Moving with grief, not moving on.
The short version of a long story.
On June 1, 2011, my husband Ken died at home, in a hospital bed in our living room, after nine weeks of hospice care. We'd had ten years together. I was two weeks shy of my forty-third birthday. I had spent months learning how to be a caregiver, and exactly none of them learning how to be a widower.
But, in spite of what I'd lost, I still had a pen.
I'd been writing my way through life since I was thirteen—pen first, feelings later. After Ken died, writing stopped being a craft and became a companion. I didn't write to make something of the grief. I wrote because the grief insisted on being translated. Late at night, in journals, in blog posts nobody read, in a letter I wrote to my future self from a hospital room during the worst week of my life.
That letter is in my book now. So is the pie I ruined. So is the night I texted a friend to warn her that vampires had been in my apartment. Grief is not dignified, and it does not follow the stages in order.
Fifteen years later, I'm still writing about it—and I've spent a lot of that time listening to other people tell me their version of the same story.
Credentials
I've completed certification as a grief support practitioner—formal training in accompanying people through loss.
The rest of my qualifications are less tidy. I'm the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays with a foreword by grief therapist and bestselling author Claire Bidwell Smith. I've written about grief publicly for more than a decade. I've buried my husband, my father, my sister-in-law, and two dogs I loved past all reason.
I don't consider that expertise. I consider it fluency.
Grief Coaching with Ron
Why I do this work.
Here's what nobody told me in 2011: the hardest part wasn't the soiree. (Ken didn't want a funeral or memorial; he wanted a soiree). It was month seven. It was year three. It was the Tuesday I realized everyone else had gone back to their lives and I was still standing in mine, holding something I had no idea how to carry.
People kept asking when I'd move on. Not in so many words, but the inference was there.
I didn't want to move on. I wanted to move with—to build a life big enough to hold both the loss and whatever came next. That took years, and it took company. Some of that company was a therapist. Some of it was a hospice grief counselor who became a lifelong friend. Some of it was a Chow Chow puppy named Kallie who needed me to get out of bed.
And a lot of it was writing.
I became a grief coach because I kept meeting people in that same middle place—past the casseroles, nowhere near "fine"—and because I know what it's worth to have someone sit with you there who isn't checking a clock or waiting for you to be done.
