Maria Kubitz

Maria Kubitz lost her four year old daughter in a drowning accident in 2009. In her grief journey, Maria continually tries to find ways to learn from the pain, and maintain a loving, healthy environment for her four other children. She volunteers as newsletter editor at a local chapter of The Compassionate Friends, and in 2012, Maria created www.aliveinmemory.org – a blog about learning to live with grief.

Articles:

The Terms of My Surrender

From the moment you came into my life, I hated you. I despised you. You came on the heels of my worst nightmare come true – the death of my young daughter. I didn’t know your name at the time. I just knew that you brought with you all the horrible feelings and emotions I had spent a lifetime learning how to repress and ignore. You broke my defenses down like they were candles trying to stay lit in a hurricane. You pounded me with pain, panic, anger, confusion, hysterics, anguish…and too many more to list. Mostly you came in […]

We Would Have Died For You: The Journey of Bereaved Parents

From the moment we found out you were coming into our lives, we felt electric: a mix of excitement, adrenalin, and a dose of fear for good measure. We dutifully began plotting the course of our lives together – starting with milestones like kindergarten, puberty, graduation, career, wedding, grandchildren, etc. Then we began making our maps more detailed with our hopes and dreams for you. We prepared as well as we could for your arrival. On the day we welcomed you into our lives, we held out our loving arms and said softly, “Welcome. We’ve been waiting for you.” We […]

Grief and the Loss of Control

Possibly one of the hardest aspects of grief for me has been that I can’t control it. I spent the majority of my life trying desperately to control everything in it. I wanted life to be predictable and – above all – peaceful. The problem has been what I tried to control and how I’d gone about it. I spent many, many years trying to control the people and situations around me through careful, strategic use of my own words, actions (or lack thereof), and responses. It was exhausting and depressing. And as you can imagine, it never really worked. […]

Finding Light in the Darkness of Grief

Over four years after her death, thoughts of my daughter fill my mind every day. She has now been gone longer than she was alive. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She was supposed to live a long life full of adventure, creativity, and quirkiness. As my only daughter in a family full of boys, she was supposed to be my best friend and confidant. She was supposed to… Whatever she was “supposed to do” was lost the day she died. My dreams for her will never come true. I am left sitting here holding my shattered dreams of […]

Looking for Hope in the New Year

For many, welcoming in the New Year is a celebration of optimism and hope. Many see it as a fresh start and a chance to take steps to improve both their lives and perhaps themselves. Of course, this isn’t a view shared by all. For the newly bereaved, the New Year can be an incredibly painful milestone. Thinking back to the first New Year after the death of my daughter four years ago, I was blindsided by how painful it was for me. She died on September 30, so I had been preoccupied with overwhelming anxiety over how I was […]

‘How Are You?’: A Silent Signpost for the Newly Bereaved

“How are you?” It is such a seemingly simple, benign question. Often, those who ask the question are not doing so out of real concern, but just as a polite, meaningless pleasantry. Just as often, those who answer the question would never think to respond with anything other than the implicitly expected “I’m fine” or “Good. How are you?” – even if everything wasn’t fine. But what happens when the simple question of “How are you?” becomes a harsh reminder of the isolation felt by anyone struggling with overwhelming grief? What happens when it becomes the silent signpost marking the […]

Just Let Me Be Sad: A Response to the Stigma of Grief

We live in a world where – if you have the means – pain and suffering are to be avoided at all costs. We are always looking for the next “quick fix” to alleviate discomfort with the least amount of effort required. In many cases, this means treating the symptoms while ignoring the root cause of the problem. In the United States, we live in a society so uncomfortable with emotional pain that when someone dies, society expects the outward mourning period to end once the funeral is over. When the bereaved do not cooperate with these prescribed time tables, […]

Surviving the Isolation of Grief: A Mother’s Story

I’ve never been a stranger to the isolation that comes from feeling like you just don’t fit into your surroundings. But I never felt as isolated in my whole life as I did after the death of my daughter. A History of Isolation As a child, I was a shy, introverted person and often felt different than the people around me. At the time, I never really knew why. While I didn’t like the feeling of isolation, I didn’t understand what caused it so it just became a fact of life. Over the years my shyness has lessened, but I […]

The Fear of Forgetting

Since my daughter died just after turning four years old, one of my biggest fears has been that she will be forgotten. But lately, I’ve been asking myself: What does that really mean? What am I really scared of? The idea that she will be forgotten is actually two separate fears. The first is that due to the notion of “out of sight, out of mind,” friends and even family will stop thinking of her and, in essence, “forget her”. In reality, this is the natural course of life. I have beloved relatives and dear friends who have passed, and […]

Navigating the Ebb and Flow of Grief

At almost four years after the death of my daughter, I had thought it would be easier than this. In those early days and months when my grief made it feel like I simply couldn’t survive this loss, I saw others in support groups who had lost their loved ones many years before, and they seemed ok. They looked almost “normal” again. They told me it wouldn’t always be like this. They said you learn to live with the pain, and it would lessen over time. They said you will eventually find joy and happiness again. They said you create […]

Open to Hope is an online community offering inspirational stories of loss, hope and recovery. We believe hope is the bridge between loss and recovery.