excerpt from Grieving Mindfully

It is extremely important to remember that the lessons of grief are at their most potent not when they are being learned, but when they are being integrated into your life. It is one thing to read about these ideas, but it is quite another thing to put these ideas into practice. Grief has the power to radically change your life, to encourage a more meaningful, richer life, but only when its lessons are manifested in the way you live your life every day. This means becoming a more active and more mindful participant in your life.

One of the hardest steps in this process can be putting the lessons of grief into practice. Many people I have worked with have a passive appreciation of the concept of mindfulness and the positive transformation of suffering long before they integrate these ideas into their everyday life. By exploring specific areas of their lives, they help this passive appreciation to develop into a more active, dynamic process. It becomes an invigorating, life-affirming task, even though there are still many emotional ups and downs along the way.

excerpt from The End-of-Life Handbook

When informed of a loved one’s serious illness, you may wish to find out more information from the doctor. Unfortunately, doctors don’t always communicate with patients and families as effectively as possible (and vice versa). This can occur for lots of reasons. Sometimes the fault lies with doctors: They may use overly technical jargon or fail to spend sufficient time answering questions. On the other hand, sometimes patients and family members can’t think of the right questions to ask, or they may feel so intimidated by the whole process that they remain quiet. If you’ve experienced any of these situations, you know how frustrating they can be. Nonetheless, it’s usually worth making another effort to communicate effectively with your loved one’s physician. In the next chapter, we’ll offer detailed advice about how to maximize your time with the doctor. For now, we’d like to offer some pointers to help you through the first few conversations:

Excerpt from Walking After Midnight

I love being in the center of the busy energy in our home. However, I hold my breath every time the phone rings. I know at any moment the police could call to say there has been some activity on the criminal investigation, and our lives will be thrown into a tailspin.

I agonize over how the waiting must be affecting families on the other side of the tragedy. Surely parents have seen loved teenagers change over the last two years as they have tried to push the events of New Year’s Eve 1997 far, far down into the realm of forgotten memory. I imagine those parents watching in isolation, fearing something horrible has happened to pull the light from their children’s eyes, but having no idea what it was.

Excerpt from Grief’s Courageous Journey

Grief is a highly personal response to life losses. Every relationship we have with a person is unique, irreplaceable, and unrepeatable. Since our relationships are unique, our grief is unique, too.

There are no road maps, no blueprints for grief.

It is always a mistake to judge how another person is expressing grief.

Instead of judging, we must be very patient and accept the uniqueness of ever individual’s grief process, including our own.