Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Writer + Guide for Life's Messes

Tag: grieving

  • Grieving at the 4-Month Mark: What Helps and What Doesn’t at this Moment

    I’ve posted the last two weeks about what seems possible and doesn’t seem possible now, 3 ½-4 months out from Tom’s death. Today I’m going to continue on that theme but focus on what is and isn’t helping me right now. I’ll start with what isn’t feeling helpful right now that has been helpful in…

  • Grieving at 16 Weeks: Things I’m Not Ready to Do Yet

    I talked last week about what seems possible now. Today, I’m thinking about what, 16 weeks out from Tom’s death, still does not feel possible: Going camping and rafting. Every rafting trip I’ve ever been on involved Tom as captain, and in the time Tom and I were together, I only camped once without him.…

  • Grieving at the 3-Month Mark: What Feels Possible

    September 19 marked three months since my amazing husband died. Grieving never ends but it does change. I’m back at work half-time (I had enough annual leave saved up that I was able to go half-time this semester but maintain my income—a privilege I wish every widowed person had) and the routine of work and…

  • Practicing What I Preach

    In the spirit of everything I blog about, I am taking this week off from posting. The celebration of my husband’s life is on Sunday and I am giving myself permission to let blogging go for a week. See you next week.

  • The Value of Grief & Trauma Communities

    Grief is isolating and the way we (don’t) deal with it in our culture—glossing over it, minimizing it, focusing on “the bright side” and “the blessings” and pushing the negative feelings aside—makes grief even more isolating because it can make us think we are the only ones who feel the way we do. Being in…

  • Rejecting False Choices: Moving from OR to AND or even NEITHER

    There’s a poem that gets a lot of traction in the several Facebook widow support groups I’ve joined called “He Is Gone” by David Harkins (the pronoun in the title is flexible—I’ve seen the poem called “She Is Gone,” too). You can read the poem in its entirety here if you like, but the first…

  • Say Thank You instead of I’m Sorry

    Earlier this week, some colleagues and I were discussing by email a decision that needs to be made. I tried to follow the discussion, but six weeks out from being widowed, my brain just wasn’t up to it. I couldn’t remember the context from email to email, couldn’t make myself care about the decision in…

  • Grief Resources: You Don’t Need to Grieve Alone

    I don’t recall there being any grief resources beyond the middle school guidance counselor when my mother died when I was 12, so I have been pleasantly surprised by the richness of resources available to me in dealing with my husband’s death. I’ve found that not only are there good resources available on grief in…

  • Talk about Grief (It Will Be Messy)

    I’ve posted recently about some of the dysfunctional ways we respond to grief and loss, such as asking “How are you?” with the expectation of a brief and positive answer and measuring and scoring grief. Ira Glass notes in the first segment of the recent This American Life show devoted to grief that because of…

  • Measuring, Scoring, + Ranking Grief

    Neoliberalism tends to boil everything down to a number at some level. We measure, we compare, we assess, we score, we set SMART goals. We have all sorts of platitudes about how beneficial this quantification is: what gets measured gets improved, without goals we’ll never grow, how can you know you’re doing better now if…