Loss of a Family Member

After Loss of a child

We know the pain can be unbearable. Read stories and find community. You need not be alone in your journey.

Open to Hope Radio

Articles

  • The Difference Between Functioning and Grieving

    Posted on July 22, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Grieving over Libby A few months after Libby died, I sat for an interview with a local newspaper to talk about her death, her impact on the people she knew, and the charity her father and I created in her honor. If you’ll allow a mom to gush about her kid for a moment, Libby was no ordinary ten-year-old. Not only was she beautiful, with a smile that radiated her joyful personality, but she was intelligent, talented, and most of all, kind. She was the once-in-a-lifetime student that teachers raved about, who befriended the other children sitting alone at lunch […]

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  • The Tension between Recent Loss and Future Vision

    Posted on July 17, 2024 - by Mark Bodnarczuk

    May 16, 2024, would have been my son Thomas’s twenty-second birthday. But instead of candles on a chocolate cake that my wife Elin has baked – Thomas’s favorite – we have candles like the one pictured above scattered throughout our home. I have one on the nightstand next to my bed. I light it each night before I surrender to the place from which God provides leadership for my life (Psalm 23). I’ve switched roles with Thomas. Normally, children are the legacy of their parents. But I feel a sense of duty to carry my son’s legacy forward so that […]

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  • When One Loss Follows Another

    Posted on May 27, 2024 - by Anne Peterson

    I’m 12 years old and our family is living in a 3rd floor apartment. The phone rings on this summer day. Mom answers. I watch the color leave her face. I hear sentence fragments. “A lone driver…he didn’t see her…the truck was backing up……a closed casket.” Hanging up the phone, Mom tells all of us to come and sit down. She said that Julie, our six-year-old cousin, had won a bicycle and she ran outside to ride it. Julie hoped everyone would see her, but the garbage man didn’t. Julie died. It was hard to see my mom cry. It […]

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  • Finding Meaning in Violent Loss

    Posted on May 13, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Finding Meaning in Violent Loss When I hear about “finding meaning” in grief, I feel a knee-jerk reaction to snap back with a salty, “What possible meaning can come from the violent death of a beautiful, sweet, healthy ten-year-old girl?” What I want to assure you of is this: I am in no way suggesting that the death of your loved one had a point. Had a deeper purpose. Meaning. I don’t believe that. I believe that the death of your loved one sucks. Really, really sucks. However, I ALSO believe that your world has changed and is never going […]

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  • Toxic Positivity in Grief

    Posted on May 13, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Toxic Positivity in Grief When I first started devouring information about the grieving process after Libby died, I remember immediately being turned off by the overly negative messaging on social media and in some books about grief. People who were YEARS and YEARS out from losing their loved ones were still crying daily, unable to function. In one particular Facebook group, a member mentioned that she had lost her thirty-seven-year-old son TWENTY-TWO years earlier and still cried every day. And there she was, still in a social media grief group, complaining about her life. It was the most fucking depressing […]

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  • Are You Sabotaging Your Grief Journey?

    Posted on May 13, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Are You Sabotaging Your Grief Journey? This article is going to require you to be a little bit brutal with yourself. The goal of the telling the truth principle is to create a baseline so that you know where you are starting and can decide how to move forward with your grief. Of course, you want to feel better. However, I’m not going to lie–you might be holding your own growth hostage. There are four ways you might be sabotaging yourself. It’s your job to read the descriptions, reflect on your thoughts, emotions, and behavior, and be honest if any […]

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  • Grief Guilt

    Posted on May 13, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Grief Guilt is about Loss of Control Guilt is, in my humble opinion, one of the most prevalent emotions during grief, and one that many grievers seem to come back to again and again. Feelings of guilt stem from an overwhelming desire to be in control of something that’s uncontrollable. Your mind isn’t yet ready to accept that your loss is real; it tries to push off the overwhelming sadness that’s coming by longing for things that can’t be changed. Some people stay stuck feeling guilt for a long time, spiraling downward into a sea of “What ifs” and “I […]

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  • Creating a Loss History

    Posted on May 13, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Creating a Loss History The first place we need to start is the past. We’re going way back—as far back as you can remember—and dredging up any experiences that may have helped shape your awareness of grief. “But Brooke, whyyyyyyyyy would you want me to dig up all of the depressing things in my life when I’m already feeling depressed?” you might ask. Well, because I like to torture you, of course. Seriously, though, the reason is that our earlier experiences with loss shape the way we currently process it. You learned things from significant events in your life. Perhaps […]

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  • Practicing Gratitude in Grief

    Posted on May 13, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Practicing Gratitude in Grief OK, OK. Before you throw lasagna in my face, let me just assure you that this section is not going to be full of toxic positivity and the rah-rah crap that makes grieving people want to vomit. What I am going to do is share how I, personally, have employed gratitude practices throughout my grief journey to help me feel just a little bit lighter, a little more hopeful, and a little less griefy. (Is that a word?) It turns out that practicing gratitude is scientifically proven to help shift our vibes in a more positive […]

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  • Create Meaning Through Ritual

    Posted on May 13, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Create Meaning Through Ritual Creating traditions, rituals, and ceremonies that celebrate your person is the shit. Seriously. It’s the opposite of the get-over-it and move-on mentality. Instead, by celebrating the existence of the person we lost and including details of their personality and passions in traditions that honor their legacy, we create meaning that makes us feel whole again. I mean, if your person is anything like my daughter, they’re fucking amazing and deserve to be celebrated! Remembering what made my daughter special fills the void created by her absence. Whether it’s lighting a candle during holidays, visiting a grave […]

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  • Envision a Future after Grief

    Posted on May 6, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Envision a Future after Grief What do you want your future to be? I realize that this question, to someone in the deep, dark midst of grief, is a terrifying—even agonizing—one. Remember that Jerry Maguire-esque mission statement I told you about? I wrote it a month before my daughter Libby died, after losing my shit one day trying to be a full-time working wife and mother. At the time, I was utterly exhausted trying to be ALL THINGS to ALL. THE. PEOPLE while never letting anyone down. I felt like I was failing miserably at everything, and I had no […]

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  • Why Routines Help When You’re Grieving

    Posted on April 29, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Why Routines Help When You’re Grieving Think of your favorite comfort food, the coziest blanket you own, or the pleasure of consuming a warm cup of hot chocolate before bed. All these things make you feel better, right? They’re like big, squeezie hugs (as Libby would say) because they are familiar. And it’s this familiarity that makes routines so amazing. They’re like a comforting, dependable embrace during times of grief. Knowing simple things like when you’re going to wake up in the morning, what you’re going to eat, and that you’re going to take a walk each Thursday with a […]

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  • Grief in the workplace

    Returning to Work after a Major Loss

    Posted on April 22, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    Returning to Teach after a Major Loss Every day, walking back into my classroom was an immense challenge. For those unfamiliar with teaching—imagine performing in a theater, five days a week for five hours a day. It’s absolutely draining. And when you’re battling grief, it feels impossible. My colleagues were amazing, but there’s only so much that can be done to ease such a profound pain. Going through all the “firsts” without Libby—her birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the anniversary of her passing—in front of a room full of eighth-graders who are kids with raging hormones about thirteen or fourteen years […]

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  • How We Heal After the Death of a Child

    Posted on April 22, 2024 - by Maria Kubitz

    The death of a child is so profound, it’s like no other loss. There’s no such thing as getting over the death of a child. Instead, bereaved parents must learn to adapt to a new life without our child’s physical presence. It’s part of the long, slow process of healing after the death of a child. Devastating Pain If you’re never fully healed after a child’s death, how can you gauge your healing progress? The intense pain after my 4-year-old daughter’s death felt devastating and unbearable. The most common question from newly bereaved parents in child loss support groups is […]

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  • A Nerd’s Guide to Grief

    Posted on April 22, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

    My Life in Grief I absolutely, freaking hate the saying “Life only gives you as much as you can handle.” If that’s the case, then just call me Atlas, baby, because apparently life thinks I can handle the weight of the world on my shoulders. I’ve endured a laundry list of traumatic events that has made everyone close to me wonder exactly whom I pissed off in another life. Maybe someday I’ll write a memoir, and I’ll go into a bit more detail about some of these events later in the book, but for now I’ll give you the CliffsNotes […]

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  • Mother Maintains Contact with Deceased Son

    Posted on April 17, 2024 - by Sheri Perl

    Mother Loses Son to Addiction To all of my fellow parents of deceased children — mothers and fathers — I offer greetings.  I too have suffered this unthinkable loss and know the grief that accompanies it. My son, Danny, died on July 1, 2008, from an overdose of alcohol and prescription drugs, a death all too common in this day and age.  Shortly after he passed, I read that the incidence of deaths due to overdose has quadrupled in young people between the ages of 18 and 23.  Dan was right in there at 22. Needless to say, this has […]

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  • When a Child Dies of Drug Addiction

    Posted on April 8, 2024 - by Joni Norby

    A Child Dies of Drug Addiction Ben was an addict. That declaration is enormously painful and takes even more courage to write than Ben died at age nineteen. He was an honor student, football captain, neighborhood skateboard star, altar server, little league all-star, and lead singer in a punk rock band; he was handsome, popular, kind, and gentle. He was my first born, my only boy…he was an addict and heroin killed him. When Ben was in the throes of his disease, I would jolt awake, stare at the blank ceiling, feeling my blood turn to ice. With my hands […]

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  • Do We Ever ‘Get Over’ the Death of a Child?

    Posted on March 27, 2024 - by Anne Dionne

    Getting Over a Child-Loss There was a time when I believed that people should “get over” their grief by the 12th month following a loss. After all, isn’t that what our society believes to be true? In the summer of 1976, I was employed by a doctor in a medical office building. There were several other offices on our floor, and at noon time, I would meet with some of the other doctors’ employees for lunch. One woman, whom we called Gracie, had lost her 16-year-old son two years prior in a drowning accident. Each day at lunch break, Gracie […]

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  • Loss of a Child: A Pain Like No Other

    Posted on March 26, 2024 - by Louise Lagerman

    A Pain Like No Other All loss is hard. All loss is lonely. But there is something about child-loss that puts it in a unique category. I have experienced other types of loss. When my very much loved father died in 2001, I was devastated. My father was a wonderful, kind man, a devoted husband and father. I grieved for him. I will forever miss having him in my life. I will treasure my wonderful memories of him forever. Then, in 2006, my 23-year-old daughter suddenly died. In a single phone call, my life as I knew it came to […]

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  • Signs and Dreams from our Children

    Posted on March 7, 2024 - by Louise Lagerman

    Signs and Dreams from our Children Dreams and signs of our children. Do they really exist? Are dreams and signs a technique our deceased children use to contact us to let us know they are fine and indeed do live on? I believe with my whole heart they do. I am very fortunate and blessed. Because of my Grief Support website, I am privileged to hear about numerous dreams and signs deceased children have shown their parents and grandparents. Although they vary in context, they all have the same theme of our deceased children communicating to us that they still […]

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Open to Hope TV

  • Episode 219: Mens Journey Through Grief

    Posted on June 10, 2024 - by admin

    Listen to four men speak very candidly about the different untimely losses in their lives, and how they took this often tumultuous journey through grief. Join hosts, Dr. Gloria Horsley and her daughter Dr. Heidi Horsley, along with their guests Stephen Panus, Warren Kozak, Jon Lefrandt, and Johnny Sirpilla.. Stephen Panus is the CEO of Twisted Hair, a marketing and P.R. Agency. He wrote the book “Walk On,” after the death of his 16 year old son. Warren Kozak, has been a journalist for some of televisions most respected news anchors, his book “Waving Goodbye: Life After Loss,” was written […]

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  • Episode 218: Navigating the Loss of a Child

    Posted on June 10, 2024 - by admin

    Are you struggling after the death of your child? Is the pain so great that you don’t know how you will survive? Join hosts, Dr. Gloria Horsley and her daughter Dr. Heidi Horsley, along with their guests Johnny Sirpilla and Stephen Panus, as they speak candidly about their own experience of child loss, and how they not only survived, but eventually found hope. Johnny is a seasoned executive leader with a dynamic 30 year career. His life changed, and his mission emerged after the death of his triplets, two sons and a daughter. Johnny;s book “Life is Hard but I’ll […]

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