Claire Perkins

Claire Perkins is a Transformational Arts Coach and award-winning author of The Deep Water Leaf Society: Harnessing the Transformative Power of Grief (Intuitive Journey Press 2008). After losing her eldest son to a drug overdose in 2004, Claire embarked on a conscious and creative journey of healing and personal growth. By using a unique combination of dream work, journaling, expressive arts and inner guidance, Claire learned that within this deep experience of grief a gift of profound spiritual transformation awaited her discovery. Claire believes that every loss you experience and every challenge you face can be used to fuel the next cycle of your own personal and spiritual evolution. She offers one-on-one coaching and workshops to help you move through grief into healing. Using gentle but powerful art and journaling techniques, she can help you to find peace with your loss and discover the gifts that may be buried beneath your grief.

Articles:

Declaring Independence From Grief

Here in the U.S. we celebrate the Fourth of July as Independence Day. It is the day that Congress approved a Declaration of Independence from British rule. It marks the birth of our nation as a free, self-governing entity. The Declaration asserts that everyone has the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and claims that when any form of governance “becomes obstructive to these ends,” it is our right “to alter or to abolish it.” When grief has reigned as king in our lives for too long, it may be that we, too, need to declare our […]

Messages of Love

Over the years since my son’s death by overdose in 2004, I have received many messages and signs from him. Some have come in dreams, some through songs on the radio. Perhaps the most powerful of all have been the heart-shaped stones and shells washed up by the sea to remind me that love never dies. September 2004, South Padre Island – Calling Out Four months after my son died, I visited South Padre Island and walked on the beach, feeling broken, drained and missing Cameron. I shouted and cried my grief into the sky and the sea. I felt […]

Love Never Dies

I sat with my father for the last time on Thursday, the 18th of December, 2008. His condition was not much different from the past several days; he was sleeping and unresponsive. For so many days now, I’d been sitting at his bedside, holding his hand, talking to him and wondering if he even heard me anymore. Watching him breathe. There was so little life left in him. I was scheduled to leave the next morning on a 6 am flight to Colorado to see my daughter graduate from CSU. I had a feeling he wouldn’t be here anymore when […]

The Sweater: Daughter Wishes She Could Repay Father’s Gift

It is the third of December 2008. I sit by my dad’s bedside, holding his hand and watching him breathe, holding my breath as his stops for several seconds, only exhaling when he finally takes another faltering breath. I count: ten seconds of silence followed by a gasping breath, then fifteen seconds of shallow noisy breathing. Over and over the cycle repeats. His mouth opens and closes with a little pop on each exhale —“guppy breathing,” the hospice nurse calls it. His left hand reaches up, as if grasping for something—or maybe pushing something away. I read to him: Jonathan […]

Looking Through the Window: A View of ‘Home’

It is the summer of 2007. At eighty-five years old, my mother is in the hospital for the second time in as many weeks. She is weak and tired and more than a little frightened. At the age of eighty, her kidneys failed. She’s been a dialysis patient for five years now, and while it’s given her new life it has also been hard on her body and spirit. Heart problems, pneumonia and now a GI bleed have required these most recent hospitalizations. She lies in her hospital bed looking out the small window. The angle of the bed is […]

Surviving Children, Husband Save Mother’s Day After Son Dies

Mother’s Day 2004 came six days after my oldest son Cameron died. We had not even had the funeral yet, as the circumstances of his death required an autopsy by the county coroner’s office and his body had not yet been released. The meaning of the day, the meaning of what it meant to be a mother, had changed for me utterly and completely. Being a mother now included the incomprehensible truth of outliving a child. It included the feeling of a heart so shattered that I doubted it could ever be whole again. It included the knowledge that no […]

Four Friends for the Grief Journey

During my journey through grief, here were four friends that never failed me: journaling, expressive arts, dreams and synchronicity. My book, The Deep Water Leaf Society, is full of examples of how these companions helped to guide me toward healing. Here is a brief overview of how you can bring these friends along with you on your own healing journey. JOURNALING When you’ve lost a loved one, all kinds of things go through your mind and heart. You feel many emotions. You may have regrets. You may be beating yourself up with the “if onlys.” There may be things you […]

Good Friday: Even in Darkest Night, Sun Waits to Rise

I’ve been thinking about the Easter story as a metaphor for my own journey through grief. I’ve been thinking about Good Friday and the days leading up to it, because in reality that’s where the Easter story begins. It begins with the dark night of the soul. It begins with a death. In my life, the darkness wound through years of watching helplessly as my son Cameron struggled with addiction and, at times, homelessness. The darkness only deepened with his death by overdose in the county jail on May 3, 2004. As in the Bible’s story of Jesus’ death, there […]

Helping a Child Cope With the Death of a Grandparent

The death of a grandparent can be especially difficult for a young child. But there are ways that you can help the child cope. For example, you can ask the child to draw some pictures of her and her grandfather together and then tell you about the pictures. Or you can suggest that the child draw a picture of the grandparent in heaven. If the picture comes out scary, ask the child to draw another one in which the grandparent is having fun, doing what he or she always loved to do. The reality is that young children often find […]

The Twins Born From Grief

Exactly one year to the day after losing my 26-year-old son to a drug overdose, I had this dream: May 3, 2005 – The doctor tells me I’m pregnant. Oh my God, I don’t want to have another baby at this age! It will be so much work and I don’t have the energy. I am torn. I love babies, but I don’t want one of my own. Yet, I can’t have an abortion because I feel like God must have given me this baby and I can’t turn away from that. I hope that maybe the doctor is wrong. […]

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