The Grief Recovery Institute, as an organization, takes no position on political or social issues. We only have positions on how effectively we can help people deal with their reactions to loss of every imaginable kind. Of course, if we had the power, we would eliminate all events that harm anyone, but that’s not realistic.
A man once said, "Grief is the feeling of reaching out for someone who has always been there, only to discover when we need them one more time, they are no longer there." Today there are many people feeling just that way as they hear of the death of Fred Rogers. All across America, people are mourning the death of someone who came into their homes and their hearts for many years.
Indelibly embedded in our collective consciousness is a huge psychic scar, the result of the litany that began with the savage events of 9/11/01. Many of us are left with a low-grade emotional infection that never quite goes away. The constant potential for further acts of terrorism - vague, nonspecific, and unpredictable - has engendered a hypervigilance which corrodes daily life.
This week has occasioned the celebration of my 40/20 birthday. At least that's how a dear friend labeled it - you do the math. Having reached another chronological marker in my life reminded me of a conversation I had with my mother several years ago.
It was a chilling year, highlighted in part by the daily body count of the world-wide blood bath, which appears as an incessant nightly crawl on the bottom of TV screens everywhere.
As fate would have it, in the lives we led before we began helping people deal with loss, we happened to have been acquainted with some of the legendary people who inhabited the worlds of rock ‘n roll, the movies, and television. Sadly, many of them shuffled off this mortal coil a whole lot sooner than age statistics might suggest they should.