Paul Bennett

Paul Bennett is a writer living near Washington, DC. He was married to Bonnie Bunting for twenty years. After her death in 2002, he began writing and speaking about grief and about his exploration of spiritual and emotional growth as he built a new life. His book, Loving Grief, published by Larson Publications, was named “Best Inspirational Book” for the fall of 2009 by The Montserrat Review. For more information on the book, visit www.lovinggrief.com. To listen to Paul’s interview with Dr. Gloria and Dr. Heidi Horsley, click on the following link: http://www.voiceamericapd.com/health/010157/horsley102209.mp3. A video of Paul reading from Loving Grief is on the AARP site at: http://radioprimetime.org/specials/focusspecials/bennett/index.htm.

Articles:

Winter Grief

“When we scattered the ashes, the land was bare and brown and dry and cold. And we ourselves felt bare and cold. We were feeling the death in us, Rebecca and I, and hoping for spring to come, hoping for spring in us, hoping for something to be reborn.” – Loving Grief Does your grief have a different color in winter? Does winter seem more in tune with your grief than spring does? Winter landscapes here in the middle Atlantic states are rarely white. They’re mostly just bare, dominated by grays and browns. Cold rain is more common than snow. […]

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Grief Soup: The Mix of Emotions

If only grief were simple: sadness, tears, missing that beloved person. If only we could be alone in stillness with the absence (and the starting presence) of that dear person we’ve lost. Maybe then we could simply rest in the plain sorrow of love and let our grief be. What you get, though, is it not just grief but grief soup – a rich and varied blend of emotions that is as unique as you are. Grief soup is a mixture of love and sadness, fear and anger, regret and resentment, with a healthy dose of loneliness, most likely, and […]

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Coming Out of a ‘Cold Winter of Grief’

For three months this winter, the mid-Atlantic was locked in a hard freeze. The ground was solid, trees bare, and the flower beds were buried under dirt-encrusted snow. Birds were mobbing the feeder out back, and I wondered how they manage to survive weather like that. At this season, in the months after my Bonnie died, the barrenness of the landscape mirrored my inner bleakness. I described that in Loving Grief: When we scattered the ashes, the land was bare and brown and dry and cold. And we ourselves felt bare and cold. We were feeling the death in us, […]

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When Death Steals Your Holidays

We all have images about how life should look, and those images are never more powerful than when we look ahead to a holiday. My wife, Bonnie, loved Christmas. The fall when she was dying of cancer, she ordered presents by phone and online, sent our daughter Rebecca to stores, and had me pack presents for shipping. She finished all her Christmas shopping, and she died on the 17th of December. A couple of days after Bonnie’s memorial service, Rebecca and I opened the gifts Bonnie had bought for us. We were numb, uprooted. The only thing stranger than opening […]

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