Live the kind of life so that when the end comes, people don’t have to lie. I’m not sure who said this. Or if the quote can be attributed to one particular person. But there’s truth in this statement. And I am often reminded of this statement when I am at a funeral or a memorial service for a loved one. It happened again yesterday. Hubby Rick and I attended the service for a lovely woman who used to be our neighbor, Kathleen.

I consider myself a very fortunate person. I have a variety of friends. People I can lean upon when a day is difficult. Hard. When I’m feeling beat up and just need a cheerleader. I call them my tribe. People who will listen. Give advice if appropriate. Encourage me. Be there for me. These are my people. My tribe. We all need a tribe, whether we willingly admit it or not.

We grieve what we love. It’s that simple and that difficult. If we do not love something, we may be bummed or disappointed. When we grieve the loss of something deeply meaningful? It’s excruciating pain. We wonder if it is possible to keep going. When we allow ourselves to experience the deepest love we can imagine, we are opening up ourselves for the most hurtful pain and suffering. We can’t have intense love without potentially exposing ourselves to the most hurtful pa

Over time, I’ve thought about how I might condense grief into just a few words. This is really quite impossible. There’s just too much with grief. Grief is never a nice linear progression from one stage to the next. Nope, it’s a shift back and forth through a whole bunch of emotions and feelings. Because grief is so unique for each person, doling out hard-and-fast interpretations are risky. Yet sometimes thinking of something in easy-to-remember terms is so helpful. That’

Grief. It’s personal to me. In fact, I recently published a book about grief. How grief is more of a part of our lives than we often realize. Now, try to imagine being a kid and experiencing huge amounts of grief. Like being a child or teen a losing a parent. A sibling. A significant person in their lives. Loss so big it’s impossible to begin to wrap one’s little arms around it.