Elizabeth Brady

Elizabeth's son Mack died suddenly on New Year's Eve 2012. Elizabeth teaches at Penn State and her essays on learning to live with loss can also be read on The Compassionate Friends, Modern Loss, and Motherwell. She has participated on the panel "A Flower Picked Too Soon" at several national Compassionate Friends conferences. Elizabeth served on the content advisory board for the Public Television documentary "Speaking Grief" that seeks to help us all get better at grief. (speakinggrief.org) Elizabeth's collection of essays "Oil for Your Lantern: Sharing Light After the Death of a Child" was published in November 2024 with Sunbury Press.

Articles:

Three Years After Son’s Death, the Emptiness is Sacred

“It is your season, Elizabeth,” our priest greeted me, more than eight months pregnant and my body filled to bursting with our son, John, during Advent 2003. “It is,” I laughed. “I can’t wait to hold him!” Our daughter, Izzy, six at the time, was dubious about a little brother joining her domain in January. We began reading the first chapter of Luke out loud feeling a kinship with Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, enjoying the company of her cousin Mary while they were both expecting their sons. And, like their sons, our John, nicknamed “Mack,” came to us […]

Read More

Lent as a Verb, Not a Noun

In Christendom Lent, from the Latin for “forty,” is the annual season of fasting and penitence for 40 weekdays before Easter. But, as someone in mourning, I’m having a hard time thinking about giving up chocolate or staying off Facebook as anything as penitential as the sudden death of our son Mack, 8, on New Year’s Eve 2012. The standard preparation for Lent asks us to step away from our busy lives and consider our mortality: for you were made from dust, and to dust you will return. Until Mack died, Lent was a kind of intrusion into my busy […]

Read More

Ask, Seek, and Knock Loudly on God’s Door

On the snowy night of December 30, 2012, I was reflecting on the past year in my journal. I have journaled regularly since 1990, when I lived in the bush in West Africa and had little else to occupy myself during the silent nights in my mud brick house. I wrestled for a while as to whom I was addressing my journal, but eventually I realized I was sharing my thoughts and fears with God. So, I have written thousands of “Dear Lord” entries over the years. Curled up in front of the fire after the kids were asleep, I […]

Read More

Another School Year Begins

We hosted a college graduation party at our house for our nephew last weekend. My husband’s family was here, including our 95-year-old great-grandmother, all four grandparents in various levels of physical health. This made five generations gathered to hear my brother-in-law speak of his three children, who have now all graduated from college, and we toasted their accomplishments. I sat on the porch with my beautiful daughter Izzy, 16, listening to the toasts and thinking that it won’t be too long before she is graduating high school and heading to college. But our sweet Mack, who died suddenly of sepsis […]

Read More