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,” […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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). […]
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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 […]
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