Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief : A Comprehensive Guide to Reclaiming and Cultivating Joy and Carrying on in the Face of Loss (a Grief Recovery Handbook)

Help in Healing from Grief and Loss

Living Now Book Award, Silver – Aging, Death, & Dying

“Filled with insight, wisdom, and relatable stories, this resource shares everything you need to know to start living again with joy, meaning, and love after loss.” —Chelsea Hanson, author of The Sudden Loss Survival Guide

Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief is a handbook for dealing with grief, organized so that you can pick and choose a topic from the table of contents pertaining to the issue affecting you the most at that moment.

Rediscover sustained moments of joy as you seek a new way of being in the world. Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief guides and lightens the journey to positivity for those who feel the pain of loss, whether it is the loss of a loved one, a job, a marriage, a house, a pregnancy, a nest egg—anyone or anything that we loved and that is no longer in our lives. In this book, author and fellow griever Emily Thiroux Threatt provides you with strategies to embrace the process of learning how to start living again. The book includes 26 practices and stories from people who have been through the grieving process and have come out on the other side feeling renewed: one for every week of the year.

Mourning and coping with grief looks different for everyone. Emily organized Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief with this in mind, giving you 26 different options to try in any given moment. Find what works for you, with dozens of ideas covered, including:

• Meditating and allowing space for mindful grieving, sadness and loneliness
• Finding joy and gratitude in the dark moments
• Learning what you can say to others so that they can better understand and help you in your recovery

If you’ve found help from grief books like It's OK That You're Not OK, Bearing the Unbearable, To Love and Let Go, or Things I Wish I Knew Before My Mom Died, then you’ll be encouraged and inspired by all of the tips and ideas in Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief.

From the book:

When I thought I didn’t really have anything to live for, I started writing down what I am grateful for. I found I kept writing more things and making new lists, and that I wasn’t repeating myself. This showed me how good my life actually was and that I really had lots to live for.

For a long time after Jacques died, I didn’t smile. Life just kind of happened, and I just let it. A couple of my friends, Joe and Ruth, were concerned about me and gave me a copy of the movie The Secret to watch. I watched it with a chip on my shoulder. I didn’t see how anything that it said had anything to do with me. It seemed like the movie was about magical thinking where I could just decide I wanted something, and I would have it. I didn’t see how that could be true. After I watched the movie, I noticed in the case for the DVD there was a sheet that said, “Don’t turn this over until you watched the movie.” Since I had watched the movie, I turned it over, and it was simply a sheet with lines and a statement at the top that said to write down things I was grateful for. My attitude was, yah, right, but I decided to challenge myself and started writing. It didn’t take me long to fill the page. I was surprised because here I was thinking I was miserable, yet I easily filled a page with things I was grateful for. And it felt good!

This little exercise got me going and I found that I was constantly thinking of more things to be grateful for, and I just had to write them down. I wrote on scraps of paper in my purse, on the backs of receipts, and actually on anything that was handy when a thought would come up. I finally bought a little journal and started to record things there. I was absolutely amazed that I kept coming up with new things, and the more new things I came up with, the better I felt, and I realized I was smiling. Knowing how good writing down my gratitude was making me feel made me want to share this feeling with others. I started paying attention when anyone did something I was grateful for, and I would express my gratitude right then. If someone held the door open for me, I thanked that person. When my hairdresser cut my hair, I told her how great it made me feel to have her do such a wonderful job. I even wrote notes to people to thank them for a variety of things they did that made my life easier or made me smile. The more grateful I became, the happier I became. I felt better. Most of my physical complaints subsided. I lost weight. And life in general felt good again. And I knew then I would survive.

Practice: Gratitude

At this point, you may be saying that you don’t have anything to be grateful for. I understand that, but I encourage you to try this tool anyway. Before I started writing my own gratitude lists, I came to realize that that I was unconsciously making lots of lists of things I wasn’t grateful for which I now call my Poor Me lists. I would dwell on how lonely I was, how terrible my alcoholic next-door neighbor was who abused his wife and encouraged his sons to fight, how I no longer had a job I loved because I gave it up to care for my dying husband, how my friends didn’t call me, how I had no idea what to do next, and on and on and on. Those lists didn’t serve me. So, I now write gratitude lists which do serve me. Now I am grateful I wake up in the morning. I am grateful for the beautiful place I live. I am grateful to hear the birds singing every day. I am grateful that I can take a deep breath. I am grateful that I can write gratitude lists.

Try writing right now five things you are grateful for. No one will see them or judge you, so feel free to write anything you would like. Start each item with “I am grateful for,” then complete the sentence. Do this every day. Try not to repeat things, but it is ok if you do. There are no rules here. Just gratitude.