I was 24 when my little brother died. Losing Will was devastating– we were supposed to enjoy another 50 or 60 years of sharing our (dark!) sense of humor, reminiscing about our shared childhood, and watching each other’s lives unfold. So often, for so long, I felt like his death broke me. It’s been almost […]
Author Katie Morini, left, and her sister Amanda Randall, right People often ask me, ” What was it like to see your sister struggle with her addiction?” This sounds like such a simple question, but the answer is never easy to find. I often find myself at a loss for words…. nothing can explain how […]
I’ve been getting more and more messages and emails from people who’ve lost brothers or sisters to drug and/or alcohol related causes. This new essay I wrote for The Fix talks about the stigma of losing someone this way. Click here to read.
While we all experience grief in slightly different ways, and we may choose different coping methods, there are also commonalities. I’m over at Elephant Journal, talking about 5 things I never expected about grief. 5 Things we Don’t Get about Grief.
Whether it’s because our loved one died violently, or somewhere far away, or their body hasn’t been found, we can’t always see our dead. What happens when we aren’t able to see them? For my family, it meant we searched for my brother. I’m thrilled to have a new post over at the amazing […]
Losing a loved one is always hard. But when you feel like your grief isn’t recognized, isn’t valid, it adds an extra layer of pain. Click below to read more about this on elephant journal. The Specific Qualities of Sibling Grief—How it Morphs & Marks Us.
The death of singer and musician Chris Cornell stirred up my grief around my brother in a big way. It’s beginning to ebb, but that only happened when I untangled some of the threads that his death brought to light. Read more about it here.
If you’ve recently lost someone you love, you probably don’t want to hear that buried beneath the terrible sadness are little gleaming gems. That loss sets us down a different path than we’d hoped for, but that sometimes, if we’re lucky, grief has the power to remake us. I’m not going to say “Everything happens […]
To my child: The months after you were born were tough ones. You cried a lot and slept little. Your assessment of this bright, new world was decidedly unsatisfactory. In between fussing though, you offered just enough syrupy, middle-of-the-night smiles to melt away the challenges and make me want to buy you a pony, or anything […]
Do you ever experience nostalgia so intensely that it has skin? “You will miss your childhood at the strangest moments. Like when you’re 42, and you’re watching your son catch air in the bright February sun. I want to tell you this secret of adulthood, the one that still catches me by surprise.” Read more of […]