Table of Contents
List of Grieving Practices Mentioned xiii
Foreword xv
Prologue 1
1 The Role of Others in Our Grief 9
2 Public and Private Grief 13
3 Ritual and Artistic Expressions of Grief 17
4 Early Manifestations of Grief 21
5 Nutrient-Deficient Soil 29
6 Cultural Sensitivity 33
7 Bearing the Unbearable 39
8 Pause, Reflect, and Feel Meaning 43
9 The Terror beneath the Terror 47
10 The Pursuit of Happiness and the Unity of Opposites 51
11 Bypassing Grief, Bypassing Love 55
12 Intensity and Coping 59
13 Contraction and Expansion 61
14 The Collision of Love and Loss 67
15 Boundless and Timeless Love 71
16 Personifying Grief 75
17 Pausing with Grief 79
18 The Practice of Being With 83
19 My Heart Cried Many Tears 85
20 The Barefoot Walkabout 89
21 The Vitality of Self-Care 91
22 Self-Care and Sleep 95
23 Ways to Care for Yourself 99
24 Telling Family and Friends What We Need 103
25 Self-Care as Distraction 107
26 Learning, Adapting, and Trusting Intuition 109
27 Re-Grieving 113
28 Surrendering and Stretching 115
29 When We Fragment 119
30 Duration of Grief 121
31 The Courage to Remember 125
32 Joining Hands 129
33 The Power of Unprocessed Traumatic Grief 133
34 Silenced for Decades 137
35 Guilt and Shame 141
36 Inward and Outward 147
37 Works of Love 151
38 Waves of Grief 155
39 "Remember Me," She Said 159
40 Ritual and Microritual 163
41 Meaning through Compassionate Action 169
42 Kindness Projects 171
43 Through Knowing Suffering 175
44 Fierce Compassion 179
45 The Horse Chemakoh 183
46 The Price of Unrealized Grief and Trauma 189
47 Transgenerational Grief 193
48 Grief Broth 197
49 The Darkness Has Its Gifts 203
50 What I Know 207
Epilogue 211
Acknowledgments 213
Index 215
About the Author 221