The Spaces Between Knowing and Understanding

 review of Renée M. Sgroi, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, Guernica Editions, Toronto, 2024

Connecting grief with nature resonates with me because after my wife Evelyn died in her 40s I went camping in Yosemite throughout the two years after, and nature taught me how to take in and understand my grief. Renée M. Sgroi also pairs nature with grief in her elegant and evocative book of poetry. She finds parallel stories between the lives of people and the lives of plants and animals of wanting, loneliness, loss, and being bound together.

Birds and Grief

 

Review - Birdology, by Carolyne Van Der Meer

Carolyne Van Der Meer guides us into paying attention to what is going on in the outdoors, especially with the birds – pigeons, sparrows, and seagulls. In her chapbook of fourteen poems and short essays, she links the struggles and deaths of birds with the struggles and dying of people she loves.

Prostate Cancer History

Helen Valier, A History of Prostate Cancer, 2016, Palgrave MacMillan.

    This is the best book I’ve found that covers the scope of prostate cancer—history, treatments, research. There are quite a few articles that deal with specific topics in a limited way, but Helen Valier has brought everything together, and her book answers most of my questions. I say most because her book came out in 2016, and medical advances have continued to occur over the last seven years. One example is the development of the PSMA-PET test that can detect trace amounts of cancer cells that traditional scans miss.

Breast Cancer

 

Anticipatory Grief

Anne Boyer’s book about surviving aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, The Undying, takes the reader inside what it feels like to endure chemotherapy without any promise of surviving. Boyer covers a wide range of topics—the physical suffering, fears about dying, figuring out how to cope with pain, research into the medical treatments, the philosophy and history of breast cancer procedures, and the social inequalities of a for-profit health care system. 

Birds

 Birds of a Feather: A Children’s Story of Love, Loss, and What Came Next, by Tom Crice, illustrated by Ellen Rakatansky, 2018.

 

            The two biggest problems when a child is grieving is that the child’s feelings are often discounted and that adults try to protect the child from feeling pain by lying to them about what happened.

Seeing Our Life in a New Way

 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James were thinkers and writers, and each of them faced the traumatic death of a person they loved. They responded to grief differently, but the deaths caused them to change direction and each discovered his life’s work. 

 

Pieces of the Puzzle

 One of the things I love about Lynn Haraldson’s book is that it shows how everyone’s journey through grief is different, and in profound ways. If you think that you understand the grief memoir territory after reading one grief memoir (although I do applaud you for taking this step), or even if you’ve read ten grief memoirs, you would be wrong, because each memoir is the story of a life, and each life is a cornucopia of experiences, discoveries, and struggles. Each story is a journey through a different wilderness. Stories like this are told from the heart, and there are never enough of them. 

Listening For Cranes

 

Whether it’s someone we love who died or we’re looking for our birth parents, we are searching for something lost and hoping to find.

 

We are trying to give form to our shadows.

 

            With adoption, you’ve already lost growing up with your birth parents. Even if you have wonderful, considerate, and loving adoptive parents, you will wonder what this other life would have been like, and if who your birth parents are has influence your life in some unseen way. 

 

When Everything Is Not Okay: Megan Devine

update – in 2017, Megan came out with It’s OK that You’re Not OK, in both book and audio versions. This expanded her work in Everything is Not Okay. In both, Megan Devine invites the newly bereaved to enter their grief and see where it leads them.

Devine notes that everyone has an opinion about how people should grieve, even those who have never lost someone. Ignore them, she says. No one can tell you how you need to grieve; only you can determine that. We also have our own guilt trips to deal with, the “shoulds” that we pile on ourselves. Getting beyond the shoulds and oughts is one of the first tasks that grievers face so that we can hear what we need.

Using humor and speaking of different ways of grieving, Devine also includes words from poets and writers like Joanna Macy, Mary Oliver, and Rumi to illustrate her words. 

She shares insights from her own journey with grief, yet realizes that what worked for her might not work for everyone, and that is okay. When she began to grieve, she could not find resources that were right for her. Nothing met her where she was, and at the beginning of grief what she wanted was acknowledgment, not repair.

When you are broken, the correct response is to be broken.

When something destroys your orientation in life, Megan says, when someone you love has been ripped away, you are not okay. Grief impacts you on the visceral level; it pummels you physically and mentally, so do not pretend that everything is okay. Your task, your only task right now, is to grieve. 

She offers concrete ideas for doing this, not wishful thinking, and encourages listeners to follow what pulls them into wellness, not what drags them away. Find the places, people, and words that support you, she says, as you work with your grief. Find the way stations where you can rest. 

Speaking as a fellow traveler, and with her background as a therapist, Megan includes several guided meditations to center listeners and root them into the core of their lives. The exercises quiet the mind and heart so that listeners can exist in this moment and feel it as it is, with all of grief’s anger, confusion, and even beauty. Her words are compassionate, inviting, and inspiring. 

This book has practical tools for dealing with your grief, and is available from the Refuge in Grief website. I hope it is the first in a series of CDs.

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Megan and Refuge In Grief run several 30-day writing courses throughout the year. Every day for 30 days, a new writing prompt will show up in your email and encourage you to look at your grief in a new way. Write as much as you want, or as little. Because you are part of an online community, you can share what you have written, or simply read what others share. Either way, you become part of a supportive group of people who understand grief. 

This is an excellent course for those in the first years of grief.

You can find more information at www.refugeingrief.com.

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HANUKKAH begins tonight and continues to Christmas Eve. There are several themes that all of us can think about. 

BELIEVING IN WHAT YOU CANNOT SEE. The unexpected happens. In this case, the miracle of the oil in the lamp lasting for eight days. This reminds us that good things can happen in our lives that we didn’t even know was possible. People can show up who turn our grief around. 

THE CELEBRATION OF LIGHT. When we are lost in darkness, the guidance of a single flame of light can lead us to a place of safety, of refuge, and where we need to go. 

REDEDICATING YOUR SACRED SPACE. Here it was the Temple. This reminds us to rededicate ourselves to walking the path of whatever we hold most dear, and reconnect with our sources of guidance and inspiration, the power that is larger than our lives.