My mom died when I was young, so I grew up spending summers with her mom in South Dakota. I loved that time with her, but I often only saw her that one time of year. I lived back in Florida with my dad for the rest of the year. When my grandma was older, she embraced the snowbird lifestyle and spent half the year in Florida to escape the Midwest winters.
Losing my brother to a substance use disorder taught me things I never wanted to learn. Things nobody prepares you for. Things that will change you in ways you never thought possible. It taught me that you can love someone so much it physically hurts-and still not be able to save them. It taught me that you can mourn someone you love long before they are physically gone, and no one tells you how helpless that feels. How humiliating.
Growing up, Melissa Shultz sometimes felt like she had two fathers. One version of her dad, she told me, was playful and quick to laugh. He was a compelling storyteller who helped shape her career as a writer, and he gave great bear hugs. He often bought her small gifts: a pink "princess" phone when she was a teen, toys for her sons when she became a mom.
When we think of rituals, we tend to think of face masks and wellness trends. But there are actually ways to use rituals to help heal grief and deal with stressful times. On this episode, Lucy Lopez, Elizabeth Newcamp, and Zak Rosen are joined by ritual expert Betty Ray to talk about creative ways to help children process grief and big emotions, how to use ritual to create safety and expression, and much more.
When Justin Harrison got the call in 2022 telling him that his mother would likely die within the day, he didn't panic. He got on a plane to Singapore, where he was scheduled to present at a conference about his start-up, You, Only Virtual, a platform on which users can chat with AI versions of their dead loved ones, and which Justin believes can ultimately eliminate grief as a human experience. He learned about his mother's death while flying over the Pacific.
Anastasiya Buchkouska, a 20-year-old student from western Ukraine, gently brushes away layers of snow and ice from her father's grave. She pauses, looking up at the photograph fixed to the gravestone. His face bears a striking resemblance to hers. When her father was younger, he had served in the military. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he was called up almost immediately and sent to the front line.
"Not only did their parents, their uncles, their cousins their friends, and myself lose two great men. We lost people we dearly care about and have been major players in all of our lives," Joshua said. "It's tough, it's really tough. "I'm not going to sit here and show all of my emotions. I know in today's day and age, it's easy to micro-analsze as people and pass judgement but I know what I feel, and that's what that matters to me."
'They're dead.' In disbelief, my response was unfiltered. 'What?' Followed by the F word. A wave of emotion rushed through me. My chest tightened. My body went cold. I could not immediately find the words to offer condolences, not because I did not feel them deeply, but because inside, my many parts were experiencing a collective shock. When you live with dissociative identity disorder (DID), news like this does not land in one place. It ricochets across all parts within.
For the Duplass brothers, the festival was, as it has been for many a small-budget artist trying to break out, the difference between a career and another $3 film. Without Sundance, he recently joked: I'd probably be a psychologist right now. Psychologist sympathies peek through See You When I See You, Duplass's feature film return to the festival after 16 years largely focused on acting and directing episodic television, notably for Togetherness, Search Party and the criminally underseen Somebody, Somewhere.
As Aaron Whistler, a comedy writer who had an extremely close, almost conspiratorial bond with his sister Leah (Kaitlyn Dever), Cooper Raiff gives basically the same performance he always gives, delivering his lines in affectless bursts. Perhaps the idea here is to depict Aaron's inability to work through his pain, but that requires a kind of charisma Raiff might not have - he doesn't really convey much of an inner life.
When it comes to clutter, my parents were a case of opposites attract. My dad had a shorthand saying: "ABC." It meant "always be clearing." My mother, on the other hand, loved beautiful things and collected them without much rhyme, reason, or organization. I always followed my dad's footsteps more closely. Although I hold a doctorate and have a career in academia, I started a professional organizing company 17 years ago. Today, A Clear Path has 17 employees.
At the start of A Single Man, George Falconer wakes up at home in the morning and drags himself despondently to the bathroom. There he stares at himself in the mirror, observing not so much a face as the expression of a predicament a dull harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle.
The Crown Bard in Rhyl had always been there, on the main road on the way out of town. Despite living a five-minute walk away, I don't remember ever going there in my teens, but I must've passed it thousands of times. Local wisdom dictated it was where the rugby lads drank, while the pub directly opposite was where you'd find the football crowd.
It's my mom's favorite country, and the house we share is full of treasures from her travels there, from peacock fans and silk scarves, to jewelry boxes carved from mango wood. I grew up in the UK, hearing spellbinding tales of painted elephants and mirrored palaces, and India soon occupied a special place in my imagination. Having got to 42 without making it to the promised land, this summer my chances of going there felt slimmer than ever.
Our brain interprets grief as stress. As a result, it activates our stress-response systems, especially the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympathetic nervous system. These systems release stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, which are meant to protect the body in short-term crises. In acute grief, these responses are adaptive. They help us cope with shock and disruption. If unresolved, however, the same systems can become dysregulated.
I grew up with cats when I was a little kid but my love of black cats began when I moved from New York to LA in 1996 and found four feral black cats in my back yard. Almost immediately, two female cats got knocked up and had two litters at the same time. Suddenly, we had 13 black cats, the most I'd ever cared for at once.
On the night of Boxing Day 2021, my dad's body was found near a Cardiff hostel. His death, at 55, was as sudden as it was not. For years, alcoholism had been changing the shape of his heart. He died less than a mile from his old office; top law firm, equity partner. Four miles from our once tight-knit home in a leafy neighbourhood.
Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true. It's curiously circular. In a film about grief, the valorised quality is depth of feeling; it stands or falls by how profoundly the hero(ine) experiences emotion, and the audience proves its acuity, buys itself into the imaginative contract, by its ability to mirror that profundity.
I thought it may have been Mom's cheesy potatoes. It was Easter, and in between doing a million things, she added too much butter. When she first pulled the pan from the oven, a thick layer of oil wriggled at the top. My brother, father and I playfully jabbed at it with our fingers, giggling as Mom rolled her eyes and scraped the oil off into the trash before dropping it on the table with an annoyed thump.
Donna Cochran had boxed up nearly every room in her Atlanta, Georgia, home - except one. The space belonged to her late daughter, Ansley, and it remained exactly as it had the day Ansley left it, with journals, jewelry and drawers filled with the cozy clothes she loved to wear. Ansley died in 2018 at 21, after a 19-year battle with neuroblastoma, a rare childhood cancer. What Cochran could not yet bring herself to dismantle was not a bedroom, but a life.
Knowing when to leave a relationship is not a dramatic moment of collapse. More often, it is a quiet reckoning. A slow accumulation of truth. People imagine that leaving happens because love disappears or conflict explodes. In reality, many people leave because the daily effort of holding themselves together inside the relationship becomes weightier than the fear of being alone.
The night before her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths was fretting about her best friend. Kamilah Aisha Moon was due to read a poem at the ceremony, but no one had heard from her. Her phone was going straight to voicemail and staff at her hotel said she hadn't checked in. We'll find her. She wouldn't miss your wedding, Griffiths's sister, Melissa, assured her.
Over the past decade, 27-year-old Jenny Hollingworth's musical output has become steadily less strange. As half of Let's Eat Grandma, the Norwich native started out making freaky synth-folk the arch syrupiness of which chimed with the then-nascent hyperpop scene: I, Gemini, the duo's 2016 debut, was outsiderish juvenilia of the most thrilling variety. For its follow-up, I'm All Ears, Hollingworth and her bandmate, Rosa Walton, sharpened their songwriting skills while holding tight to their eccentricities; the result was an album of sensational futurist pop.
The experience may arrive as a dream that feels less like imagination and more like a profound moment of connection. A familiar scent like perfume or cologne may start drifting through a place where no one should. You may experience a sudden sense of being lovingly accompanied when you feel most alone, or a spontaneous song on the radio that carries such precision and memory it briefly stops time.
Nearly every day since Elvin Sanchez's wife died a couple of months ago after a long battle with diabetes, he could be found at the home of the elderly couple in the apartment next door, grabbing a meal and talking about the love of his life. Even on the day he died - when Sanchez was fatally struck crossing Linden Blvd. in East New York less than an hour into the near year - his neighbors had dinner on the table later that day
You're Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes... is an open mic event, the communal offering for us to explore the conversation of death & dying, to embrace our losses & mortality, to grieve, bereave & honor what we've lost & love, in laughter & in tears... while all the while making room for the joy & gratitude at simply being ALIVE.
You: Some days I'm depressed. Some days I'm busy and distracted. Some days I'm living in the past. Some days I'm present in the moment. Any way you look at it, I still don't feel like I'm the one doing the choosing, but I push through because there's no other choice. Me: It may not feel like it, but you're choosing life. You're choosing to get out of bed every morning and live in the real world.
A few days before he took his last, mercifully peaceful, breath, my husband, Ian Reinecke, looked at me intently and asked, Is there anything going on in the world I need to know about? No, nothing, I said as calmly as I could to the man with whom I had intensely discussed events in the world and at home for nearly 50 years.
Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, begins her memoir, The Other Girl, written in the form of a letter, with a description of a photograph of an infant in an embroidered dress. The description ends with these startling words: "When I was little, I believe-I must have been told-that the baby was me. It isn't me, it's you." (Italics mine.) 1
About a year into his job as an interfaith chaplain at Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Fla., J.S. Park began to have what he calls "really awful death anxiety." "I saw all the ways people could be injured, especially working at a trauma center," he says. When he was around his wife and kids, he'd think, "this could be the last time that I get to hear their laughter and see their faces like this," he says.
Shadowloss describes the grief we carry in our day-to-day lives that we often don't share with others. It reminds us that the physical death of a loved one is not the only kind of loss. We may experience grief when we lose a job, a relationship, or a way of life; when we experience a health challenge; or when we must give up on a dream.
I remember telling my coworker I had to leave, recognizing that he instantly knew what I had learned; I remember seeing a sunset so beautiful that words don't do it justice, as if grandma was telling me, "I'm better now," on my way back to the hotel, where I'd spend hours crying, wishing I could see her one more time, wishing I could squeeze cancer like a rotting orange, ridding this earth of its putrid juices.
Tests were run and I was told it might be a clot. I recognized it as the kind that had killed a friend of mine just the year before. She was my age and also a mom of two. Healthy. Strong. I remember hearing she'd gone to the hospital and thinking, She's tough. I'll see her later this week. She was gone less than 24 hours later.
