Since I was a small child, I’ve had a recurring fantasy about being tucked amongst furs in a sleigh, being pulled through a wintry forest. It is equal parts the Snow Queen from the Chronicles of Narnia, and an actual memory of a family photo shoot where we children were arranged in a dogsled and…

“I feel like I’m mourning my whole life” said a fellow griever at a retreat I led this month. And I knew exactly what she meant. There’s a way in which every grief connects to every other, tying itself with an invisible string that webs it’s way across our past and tugs our hearts out…

I’m single again, and processing all the feelings that come along with a break-up. I had high but cautious hopes and they have been disappointed. Being in my first serious post-widowhood relationship revealed so many things, including the places where I still need to heal. But more than anything, in the disappointment and hurt, I…

This is the result of some Internal Family Systems therapy I’ve been engaging as I try to understand my anxiety and fear of relationship abandonment in the wake of both divorce and widowhood. I am a wall, it said, standing around you to keep you strong I am a whirlwind blowing you away from pain…

As we prepare to celebrate All Saints’ Sunday this weekend, I wonder if you are feeling the complicated pull I am about the saints who surround you, both living and deceased. I am so grateful for those who have walked in faith with me, from my earliest days until now, for the ways they have…

Early in my grieving after Marrett’s death, my therapist suggested that the love I held for him needed somewhere to go, now that it couldn’t be shared with his physical person. Instead, I snuggled his big wiggly hunting dog, I washed his boat, I combed through his papers and books to sift out the best…

Me newly 45, with her father nearing 50, we laughed about how we’d be the same age as some kindergartener’s grandparents. I teased him about how he’d surely be crying more than me (he usually did) and he told the story for the millionth time about bawling in front of his eldest daughter’s kindergarten locker,…

If God is love, and grief is really just love that now has no living object, then it seems obvious that God is found in grief. Yet every time I make this connection, first for myself in the wake of Marrett’s death and now regularly for others in writing, preaching and speaking, people are stunned.…

The final post from my original Grief Lectionary writings, based on 1 Samuel 17. What happens when what we want turns out to not be what God wants? What does it feel like when our dreams of grandeur and prestige turn out to be unlike any of God’s dreams, either for us or for Themselves?…

This is one of my favorite chapters in the whole bible, and reading it now through my grief further enriches its meaning. This is a story that makes me not only love, but like God, for They seem so relatable. Like, who hasn’t wanted to destroy the people who’ve betrayed them? I know I have,…