My Brother, Noah
My brother was diagnosed with fibrolamellar carcinoma in November 2019. And he was gone by March 2020. He thought he just had a stomachache. It’s the rarest form of liver cancer that attacks healthy people under 30...
0“Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told.”
—Judith Herman
Our stories — these ones, the ones we hold dear about our deepest sorrows — and the sharing of them help us to open a conversation about grief as a global community.
How and where do you talk about it, if at all?
Sharing our stories helps peel back the layers and allow the topic of death, dying, and grief to be accessible and acceptable to talk about, whether around a kitchen table, on social media, in a yoga class, street corner, or at a formal dinner with strangers.
What is your experience of grief? Who (or what) did you lose?
This is a place we can share the nitty-gritty, hard-to-tell details; the moments of heart expansion and the never-ending stories about the nights where we thought the tears wouldn’t stop.
This is a safe space for storytellers. If moved to comment on anyone’s story, please be respectful and keep in mind the guidelines for our virtual sacred space:
“No fixing, no saving, no advising, no setting anyone straight.”
—Parker Palmer
My brother was diagnosed with fibrolamellar carcinoma in November 2019. And he was gone by March 2020. He thought he just had a stomachache. It’s the rarest form of liver cancer that attacks healthy people under 30...
0I’m perched on the edge of the green couch. An imperceptible breath moves through me as I inspect the white, cardboard box I’ve taken down from the bookshelf. Inside rests a muddy brown, plastic container. The gold lettering of the...
0I had just found out I was pregnant with my first son when my brother was diagnosed with cancer. That was 14 years ago. He passed away a little over a month before my son was born. I was kept in the dark in order to protect the life of...
0I missed the call from my brother-in-law. I could tell through his voice, though his voicemail didn’t say what had happened. I called back, sobbed, and wandered through the house to find Craig. I asked the airplanes about their...
0Grief is lonely. People can only meet you where they have met themselves. I was 25, he 26. We were high-school sweethearts, each other’s first love. He was handsome, intelligent, incredibly athletic, wildly funny, and insanely loved. ...
0It felt like a punch in my gut combined with a sickening whirlpool in my belly. Even as I felt the physical proof that the news of nine people dying in a helicopter crash was indeed quite personal, my higher brain confronted me with...
0Holding new life while also facing death is so very complicated. My sister Miranda died on September 20, 2018. We moved out of state, away from all friends and family for my husband’s job on October 2, 2018. We had our first baby...
0Something happened. Since Cami died I have been feeling so sad. There are things people say are their loved ones visiting after they have died, like red birds and butterflies. Well, Cami had loved frogs when she was like six years old....
0Raina asks me why I can’t just relax. I tell her that I’m afraid that if I stop moving, I won’t be able to start moving again. We don’t know what’s happened. All we know is that they found her in the bathroom...
0That’s what I’ve always told myself and others. I’m not that person who cries at sappy TV commercials, depressing songs, or sad movies. I’m not that person who cries when other people are crying. And I’m not that person who cries at...
1Tomorrow will be 8 years since the love of my life chose to end his life. On June 24th it will be six years that I lost my grandfather (also the day I buried my love 8 years ago.) On October 21st it will be 8 years since I lost my...
0I’m a grieving mama whose beautiful, unique, and amazing light of a daughter left here a little over 3 years ago. She had a long battle with substance-use disorder… Through it all her beauty was always bigger than her...
0I recently received the news that my husband and I cannot have children. My entire universe had been planned around this for-sure life event–a beautiful watercolor too blurry to see the fine details but clear enough to see the...
0I arrived alone at South Carlsbad State Beach on December 30, knowing that this would be a perfect place for me to be to digest the loss of Mike on December 4, and the preceding 2.5 years of awareness, concern, discovery and...
0sometimes I touch the things you used to touch hoping for a connection – an echo of you; your fingerprint marked in time and me, lost in its swirl -Becket Berning...
1In my mind… I often see him filling his glass with his trademark ice cubes. I can see him standing at the fridge. I know exactly how his pants rest on his hips. I know how he wears his belt. I know how his little but fills out the...
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