Cheryl Espinosa-Jones

Cheryl Jones is a grief counselor and the host of Good Grief radio at VoiceAmerica. During her education as a Marriage and Family Therapist, her first wife was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, which was at the time a uniformly terminal illness with a six month to one year prognosis. In the eight years that followed, Cheryl engaged daily in the work of preparing for her death. She was trained during this period by Stephen and Ondrea Levine (Who Dies and Grieving Into Life and Death) and Richard Olney (founder of Self-Acceptance Training). After her wife’s death, Cheryl immersed herself in her own multifaceted grief, startled by frequent moments of joy.! ! Along with her private therapy practice, Cheryl is Manager of Professional Education at the Women’s Cancer Resource Center in Oakland, CA. She has trained extensively with Erving Polster, leader in the field of gestalt therapy and author of Everybody’s Life is Worth a Novel. Previously, she was Clinical Director at the Alternative Family Project, which served the therapeutic needs of LGBTQ families in San Francisco. She also wrote a column for the San Francisco Bay Times called Motherlines and ran Considering Parenthood groups for the LGBT community. Website: www.weatheringgrief.com Good Grief host page: www.voiceamerica.com/show/2264/good-grief

Articles:

The Blessing

Not long before Joanne, my wife, died, she told me she expected me to love again. She said it would “not be right to waste all the lessons we’d learned,” and I was “too young” never to love again. When I replied that I couldn’t imagine any love ever being as good as ours, she replied, “maybe it will be better.” She was bedridden by then, disabled by multiple myeloma, and we spent most of our time in her room, talking, cuddling, and receiving visitors. This was after I’d taken a leave from my therapy practice so I had lots […]

Revolutionary Act: Choosing Love When Death is All Around

The past few months, I’ve been struck dumb, collapsed by the weight of what Francis Weller calls the “sorrows of the world.” The best I could do most of the time was share stories other people were writing. I managed a brief comment on Good Grief, my radio show, after 49 people were killed at the Pulse club in Orlando and then silence captured me. What could I say to the unfolding of too many events to absorb, all of them pointing to the tremendous capacity of human beings to go cold and violent? After the Pulse massacre, I flashed […]

After Father’s Death, Daughter Recalls His Deep Devotion

My father was an activist who devoted his life to one principle: that God is love. He once told me that he was a Christian because he was born in a Christian household in a Christian culture and it might have been otherwise if he’d been born in, say, the Middle East. His belief in the power of love was so all inclusive that when I, in 1971, revealed I was a lesbian, he never said one negative word to me. It was only after his death that I saw his writing, in which he struggled with whether he had […]

Thank You, Stephen Levine

It was intermission at In The Name of Love, a yearly concert in honor and memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Each year, Living Jazz gathers incredible musicians to offer musical tribute and this year, they were all singing Nina Simone. My choir, the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir always sings and the night has particular meaning to me because my father spent the most vital years of his career as a civil rights worker. He was on the bridge in Selma, he registered voters and, to his great honor, he was near MLK, behind him on the steps, when […]

First Christmas Without Mom

I’m searching the internet for ways to get through this first festival of lights season without my mother. The articles I read about loss and the holidays offer helpful tips for getting through it. So many helpful suggestions: find meaning in your traditions, ask for help, plan ahead, discover what has most value to you, change it up, keep it the same, leave an empty chair at the table, feel the absence. This small list hardly scratches the surface. And what I keep thinking is, skip to January! This is not an option I would actually take, because in some […]

Letter to a Loved One, Twenty Years Later

Dear Joanne, Today marks twenty years since I walked you over the threshold and out of your life on this earth. It feels like yesterday. It feels like 100 years ago. I cried last night at the benefit for the Breast Cancer Fund. It’s complicated when I cry like that. I’m crying because you are no longer bringing your good nature, your fierce determination and your insight into this life. I’m crying because so many others are going through what we went through (the room was full of them). I’m crying in wonder and disbelief at all the changes we […]

Emergency 2009: A Father Falls

It’s getting close to dinner time and I’m in the kitchen, ingredients on the counter and a pan heating up. The phone rings. It’s my mother. It’s not a usual time for her to call, but I don’t think much of it. “Cheryl, something terrible has happened.” I have that strange feeling you get when you come home to a house that has been burglarized. Something is not right, but what is it? The evidence is in front of me, but it doesn’t add up to any conclusion. I am suddenly alert. “What’s happened, Mom?” “Your dad was out for […]

Mourning Mother

Exactly a month after my mother’s death, I’ve boarded a plane for Toronto, Canada to train with the cancer center there in their protocol, CALM (Managing Cancer and Living Meaningfully). It’s hard to leave home right now. I stick close to my wife and become easily overcome by the many details of living. On the other hand, I’m going somewhere that my grief will be, I assume, accepted, and where I will have space to appreciate that my mother died prepared, facing death squarely with her eyes open, just as this program teaches us to facilitate. What a gift she […]

Wildest Dreams: How We Can Learn to Grieve

On the day my wife died, the house was overflowing. In the room with me were our kids, 2 1/2 and 14, and a few friends who had pretty much moved in with us those weeks when we knew it was the end. Out in the living room were people who had supported us through her illness, really supported us! They fed us, took care of our baby and helped our teenager navigate having a parent with life-limiting cancer. They had been there when we cried, and laughed, and napped; even for our difficult conversations. We all learned together to […]