Friday Feature: Managing Grief

In a perfect world, I'd wake up when I wake up, ease slowly into the morning, and get my pre-planned blog posts written and posted by noon.

In the real world there are alarm clocks (and, thank God, snooze alarms), day jobs, and mornings that move at a pace that's less than leisurely. These are the days in which I live, and so these are the circumstances under which I plan and create my blog posts, often (usually) hours after the ideal world time frame.

This used to annoy me and cause me stress but, over time, I've learned that delays aren't always bad -- some of them have given me my best material.

Today was one of those days. I had an article all picked out for today's post but, while I was waiting in the drive-through line at Starbucks, I checked Facebook and saw a post from a grieving friend. I sent hugs and when I logged out of Facebook, I popped over to Twitter where the first thing I saw was an article on coping with grief.

Sometimes, the "meant to be" is so loud it's impossible to miss.

In "9 Ways Therapists Personally Deal with Grief," Ali Drucker delivers sound advice in a gentle tone that boils down to the idea that grief is nothing if not personal. There is no time frame carved in stone, no recipe offering a teaspoon of this and a heaping cup of that because what I need a teaspoon of you might need a cup of and vice versa. Grief changes; it ebbs and flows, all but disappearing one day only to reemerge as a tsunami the next and no one -- no one -- can tell us the right way to manage it because there is no one right way.

Needless to say, I shared the link with my friend. I also bookmarked the article. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need to keep something like this handy but grief, along with alarm clocks, day jobs and things that don't go as planned, is an inescapable part of life. And, when we find something that might help ease the pain, even just a little, it's worth hanging on to, especially when it recognizes that the recipe is ours to create.