Welcome to Your Peak Grief Season

November 1st is one of those days that is a day of mixed emotions. On one hand, Merry Christmas! Halloween is over and those of you that know me personally know that my Christmas decor is going up this weekend and it brings me GREAT joy. On the other hand, November 1st starts all the […]
What Grief Books Do I Get My Kids?

Well I am glad you asked! You have come to the right place! I love using books in my practice and often am asked what my favorites are by my friends and colleagues when kiddos near them are grieving. Below you will find some of my favorites with a short explanation of why I love […]
20 Years Later

August 8, 2000. A day that will be burned in my mind until I take my own last breath, because this was the day I watched my father take his. It was the fourth day of the fourth grade and I was 9 years old. Dad had been sick since before I was born. He […]
Task Four: Embarking on A New Life

We are at the end of our four task series. If you have not had a chance to read about the other three, I would do that now. The fourth task of Worden’s Tasks of Mourning is to find an enduring connection with the deceased while embarking on a new life. At the beginning of […]
Task Two: Work Through the Pain

Last week, I started a series in which we are discussing Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning. If you haven’t read last week’s post, I would encourage you to do so to be able to have a better understanding of the tasks. This week we are continuing this series by talking about Worden’s second task of […]
The First Tasks: Acceptance

There are many approaches that people have created to illustrate how people process grief. Some talk about stages, some talk about steps, and one talks about tasks. William Worden provides for us four tasks of grief in order to achieve equilibrium in our life again. These four tasks can be completed in the order the […]
Another Celebrity Gone

“This is the moment I accept the most challenging times will always be behind me and in front of me.”- Kobe Bryant Today we are all still in shock and full of sadness. Yesterday, the world experienced the loss of Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, a Gianna’s teammate Alyssa and her parents John and […]
My Grand Baby Grand

“My mother bought it secondhand from a silent movie star It was out of tune but still I learned to play And with each note we both would smile forgetting who we are And all the pain would simply fly away” Well, my mother did not buy our piano second hand. In fact, it was […]
4th Day of Fourth Grade

In August 2000, I went back to school on August 4th. It was a Thursday and my dad had been in the hospital for almost 10 months straight. At this point, he had suffered from two heart attacks and multiple organs had started to fail. My mom and I were guessing his time left on […]
Keeping the Traditions
It’s July, which means for some this is a weird time to talk about traditions. Normally topics of tradition come up during the Holiday season, but what about the traditions in the other times of the year? Those are traditions we don’t seem to acknowledge during other times of the year are important too. My […]