Life After Loss

Sarah Nannen on life after loss.  Dealing with Grief.Long ago, way back in one of my college classes on death and dying, the professor told us that our death rituals — the funeral, visitation, etc. — were our ways of “reweaving the cloth of our community” after a loss.

Grief has a process.  It is our internal response to loss, that is about how we move through and beyond that loss.

Yet in our culture, we tend to have an impatience with grief and the grieving.  With the best of intentions, we sometimes push people to move through their grief.  And we push ourselves to move through our grief.

We want those grieving to find happiness again.  And as we grieve, we want to stop hurting.

Which often only serves to disrupt grief, prolonging or curtailing the healing that needs to come after a loss.  In our attempts to “speed it along,” we slow it down or cut it off.

My guest on this episode, Sarah Nannen, knows this first-hand.  With 4 young children, Sarah was widowed when her active-duty husband died in a training accident.

In the aftermath, Sarah had to follow her own instincts to find space for her grief… and then she found herself once again among the living.

Since then, Sarah has been helping others do the same.  She wrote a book, Grief Unvealed, and helps others to find empowerment as they process their own grief.

Who is this episode for?  If you are alive… you!  Because every single one of us will be (or have been) confronted by loss.  Every single one of us will (or has) pass through grief.

Listen below.

RELATED RESOURCES
Sarah Nannen’s Website (and free Peace Meditation)
Moving Through Grief
Order, Disorder, Reorder
Grieve Losses, Celebrate Gains
Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

Grieve Losses and Celebrate Gains

The Rules of Living by Lee Baucom

Losses are painful.  No way around it.  They are also normal. Or to say it differently, loss is a normal part of life.  Not an anomalie.  Part of being alive.

And loss leads to grief.  That is our natural reaction to any loss.  Big grief or small grief — that is simply how we process a loss, so that we can re-weave life and continue.

Sometimes, we get caught up in the “unfairness” of a loss, and we get stuck in the grief. In the process, we lose out on life.  We fail to celebrate the gains that also are a part of life.

Think of these three stages throughout your life.  We have a certain orientation to life — we understand what life is about… until something changes — a loss or a gain.  And then, we experience disorientation.  The process of grieving and celebrating brings us to a new orientation — a re-orientation.  Not the same as before.  But not necessarily worse than before.  Just different than before.

So, rule #4 is to grieve your losses and celebrate your gains.  Listen for details below.

RULES OF LIVING SERIES
#1 Let Fear Point, Not Direct
#2 Be Present In The  Present
#3 Accept the Past and Revise the Future