation that we know how to love, we have loved, and with time we will love again when we are ready.

Be well, share openly to reduce the loneliness of grief for others, and ignore the social media vandals.