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Are you living with grief? For the loss of your health, your job, a family member or friend, your marriage, your dreams?
Come share my experience as I learned to incorporate grief into my life while ultimately deepening my appreciation of and joy in living after my teenage son died. I share my story, and also some of the exercises and thoughts that have brought me through a time I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Two years after my 17-year-old son John died unexpectedly, I finally wrote the book people had been asking for. My way of slogging through the grieving process isn’t exactly like anyone else’s, because each of us has to do that alone. Still, it can be helpful — in a friendly sort of way — to know not only that someone else made it through (13 years already), but also how they did it.
My hope in telling my story in Black Hole: unexpected tool for joyous living is that it will help guide you into your own version of the new life you must build after any grief that affects you. These griefs can be from the death of children, spouses, parents, brothers, sisters or close friends, or they can be the deaths of a dream, loss of a job, your marriage or your good health.
As people read my experience of learning to incorporate the evolving grief into my new life after John died, they asked me to lead seminars to teach others. Later I was asked to start a mailing list for those who wanted a way beyond their grief.
Unintentionally, I became an expert in a subject I’d much rather have known nothing about.
Along the way, I realized I was gathering more material that would be helpful to many. Living Beyond Grief: The Black Hole Companion (temporarily unavailable) is a collection of new and not-so-new stories, exercises and meditations, along with a few of the poems I’ve written to John during these years. I believe this is the logical outgrowth from the work I’ve been doing with people who grieve for many reasons.
This book is dedicated to John, of course, and also to Stephanie, my younger niece, who died in 2002 after almost two years of reaching with her whole self for life and more life on this earth, something breast cancer did not allow her.
I’ve included excerpts from each of these books to give you a sense of their flavor. Rather than make this page too long, I’ve put links to the two books below.
I wish you peace as you rediscover the joy that living is meant to be.
Chas
August 6, 2006
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