“Grief is the unavoidable consequence of ‘letting go’,” says Catholic priest Monsignor Tony Doherty. Tony has sat with families and friends at the bedside of the dying on many occasions during his 50 years as a priest. “One of life’s fundamental human equations goes like this: the more you … Read more
When does grief become abnormal? And if we don’t see it in medical terms soon enough, do we lose chances to help?
When my friend Susan’s mother Jean was cremated at Leura Memorial Gardens in Autumn this year, her family used lots of flowers and foliage from her garden in the Blue Mountains of NSW to adorn her coffin. It was a way of expressing something about Jean, who’d always loved the … Read more
“And if you somehow die of the disease then you’ve lost the battle and you didn’t fight hard enough. I think that’s toxic.”
John Faine, then of ABC Melbourne, interviewed Susan Wyndham, Margaret Rice and Chris Hall on 24 October, 2013. That interview is just as relevant today as it was back then. Today I planted cuttings from my father’s garden to remind me of him. I had taken them from his garden … Read more
“Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other,” Jandy Nelson. Jahanvi Sardana writes We grieve because we love. How lucky we are to have experienced that love. Illustrator Gary Andrews uses drawing to cope with the loss of his wife Joy, his great love. Sandra Moon … Read more
We said farewell to my lovely cousin Kim this week, a beautiful woman and another cousin who died too young. Cousins are the first friends we have as children, they are different yet familiar. With them we have our early experiences of comfortably moving into someone else’s life, then slipping quickly … Read more
“Now tough blokes like us don’t have to worry about grief because we just get on with it, right?” Anthony suggested, to nods from thirty other men huddled in the man cave. Wrong. (We weren’t exactly huddled, either. It was a balmy Sydney evening and the men were sitting … Read more
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