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“Holistic Medicine” and Other Words I Never Used to Like
I was never that girl who liked yoga. All of my friends did it, but I found it boring. When my mom died, yoga didn’t calm me – it made me feel mad at all the people in the room with their “pretend” traumas. When I was a new mom, yoga didn’t make me feel connected to my baby – it made me feel ridiculous that I was sitting around chanting my baby’s name with people I didn’t know. I didn’t even try to do yoga when Shawn died because I knew that it was likely to trigger all sorts of negative emotional responses. It’s not just yoga that I…
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Sorry For Your Loss: A Review
A few weeks ago, a new show debuted on Facebook. I had no idea Facebook made tv shows, but apparently they do. In any case, this new show is called “Sorry For Your Loss” and is about a young widow. It is brilliant. That is not an understatement. I’ve watched the first eight episodes and I am convinced that the writers for this show are all young widows. It’s that spot-on. The show is about a woman, Leigh (played by Elizabeth Olsen), who is probably in her early 30s. As the show begins, the viewer finds out that her husband died three months prior. In the first episode, she sits…
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A Brutal Few Weeks
I’m not sure how to say this any other way, but it’s been a brutal few weeks for me. Of course, healing from tragic loss is not linear. Every therapist loves to tell me that, and I believe it. Some days are terrible, some days are not, and there’s no specific progression. In January, and for about six months afterwards, I felt really sad about my life. I felt like I might never be happy again, because how could I be? But then, I started to see some hope. I had days when I felt good for much of the time, and I began to envision the future. I couldn’t…
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My Garden
I’ve always loved my garden. I love the way I can plant a tiny seed or a miniature seedling and with just a little work, it can grow into a plant that towers above my children’s heads. When the kids were really little, Shawn spent a series of weekend days digging out and building vegetable beds for me. It was a labor of love, and involved a lot of back-breaking work. I remember when he finished them and sent me a photo. There wasn’t any text with the photo, but I felt a rush of love for him when I got it. He didn’t need to write anything else, because…
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EMDR
I got together with one of my widow friends the other day (yes, that’s a thing) and we started talking about all of the crazy types of therapy we’ve both tried. Of course, we both have individual therapists (I’ve been through three) and group therapy (we’d each tried a few.) She told me about a “grief yoga” group she attended. I talked about the crazy “mindfulness and grief” group I went to that was not a terrible idea in theory but that I had to leave in practice once people started crying about their dead dogs. Of all of them, I found the spousal loss group I did at the…
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Claire’s Hero
At the start of fourth grade, Claire came home with an assignment to write about her hero. “I picked you!” she announced to me. She then spent much of the afternoon finding a photo that she liked of me and writing about why I was her hero. It was really sweet and touching. My kid – the one who’s just on the cusp of being a tween – still thinks her mama is awesome, at least some of the time. As she was working on it, I sat down next to her to see what she’d written. “My mom is a brave courageous person,” it said. “My mother inspires me…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
