Good Mourning Grief

A blog about my adventures as a grief warrior

Month: September 2025

The Art of Compromise

September 28, 2025 /

In the beginning of my grief, I rallied. There were too many people that were drowning, and my motherly instincts were to put my own grief on the back burner to support those I loved. This was comfortable for me, putting my needs aside for others is a life-time practice. Thus, that is how I handled my grief. It can wait. I will deal with it when I am alone. The trouble was, I was never alone.

As time pushed all of us ahead, my grief morphed into the health challenges that occupy so much of my time now, ironically having me face my own grief better than I have been doing and putting up new boundaries that are requiring all of us to get used to.  

As grievers, we know that grief is a path we walk together but it is also a solo journey. Each person must handle their grief in the way that best comforts them. This can cause struggles when one person expects the other to respond in the same way, but to which doesn’t work for both.

As I become more aware and thus more vocal about what I need, I am finding that it is not what some of my loved ones want and push back happens. I have had recent conversations with family and friends of what they are expecting of me that conflict with my new awareness. I find myself at a crossroads; do I continue on my healing path, or do I step off to ensure that they are ok. The answer is not an easy one.

So, compromise comes to the table. A conversation around what the individual needs are. An agreement that there might not be an understanding of these needs, but an acceptance of trust that the needs are valid. Compromise must be fair and comfortable for all parties.

 I am learning that compromise takes work. It requires putting ego aside and letting love lead the conversation. It requires individual time to process “can this work with my needs” before agreeing and then creating unjudgmental space to try it. With each new happening, compromise needs to be reviewed and adjusted. Above all, it requires respect; the affirmation that we are each hurting in different ways, for different things. If this can be shared, then peace is achieved. And grief is supported.

The word compromise is beautiful. A Latin origin that means “a mutual promise”. When said that way it sounds less commanded or mechanical. It might bring an attitudinal change; instead of saying, “I have to compromise…” to say, “I have a mutual promise.” And that may be all we need to heal.

A Mother’s Last Message

September 21, 2025 /

Over the summer, I had the honor of supporting a young woman whose mother was dying. It was a misdiagnosis a year ago. When things got worse, and her mom ended up in hospital, they were told she only had a few weeks before cancer would take her away. A blanket of disbelief wrapped them up and I was called and asked for help.

I knew this young woman as a friend of Zane’s who frequented our home over the high school years. She is brilliant, beautiful and carries a strength I have witnessed grow within her for decades. She has pursued life fearlessly. She faced her mother’s fate the same way. She left her home in BC to come back and take the role of caregiver, advisor and advocate to her mother’s needs. She balanced her feelings to support the emotions of her grieving family. And in the end, she ensured that her mother’s final wishes to leave this earth from her home, surrounded by family and friends was granted.

At her request, I attended the funeral. I had not met her mother in all the years that her daughter was part of our lives. I felt a bit like an imposter, coming to a funeral of a woman I did not know. But I knew her daughter and I had met her other two children, and I wanted to hold them in their darkest hour. The celebration of life reflected who her mother was in an afternoon of laughter and tears, leaving me with the understanding of how joyful her mother was and an awareness of where the strength was born.

As I listened to the tributes, I thought to myself, they speak of the love of a mother. The commonalities of motherhood; of how she created a home that had an open-door policy and within their home a sense of festivity at any time of the year. Especially Christmas for her family. I heard of how she had balanced work, to be home for her children, a task that was not easy. I heard how she found solitude in the forests and how nature soothed her. I’m watching the video of her life as wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend and I thought to myself, she is extraordinary. She has taken the role of wife and mother and by her dedication, I am sitting in a room of people who already miss her.

Each celebration of life carries a message. Yes, it involves how wonderful the deceased was and the impact they had with their own perspective of how life should be lived. This celebration reminded me of how blessed I am to be in the role of mother, of its importance to so many. However, what truly hit home was her last message to her family.  Her belief, that was recorded and played for all of us to hear. She said, “I want to be a part of all the special events. Even if it can’t be in the physical, it’ll be in the non-physical. I love you all…” And that message, her family will cling to for the rest of their lives. What a gift to believe that love overcomes death. It does not separate us. And what a bigger gift to pass that belief onto your children.

Discovering the Matrix of My Soul

September 14, 2025 /

I arrived in Ireland feeling so sick from the overnight plane ride that I could hardly wait to get to the hotel room and crash. My family found me there hours later and described me as comatose. Not a great start to a trip of a lifetime, but then again, we know I am not a good traveler.

Albeit a rough first day, the trip was everything and more than I thought it could be. The country is gorgeous, the people are friendly, the rumors of how much drinking happens are all true. We stayed in a hotel in downtown Dublin so walking to shops, bars and restaurants was easy. It was delightful. My favorite part of it was the awareness that our clan all live there in some other life.

It was uncanny how many people we saw that made us take a double look to know they were not our family and friends from Canada. We are shopping in Penny’s, and I see Sandra heading into the make-up section. Before my brain could remind me that Sandra (aka sweetie) passed two years ago, I shouted out, “Sweetie, over here!” This person was a carbon copy. She wasn’t the only one there. We saw family and friends that are no longer here on earth, and some that are still here. It became a game of who we would see next. We agreed that Ireland is our clan’s serene matrix.

A highlight for me had to be the Jameson Distillery tour. We went on our last day. We took ‘the dude’. We went because Zane would love this tour. I wanted to find a whiskey I can enjoy better than the original one we must drink in his honor. The distillery is surrounded by apartments overlooking the courtyard. I smiled. This is where Zane would be living. The energy of this place had me in tears from the first step inside the door.  The tour itself was divine.

When learning of the process and history of Jameson & Son, we were told that each bottle label has the phrase “Sine Metu”. It means without fear.  Zane’s friend had taught him “wo bu pa” to which Zane shared with his friends. He loved the phrase, which is about “I am not afraid.” The similarity of the Irish phrase had our jaws drop.

At the end of the tour, we shopped for souvenirs and a bottle to bring home. I was drawn to a brand of Jameson’s called Method & Madness. It was another term Zane used a lot. A young woman who worked there came up beside me and I asked about this brand. She told me that it was the whiskey that changed her mind about all whiskeys. She first tried it seven years ago. Her favorite is Hazelnut. It has been seven years since I have held Zane.  Hazelnut was Zane’s coffee favorite, as is mine. I was sold. And then she said her name was Rachel (the name of a girl that Zane had loved deeply). I threw my arms around her. She had no idea why I was hugging her.  Why I was crying. She just hugged me back and said, “I promise you will enjoy this”.

Ireland brought us together with friends who showed us their homeland. It gave us glimpses of loved ones who are no longer with us, but reassurance that they are not gone. It gave us a connection to our own roots, our heritage and why we live with the attitude that there is always time for “one more shot”!  This trip gave me the comfort that for each of us, there is a liminal place where we will be rejoined with those we love and miss. For me, it is Ireland.

Gratitude goes to my daughter who insisted I take this trip with her as a gift from her brother and her.  Apparently, it is something they had wished for, to which she says she can now strike off her own bucket list.

When Grief is Blinding

September 7, 2025 /

August was rough on all of us.  Especially for my daughter, in ways she is aware of and in ways she has not yet come to understand. The story begins two days before her brother’s death day. A friend of Payton’s lost her brother, and then another friend lost his best friend. Payton found herself consoling each friend of the impacts of losing a brother to sudden death. She was strong, supportive and present for both and their respective families.

This was the catalyst of her angst. Grief arrived heavy. And angry. It was too much to bear, so close to the anniversary of her own loss. It birthed an intense desire to go over her own life and what she wants.  More importantly, what she needs. And the answers to her introspection are different than anything any of us had imagined.

She admits she is afraid. She has come to an intersection of many unknowns and that is scary. What she isn’t seeing yet, is the drive behind her, the reason why she wishes to move every aspect of what is to what might be. It is because of the past seven years.  The cyclical wreckage of holding it together and then falling apart. Her physical, emotional well being are nonexistent. Her soul is screaming, intuitively pushing her back onto a path she was derailed from when her brother was killed.

What she can’t clearly see is the love and the support of those around her to which will be her refuge when she awakens.  When the pain of her decisions softens, the current blindness to how deep her grief is will become clear.

As grief warriors, we sometimes fall into the trap that others expect of us. The “I should be better by now” stage. My daughter felt that she should be healed enough to be counsel to her friends, that her grief, after this long, should be in check with the expectations of her present life. Time allows us to become blind to our grief. Then, out of seemingly nowhere, it shakes us hard, reminding us that we are changed and insisting to examine if the changes fit into our current day.  It is a distinctive process of grief. It cannot be ignored.

That is where my daughter now finds herself. Intensified by the deaths of her friends’ brothers, her own grief has insisted that she see the areas that she needs to change. The necessity of shaping a more comfortable, loving space to live with all her losses.

Her reality is paused by her latest quest. Paying homage to a tattoo she has, “give me a lifetime of adventures”, she is enjoying a trip she planned to take seven years ago. Before her plans, all our plans were blown up. This trip is her need to revisit her life before grief took over. Her soul knows that the black sands under the northern lights will soothe her heart. As her mother, it is my hope that this trip will be the reset she needs to follow her true north, alongside the energy of those who guide her from above.

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