WYD Podcast With Jill MacFarlane – The Sharing Place where kids and their families cope with grief and loss
Since 1993, The Sharing Place in Salt Lake City has had a mission to “provide a safe and caring environment for grieving children, teens, and their families to share their feelings while healing themselves.”
Program director Jill MacFarlane talks to us about the value of this process and how telling the truth is the most important thing you can do when helping kids deal with their grief
WYD Podcast With James Morgan – Connecting Through Loss
After experiencing the devastating loss of their one-year-old baby boy, James and Catie Morgan found comfort in surrounding themselves with other couples who have also gone through the loss of a child. As a way of helping others, James devised the Buddys app, which allows people to connect with those who have had similar experiences.
Recipe For Remembering: Nana’s Banana Bread
My earliest memories are of my Grandmother, Fairy Belle. She was very present in our lives and for a time, lived with us. I remember coming home from school and watching Another World and All My Children (or as she called them, her “stories”). But mostly I remember her in the kitchen. My love of […]
Swedish Death Cleaning: What is it and why should you start now?
Spring cleaning has become almost a biological ritual. The winter has gone, the windows are open and we suddenly want to give the house a freshening up. We wash, we dust, we sort. Some things are tossed or re-homed. But what if we cleaned, not with the birth of a new season in mind, but use our own death as motivation instead.
How You Can Support a Grieving Friend Through the Holidays
There is a good chance that you know someone who is facing the imminent holiday with impending dread. It’s hard to know what to say to a friend who is grieving, and the holidays can be a particularly difficult time to face. There are ways to help (or not!) but the main rule is to follow the lead of the person who is grieving.
Keepsake Memories
When Charmaine Haddad’s parents were both gone, the family still had items and clothing that had belonged to their mom and dad. Charmaine’s sister, Charlotte, took her mother’s fur coat and her father’s suede one and commissioned a local craftsperson to create Christmas heirlooms. The result was a combination of Santas that the family can […]
How Talking About Death Has Changed My Life
If you had told me a few years ago that thinking and talking about death would make my life better, well, I might have just died from shock.
Thanatophobia and How to Overcome the Fear of Dying
It’s not unusual to fear death. It is the great unknown, after all. It brings the ultimate sadness and enormous loss. But to carry that fear always, obsessively, makes it a phobia. And that phobia has a name: Thanatophobia.
Self-care in the Time of COVID-19
With COVID-19 very much a part of our lives, we have collective feelings of being uncomfortable or out of sorts. This feeling can be attributed to a global grief, and the antidote is being tender with ourselves – and others. Stressed out has become the new normal, and, clearly, it’s not healthy.
Life and Death, Tragedy and Grief in the time of COVID-19
Grief can be an isolating experience, but as the world adapts to life in a pandemic, we are forced to redesign how we grieve as communities in isolation. And when a community is unable to physically come together in tragedy, they find ways to be together, apart.