About Me

 

Hi. My name is Gloria. I appreciate you joining me here, and for your interest in reading the stories and experiences I’ve been sharing here. We will all find ourselves on the journey of dealing with grief at some point in our life. Whether you’re here because you’re in the middle of it now; or you’ve come out on the other side; or maybe you were just curious when you landed on this page. Whatever brought you here, I’d like to think that there must be a reason. So I hope it’s been worth your time.

Most people think of grief as a process someone goes through after losing a loved one. But grief can be the result stemming from several different forms of loss or other life-changing events that happens other than the passing of someone close to you.

For me, I’ve personally experienced several forms of loss that resulted in me grieving those losses. Probably the most difficult time period in my life was the 3 1/2 year period when I lost my mom, loss relationships with half of my siblings; then lost my dad. The same year my dad passed, my church went through a dysfunctional break after an ugly and public fight; an old friend I’d grown really close to lost her battle with cancer; and less than a week after returning from her funeral, I found out that I would be losing my job at the end of that year (with barely a five-week notice before the Christmas break).

I’ve grieved the loss of friendships and former co-workers; and even grieved over things that had not yet happened in my life — like having my own children — in part because they had not happened.

And I’ve also come alongside friends as they’ve dealt with their own grief. I watched as friends grieved the loss of their marriages; grieved over miscarriages of their babies; and the grief after saying goodbye to grown children who had moved out of the home and on with their lives.

For me, having a psychology background didn’t help, as I often stumbled through various stages along this process the “experts” call the Five Stages of Grief; at times still gasping for air in the middle of one thing as another landslide started. But soon realized that knowing about the stages of grief is no substitution for going through them!

So I kept journals. My way of screaming into pillows to get emotions out that were doing too much damage to my body, my spirit, my very soul, being locked inside. And now, over a decade later, I’m only now ready to share publicly what I’d already been doing privately with friends who, like me, seemed to be struggling through this process for various reasons. Not that I have the answers. But because I don’t, that I share the journey; the struggle; the positive and negative outcomes as a result of my actions and in some cases, inaction.

So that’s me. Or should I say, just one part of all of the many pieces that make up the whole of who I am.