How long is grief? I guess what I’m really asking is, “Does grief ever end?” Last week I had a five-hour drive ahead of me, so I looked at my list of downloaded audiobooks borrowed from the library. Seasons of Sorrow by Tim Challies was one of them. The subtitle was “The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God.” That was all I knew about it. Who had recommended that I read it? I did not recall. It was due in a few days, so I started listening.  Within a minute I was plunged back into the world of grief I ...

Permit me to humbly suggest the following: If you are ever invited to a 100th birthday party, consider attending. And if the centenarian is one of your dearly departed mother’s most treasured friends, do whatever you can to attend. And if she was also someone you yourself loved since you were a child because she stayed involved during sleepover weekends with her daughter (involving dress-up playing, and pool swimming, and butter making), then attending her party needs to be your highest priority. And if, during your college years, she poured love and comfort into your life when you were far ...

There’s a short film I’ve watched over and over. It’s brilliant and profound. It speaks to something we all long for, and yet receive precious little of: Validation. That’s also its title. The film opens with a sad, bedraggled man bringing his parking ticket to the attendant for validation. “Ah,” I thought the first time I saw it, “this movie is about that kind of validation. The parking lot kind.” But the attendant does much more than stamp his ticket. He also looks, really looks, at the bedraggled man, and says, “You… You are awesome. You have an amazing face. You’ve got ...

Whenever I hear the word “polarization,” I can’t help but think of cell division. Specifically? Anaphase, which perhaps you remember from high school biology. All the organelles have been doubled and are bunched at the edges—in moments it will split down the middle and become two cells. Anaphase is polarized. All those organelles are squinching themselves on one side of the cell or the other. It’s as if they can’t get far enough away from the other pole. Sound familiar? Just like a certain current political landscape, perhaps? The United States doesn’t seem very “united” right now. Progressives are getting more ...

Marijuana, Adolescents, and Schizophrenia Marijuana, Adolescents, and Schizophrenia By the time this drops, I will be one week out from age 65. Yet, I’m not grieving—I welcome growing older. Age has its advantages: Fewer emotional roller coasters, for one. For another, I’m better able to articulate my thoughts. And my body hasn’t betrayed me (yet).  However, parts of my brain are proving glitchy, as my memory just isn’t as reliable. I’m trying to humbly believe people when they insist that something happened in a certain way, rather than how I remember it. My math abilities are pathetic. I used to ...

Attachment Theory helps to explain grief. Grief is what happens when we humans experience loss. That is, when we lose something or someone, we need to go through a period of adjustment. That adjustment takes time, and it’s called “grief”.  Why do some people sail through that period of adjustment, and others have a hard time? Many, many factors impact the process of grief, including how important that thing or person was, and whether the loss was sudden versus expected. The death of a child is particularly hard to face, as well as the death of a loved one who ...