New Way To Grieve

Welcome to New Way to Grieve, a book for anyone who has grieved, is grieving, or will be grieving. Of course, this description encompasses almost everyone and includes those who are actively on the grieving continuum; from those who are demolished by their loss to those who would prefer to avoid and deny it. Grieving cannot be done on a timeline. However, you may feel, even early on, as though something is preventing you from moving forward and you would like to get back to a fuller life.

If you find yourself in any of the descriptions below, you are precisely why I wrote New Way to Grieve.

• You assert the same regrets to yourself or others such as, “If only I had done this, they might be alive,” or “If only they had not done that, they might still be here,” or “I just don’t know how I can go on without them!”

• You have additional recurring and upsetting thoughts, worries, guilt, and anger.

• Your sadness may seem to not let up.

• You say things like, “S/he was my everything and I will never find someone else.” You may even use that notion to convince yourself that’s the reason you cannot move forward.

• You have become hopeless about the future and feel that it is enough to just get through your day. The next day may seem much the same as the one before it.

• You ponder why it seems that things did not work out for you. Or maybe this is what you have to live with for the rest of your life.

• You see, after 13 deaths in one decade, I discovered a new way to grieve for myself.

Even though sadness can be quite difficult to manage, the tools I outline in this book are based on my own journey. I am sharing my story so that you do not have to add more pain to your su#ering. I want to show you that by reading this book and doing the grief work that I recommend, you can move forward and create a new life. I created a new life and continue to create my life on a daily basis.

What is unique about New Way to Grieve?

New Way to Grieve addresses a new ability to experience and express your sadness as the pure grief that it is rather than the ‘grief ’ we seem to endure because of our thoughts about our loved one’s death. These thoughts might have us so stuck that we do not participate fully in life. Not just early on in grief, but sometimes for months, years, and even decades we postpone or entirely give up on our dreams and our lives. This is not your mother’s book about grief. It is not an updated version of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s ‘stages of grief.’ Nor anything like Sheryl Sandberg’s Option B, or Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. By reading this book you will not be able to discern what stage you are in your grief journey such as anger, denial, or bargaining. This book does not suggest that you keep yourself busy, accept your lot in life, or deal with the cards you are dealt. New Way to Grieve is based on everything useful that I learned during my journey of plentiful, substantial loss and radical, sudden loss: 12 people in the previous ten years, and then Tom, my husband who I was with for 43.5 years, died suddenly. The idea of separating our circumstances from our thoughts is not my original idea. I pay homage to Werner Erhard, founder of Est and source of Landmark Worldwide. This transformational work played a key role in my being able to separate this tragedy from all the tales I might have attached to it. This transformation work also allowed me to see that by forgiving the past and by becoming aware of the words I used to describe my situation, I could move forward into a created future.

Among many things, New Way to Grieve will:

• Recommend useful ways to manage your well-being for the most productive long-term impact.

• Take you through the process of separating your pure sadness from the secondary thoughts that leave you trapped.

• Provide you with exercises to feel and express necessary anger toward your loved one so that you can forgive and feel the freedom to dream about your life.

• Walk you through the process of forgiving yourself so you feel like you deserve to take action toward your dreams.

• Offer tools to surf the waves of grief so you can set yourself up in the most powerful way as you anticipate and mitigate the triggers of everyday life.

• Suggest how to keep connected in all relationships when your loved one is dying so that you have peace, love, and a future of connection in your life.

• Move you toward finding your purpose, whether through honoring your loved one in inspiring ways or finding what truly fits you now.