Living Life More Fully: Maria Housden

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
Living Life More Fully
Host: Dr. Gloria Horsley
With guest: Maria Housden
December 15, 2005

G: Hello. I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley. Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. Our topic today is on living life more fully. My guests and I know that after a profound loss, it may seem that life is over and that you will never be happy again. But we are here each week to tell you that you truly will find happiness and love again. True, like us, you will lead a different life than you had planned but it can and will be a life filled with insight, compassion, and joy. Hold on. Things will get better. You will be able to again find pleasure in the small things of life, the first snowfall, the chime of a bell, the flight of a bird. You will find peace, quiet, and understanding for yourself and others. My guest today struggled through one year of cancer with her darling daughter, Hannah, and is here today to share with you her story and how her experience has transformed and changed her life. Today, I am honored to introduce my guest, Maria Housden, a lecturer, author, and passionate advocate for quality of life at the end of life. Maria is the author of Hannah’s Gift and Unraveled. Her books discuss the transformative lessons in living she received from her three-year-old daughter’s struggle with cancer. Maria has led bereavement support groups and speaks nationally at conferences as well as church and civic organizations. From 1995 to 1999, Maria served on the Board of Directors of Kimberly Foundation, a nonprofit organization that raised money for families of children facing life-threatening illnesses. Please join us today on our show by calling our toll free number 1-866-369-3742, with questions or comments regarding the losses in your life. You can email me through my website, healingthegrievingheart.org. These shows are archived on compassionatefriends.org as well as Health.VoiceAmerica.com. Well, Maria, welcome to the show.
M: Thank you, Gloria.
G: I’m so happy to have you on today. Now where are you calling from?
M: I’m calling from New Jersey, my little cottage in New Jersey.
G: Ah, very nice. Could you tell our audience a little bit about your life and what has brought you to writing your books and we can chat about that a bit.
M: I think like most or certainly many bereaved parents, when my daughter, Hannah, died of cancer in 1994, a tremendous aspect of my grief at that time was the thought that Hannah had only lived for three years in this world, and the idea that there were so many people who would never know what a beautiful, wise, and extraordinary spirit she was just filled me with this sense of an even greater loss. So right from the very beginning, I had the idea that I wanted to write a book to share more of her story and my own, but of course, in order to do that, well certainly from my experience, I had to really allow myself to fully experience my grief, especially in those early years.
G: Now when you were thinking about writing a book about Hannah, did you jot down things in a journal or something? Your book is so wonderful and you’re such a good writer. Did you journal to remember those stories or did you just remember them later on?
M: Well, while Hannah was sick, I did keep a journal and it was kind of funny, I imagine some parents, certainly parents who had children with terminal illnesses, may recognize themselves in this too, where if you go through my old journals, you can almost tell when we got bad news. I really used writing as a way of integrating and processing what was happening to Hannah, and so when we would get bad news about her diagnosis or relapses and things, I would find myself writing in the journal and then we’d kind of fall into this space where things felt like they were going okay and maybe Hannah was going to be all right and I would write less and less, but actually when I sat down to write the book that became Hannah’s Gift, initially I began writing about Hannah and her life about two years after her death and at that time, I was using the journals as a resource but what I realized very early on in the writing process was that I was still in a place where I was desperately trying to remember and record every little thing that happened and I realized that while all of those details were important to me as a mother, or important to our family in terms of remembering Hannah and what happened, those details weren’t necessarily the kinds of things that needed to be included in a book that I really wanted to reach and touch hearts of people who hadn’t necessarily lost a child.
G: I know that many of our listeners and for myself, too, this feeling that we’re afraid that we might forget.
M: Absolutely. What I ended up doing then when I discovered this wasn’t the kind of book I wanted to write was I essentially decided that I was going to trust that whatever memories needed to be recalled or whatever needed to be shared in the book I wanted to write, that those memories would still be alive in me when I had the strength and the energy to actually write the book, which is in fact what happened. When I ended up writing Hannah’s Gift, I never did refer to those journals and what I discovered in the process of writing the book was the way that all of us have memories that are alive in us from all different times in our lives. And what I began to discover is that the memories that were still alive in me from Hannah’s life and after her death were still alive in me because they were still teaching me something.
G: Oh, what a lovely thought.
M: There was still something to learn.
G: The teaching you. That we continue to grow, don’t we?
M: We continue to grow and we always remember.
G: Could you tell us about certainly one of the favorite memories in the book, Hannah’s little red shoes on the front page of the book?
M: Well, the day before Hannah was diagnosed, we had gone shoe shopping for preschool and I, of course, on a limited budget and all, was looking at the kind of practical blue or black patent leather Mary Janes but Hannah spotted this pair of bright red patent leather Mary Janes in the store and she immediately picked them up and said, “Mommy, these are my shoes.” And I agonized for a few minutes in the store thinking well, they’re not going to match everything in her wardrobe, and Hannah said to me, “Mommy, red matches everything.” So I ended up buying the shoes and she wore them out of the store and I remember as we crossed the parking lot thinking to myself, well, if I wake up tomorrow morning and decide this is a frivolous purchase, I can always return them, and of course, what ended up happening was the next morning I woke up and Hannah had blood in her urine and it was that afternoon that we found out that she had a tumor in her abdomen. Hannah wore those little red shoes every day for the rest of her life, that last year of her life. She even insisted when she had surgery, she wouldn’t wear the hospital gown because she didn’t like the way it looked with her shoes, but she did manage to convince the surgeons to allow her to wear her red shoes into the operating room and once she was sedated, the nurses kind of quietly slipped them off and put them in the little bag and then put them back on when she was in recovery before she woke up. So those red shoes really became a symbol for anyone that knew Hannah of her spirit, her kind of unapologetic zest for life, and her trust that you can surround yourself with the people and the things you love and everything somehow works when you do that.
G: Right. Well, it’s amazing about these little children. I worked in a hospital with terminally ill children and they have such wisdom. There’s something in the universe that gives these children an incredible amount of wisdom.
M: Well, I had the sense when Hannah was sick that there was a way that her wisdom really came from some exquisite combination of her youth and her innocence. She didn’t have the kind of baggage, for example, that I had about death and how afraid we become of death, as we grow older. She had a kind of openness to life and what was happening and didn’t have the same kinds of stories. She hadn’t yet learned how to tell all of the stories we tell ourselves about if you get sick, you’ve somehow erred or done something wrong. She just didn’t come with the baggage that the rest of us came with when she was diagnosed and I’ve always felt just a profound sense of gratitude for the fact that she was the way she was because she became really for me an example of what’s possible for all of us when we outgrow our beliefs about what should and shouldn’t happen to us as we live our lives.
G: Right. I wanted to ask you, as I read your book, one of the things that you talked about was going to a doctor earlier and the doctor said that there was nothing wrong with Hannah, maybe a month or two earlier? I know I have a cousin whose daughter had Hodgkinson’s disease and she always felt a certain amount of guilt that she didn’t catch it earlier. Did you feel any of that guilt because I know some of our listeners have responded to that and talked about feeling like they should have gotten to the doctor earlier or should have known or something?
M: Yeah, I definitely had to look at that. Part of what relieved me in some kind of strange bittersweet way was the moment Hannah was diagnosed, we were led to believe and understand that she had one of the bad cancers, so the doctors had assured me that even if we had caught this in its earliest stages that it was so malignant that there was nothing that they could have done and yet even so, that powerful experience of having taken Hannah to an emergency room, she was complaining that her stomach hurt, and to be told by the doctors there after they did a battery of tests, the one thing they hadn’t done which would have exposed the cancer was they hadn’t done an x-ray of her abdomen but they did do a chest x-ray thinking it may be pneumonia.
G: Well, it’s time for us to take a break now unfortunately, right in the middle of this. So when we get back, we’ll talk more about Hannah and also about how to live your life more fully with Maria Housden, lecturer, author, and passionate advocate for end of life issues. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and if you’d like to call in, our toll free number is 1-866-369-3742, or you can email me through my website, healingthegrievingheart.com. Stay tuned.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Gloria Horsley. My guest today is Maria Housden, lecturer, author, and passionate advocate for quality of life at end of life. She is the author of Hannah’s Gift and Unraveled. Her books discuss transformative lessons that she received during her daughter, Hannah’s, one-year struggle with cancer. Maria has led bereavement support groups and speaks nationally at conferences. Well, welcome back, Maria. When we went out on break, we were talking a little bit about your daughter, Hannah’s, death at age three from kidney cancer, is that what it would be?
M: Yes, it was a bad Wilms’ tumor. The technical term for it was Rhabdoid tumor of the kidney.
G: And that was in 1994, which would be nine years, is that right?
M: It’s been eleven years.
G: Eleven, oh wow. Now I wanted to ask you. I know that you talk a little bit and done some things about terminal illness and what people need and what you would suggest for children. Could you comment a little bit on that?
M: Yes. Well, of course, the landscape has changed somewhat since Hannah was diagnosed twelve years ago, thankfully. When Hannah was diagnosed, I was actually pregnant with our third child, Margaret, and our older son, Will, who was five-and-a-half at the time, was about to start kindergarten. It was so interesting to me that there were all of these resources available even at the library, you know, shelves of books about preparing to become a big sister, preparing for the first day of school, videos, there were programs in the community in the hospital, you know, big brother, big sister programs and yet for the most important transition that a child has to make, the transition from life to death, I found almost no resources, and it was incredibly frustrating but it also I think allowed me to trust my instincts and wing it with my instinct as a mother and to give Hannah what I thought she needed at the time. At this stage in time in my life and my work, I think one of the most important things that we can do as parents or as loved ones of someone who is dying or has a child who is dying is to be willing to show up with ourselves or with that other person with a sense of kind of honesty and openness.
G: I was going to say honesty because in your book, Hannah’s Gift, there is so much honesty and your family really talked about things when Will would ask you questions and he was what age, five, is that right?
M: He was five-and-a-half to six.
G: And the kinds of questions he was asking, where do you go? And will she die? And that kind of thing, and this isn’t good. I was very interested in Will because people are so worried about being – and I know you were concerned about being with Hannah when she actually died. And Will, it was so sweet, he said, “Mommy, I’m going to go now and come and get me when she dies.” Incredibly touching.
M: Yes. He didn’t want to be in the room when she died. He waited downstairs and when we called him back up after just seconds after Hannah passed it was so beautiful. He walked into the room where Hannah’s now body was and he looked up at the ceiling and he said, “Hi, Hannah. I’m so glad you’re not sick any more.” I felt that my willingness to be honest with my kids, of course, age appropriately, as age appropriately as possible, about what was happening really allowed them to be honest with me about what they needed and what they were feeling and what they were afraid of. And again, I think this is one of the things that we can remember not only when we’re with someone who is dying, but also when we’re with our own grief is that there is a way that our willingness to not have all the answers, like, for example, when Hannah and Will asked me, “What happens when you die?” I had to say, “I really don’t know what happens, but here are some different things that different people believe.”
G: And, by the way, this is not easy, right?
M: No. It’s not easy. But, you know, this is where I think we truly show up as parents. We all have experiences as parents not necessarily as traumatic as the death of a child, but we have experiences as parents where our children are looking to us, they’re trusting us to be the ones to tell them what’s happening, and if we’re not willing to go there with them, then who will? For me, the thought of Hannah going to her death, or Will experiencing his sister’s death without me as a resource, as a sounding board, as a source of ideas and comfort, it was unbearable to me.
G: It was also very interesting to me that you were willing to ask your doctors to stay with you. You didn’t let them off the hook.
M: I couldn’t. I couldn’t because they had their own expertise and I really, really needed everyone who was with Hannah in her life at that time to be willing to be where she was with it because it was fascinating that Hannah was not afraid to die. From the very beginning, she was not afraid to die. She was very open to talking about it and asking questions about it and so it was important to me that all of the people in her life were there to support that in her. If her doctors weren’t willing to acknowledge and support her in her dying, then who would?
G: And why are they there doing that? I know it’s difficult for some doctors, particularly, it’s interesting, cancer specialists sometimes because they are there to cure people, not to be with them when they die so it can be difficult. One of the things I also wanted to talk about was my son died in a sudden accident, and Hannah, she got progressively worse. One of the things that you said in the book was that it might be a little easier. I’m wondering over time what your thought is? I’m thinking maybe at the moment because somebody calls you and tells you your son’s dead or your daughter is such a shock. But I’m wondering after two years, three years, does it really make it any less difficult?
M: I think what I found, two things really. First of all, there’s no good time to lose someone you love. So there is no good way. It’s all painful and they come with different sets of difficulties and challenges and blessings, really. I think it’s funny how when you talk to another parent who has lost a child and you hear their story, I think every parent walks away from a conversation like that going, “Whew, at least it wasn’t like that for us.” There’s some aspect of everyone’s story that you think, “Oh, my God, now that I couldn’t do.” And in our case, I really appreciated that we knew that Hannah was dying so that I could prepare her and us for that as best as I was able and I did have a sense of clarity around what was happening but I don’t know that I would have had otherwise. At the same time, we had to endure the experience of watching Hannah suffer and there’s something that feels so incredibly unfair to me as a parent that my child had to soldier on through such devastating pain and all of the treatments and everything that, of course, she wouldn’t have had to do if she had been killed suddenly in an accident or something like that.
G: Well, Harriet Schiff was on our show and she wrote The Bereaved Parent and her son had a long-term illness and she made the comment that it is so hard on your family.
M: It is and the siblings, I think, most of all really suffer. The siblings end up parenting the parents. They end up being left kind of without ground and support in the experience because as a parent, and I think this is true for us as parents when we’re grieving, too, we simply don’t have the energy and the attention to show up the same way that we might like to.
G: And Harriet’s, I think her son was ill for many, many years, so it was very difficult. I wanted to ask you, we’re coming around the Christmas season, do you have any thoughts for parents, or any special rituals or anything that you do?
M: The first thing I would say is to give yourself permission to do whatever feels best and right and to not make decisions based on what you’ve done before or what other people think you should or shouldn’t be doing. Hannah died in August and that first Christmas, I remember, of course, we had Will who was six-and-a-half, and we had Margaret who was an infant, and some part of me felt we had to do something for Christmas, but it really wasn’t until Christmas Eve that I decided you know what, we will get a Christmas tree and we’re going to put angels on it. And one of the things I love about grief, actually, is the way that it peels away all the things that don’t matter. When you’re grieving, you know what matters to you because those are the things that you do. And I really have found that I have remade all of our holiday celebrations. I do so many things in my life differently. For example, I don’t run for the phone every time it rings. I learned when I was grieving that I could let things go.
G: Let’s pick up on that point when we come back from break. I think it’s really important about helping people figure out what they can give up during the holidays. Today our topic is Living More Fully and my guest is Maria Housden, lecturer, author, and passionate advocate for quality of end of life. She is the author of Hannah’s Gift and Unraveled. Her books discuss the transformative lessons in living she received from her three-year-old daughter’s struggle with cancer. Maria has led support groups and speaks nationally at conferences as well as church and civic organizations. From 1995 to 1999 she served on the Board of Directors of Kimberly Foundation. Please stay tuned and you may want to call in at 1-866-369-3742. This show is archived on www.healingthegrievingheart.org and www.thecompassionatefriends.org websites. Stay tuned.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and our topic today is living life more fully, and my guest today is Maria Housden. Maria is a lecturer, author, and she wrote Hannah’s Gift and Unraveled. Well, Maria, welcome back to the show again. When we went on break, we were talking a little bit about the holidays and how people could give themselves permission not to do all the things they’ve done in the past.
M: Yes. I think permission is one of the most important things for us when we’re in grief to realize that we can trust what we love and that we do find the energy and time to do the things that matter to us and I think that you mentioned, too, before the break the importance of ritual. I think ritual is an important part of the holidays. I know that for us I found that over the years what we’ve done has shifted and changed kind of dependent on just as our family has changed and our needs have changed, but you know there’s always the beauty of lighting a candle or having a place setting at the table for the one who is loved and gone.
G: Or a special ornament.
M: Or a special ornament. We still have a stocking for him and every year Santa brings another angel ornament for the tree in memory of Hannah, and I think there’s a kind of sweetness in continuing to include the reality of that loved one’s presence in our lives.
G: Absolutely. Maria, I wanted to ask you, you wrote your book Hannah’s Gift and then you went on to write another book called Unraveled and I believe it’s just out in May of this year?
M: That’s right. It was published in May of this year.
G: Could you tell us a little about that? I haven’t been able to pick up that book yet but it seems like I’ve read a little bit of the promo for it. Sounds like it’s moving on from your journey from after Hannah’s death and then moving on.
M: Yes it is. I’ve been very fortunate. It’s really received some interesting publicity and has generated some fascinating conversations in the culture about what makes a good wife and a good woman and a good mother. One of the reasons that the book and my story in gender is that conversation is because one of the things that was true for me after Hannah’s death is I felt when I began to kind of emerge back into the world from the kind of sludge of those early years of grief that
G: How many years would you think those sludging years were early years?
M: Oh, God. Well, I would say I still have my moments but they manifest in kind of different ways, but certainly the first three to five years, I think. Grief was kind of my primary experience. Everything that happened for me kind of filtered through grief. But as I began to kind of wake up in my life and realize, okay, I’m still alive, I’m still breathing, and what is it that I’m going to do with my life to give myself a sense of meaning in my life? What is worth living for from this point on? And because of those kinds of questions that I think all of us are forced to face in the wake of a child’s death, I found that I was willing to live my life much more courageously, much more fearlessly, and with much less concern about what other people thought about me, or the decisions that I was going to make.
G: Absolutely, we have a lot of our guests talk about that. The worst has happened and now I don’t think I’d be doing an internet radio show.
M: Oh, no way. I always dreamed of writing a book but I don’t think I would have. First of all, nothing could have been more compelling than the story I can tell now. Second of all, I think certainly when Hannah died, I thought I’m no longer afraid to die whatever happens, even if nothing happens. Hannah has already done it. So that kind of unapologetic way of living into my life really began to show up in I’d say three to five years after Hannah’s death. I started making some decisions in my life to make some pretty significant changes. I divorced my husband, who was Hannah’s father, which was very painful, very difficult to let go of the one person in the world who has the potential to understand why you’re going to be the way you are every birthday and anniversary that passes every year. To let go of that connection to Hannah was an incredibly difficult thing for me to do and yet I also understood that there were things that I needed to do in my life now, for example, writing Hannah’s Gift, and in order to be who I felt I was capable of being, I had to constellate a different environment for my life. I had to re-imagine my life from a completely new perspective and Unraveled is really that story. You don’t have to have read Hannah’s Gift to be able to track it and follow it, in fact, Hannah’s Gift is as much a part of Unraveled as it is Hannah’s Gift because that was the pivot point in my own experience. Hannah’s death was the reason I turned around and looked in a new direction.
G: Right. Well, I noticed Anne Lamott endorsed your book. She is so fabulous.
M: Oh, yes. I love Annie. I just love the way that she’s willing to not have a clue about so many things.
G: I don’t know if our audience has read any of her books, but if you’re going to have a baby, you should read Operating Instructions, and if you decide you want to be a writer, you should read Bird by Bird. They’re wonderful, wonderful books. Now can you tell us a little bit about how your life has changed since Hannah’s death in terms of how you feel and what you would recommend to other people?
M: Well, I absolutely believe that the death of a child, there’s a potential in grief in the wake of a child’s death that we can live into our lives differently with more attention and intention. I was so viscerally aware of the old adage that life is short, and so for me, really having a fierceness about the way I live my life, the way that I was in relationship, the kind of honesty I think that we can live into in our relationships and in our work and with ourselves is without a doubt I think one of the most incredible transformational forces that we can know in a life. When we lose a child, we suddenly have a sober and honest perspective on our lives that we have a limited amount of time. We have a limited amount of energy. We can’t always assume that we’re going to live into a long life and die a peaceful death in old age when we’ve had enough. I think that everything that we do from the moment we get news that our child has died, everything from that moment on is colored by this perspective that we now have.
G: Yeah, that was then and this is now. Well, what would you say, one of the things that comes up for me when you talk about divorcing your husband to move on, I have been married for forty-five years.
M: Oh, congratulations.
G: And going through a loss is a rough thing and we were able to make it and do it together so I just want to say to our audience it’s not inevitable because some people do feel there’s some inevitability about getting divorced after a traumatic event.
M: Yeah, and I think that really contributes to people’s sense of instability when people think, “Oh, God, every couple that loses a child ends up splitting up in the end.” What I’ve said to people in response to that is I felt that Hannah’s diagnosis and death kind of exaggerated or called to the fore all of the things that we were already doing really well in relationship. Those things we did a thousand times better. But anything that was already a difficulty in relationship just seemed to be that much worse and again, I think the willingness and the ability to really look honestly at who we are and what we need and what we want for the other. I still love my first husband, Hannah’s father, as much as I ever have. Our divorce was as much a kind of shared acceptance that we were both very different people to what we had done when we married. I was twenty when we married, and we both loved our children and yet we both needed to constellate a different life in order to do the kinds of things that we wanted to do in part because we now knew more of who we were because of grief.
G: Well with a 50% divorce rate, maybe even without Hannah’s death, you may have moved on in other directions.
M: Oh, without a doubt.
G: I know at Compassionate Friends we did a study of divorce and there was only like 12% of people who got divorced after the death of a child and I know Harriet Schiff, we talked about, put like 70% in her book and people have gotten the mistaken idea that it’s like a direct result, you know, you die, you divorce and we don’t want to scare people into thinking that.
M: This is what’s awesome about grief. Grief can teach us that we don’t have to do anything because anyone else did it. We get to do what we feel is best and right for our family and us. I think that if we live into that, if we live into the possibility that we can make more honest, more informed, and more compassionate decisions about how we want to live our life, then whatever happens as a result of that is part of the rightness of our life and part of the gift of our grief.
G: And it’s so great that you’re willing to share this all with everyone. It’s an amazing thing. We’re coming up on break again and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley. Please stay tuned to hear more about living life more fully with my guest, Maria Housden. Please join our show by calling 1-866-369-3742. You can email me through my website, www.healingthegrievingheart.org and these shows are archived on www.thecompassionatefriends.org. Please stay tuned.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and today we’re talking about living life more fully, and my guest is Maria Housden, author of Hannah’s Gift and Unraveled. We’ve been talking about the death of her daughter, Hannah, and how she’s gone on with her life and published several books, and I also want to talk to Maria about what’s going on in her life right now and I know she’s involved in some wonderful organizations. So, Maria, what are you doing now?
M: Well, I’m just about to launch an ambitious global initiative called “Grief in Action,” and the seed of it was planted in my heart when Hannah died and in the wake of my grief after her death. I know from my own experience that there is a potential in grief. When we are willing to fully allow the extent and the immensity of that experience to become a part of who we are that it can become a motivating force in our lives. It can become, you know, the same way that we were speaking earlier about what we learn about ourselves and what matters when we’re in grief. Those are the things that we do. Well, I want to create a series of retreats, three grief retreats for those who are bereaved, to come and be in a safe environment that is not about talking about everyone else’s stories. There’s a lot of silence and we use poetry and writing and it’s a very contemplative, kind of reflective environment for people to be in because as all of us who are grieving know, this culture doesn’t afford us the kind of space that we need in our lives and in the culture to be with some of the more painful and some of the more introspective aspects of the grief experience.
G: Especially as life goes on, too, after a few years when sometimes we’re really ready to start dealing with it after three or four years and then where do we go?
M: Exactly. I really felt like just as soon as I was ready to start talking about what happened and start having conversations and really integrating it into my life, everyone else in my life had already moved on and so I’m really creating the context that I longed to have when I was in grief. Grief in Action will be bringing grief work and the awareness of the way that grief shows up to all kinds of other contexts, too. So I’m partnering with some projects in South Africa and India to work with women and children with AIDS there and the people that are caring for them and to become part of the peace and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland and ultimately to bring together in a kind of U.N. of grief a circle of women who have lost children to both sides of conflicts in the world to show the way that when we lose a child we understand something about the sanctity of life that allows us to meet beyond creed and religion and the kind of culture that we grew up in and we join together and meet in our shared suffering as mothers and saying not one more child.
G: I like that idea, the U.N. of grief.
M: Oh, yeah, definitely.
G: Very good. I hope that Compassionate Friends in some way might be able to assist you in that. It sounds like a wonderful project. How would our listeners get a hold of you if they wanted to be involved in it?
M: Well, I would love to hear from anyone who either has a wish to either volunteer or be a part of the work of it or certainly and most importantly at this point anyone who knows someone or is themselves someone who might be able to fund some of these projects, and the way to reach me is I have an email address, it’s hannahsgift@juno.com and I also have a website which is hannahsgift.com and you can reach me through the website as well.
G: That’s great. As our show ends today, do you have any special tips or advice or is there anything that you haven’t said that you want to say that comes up for you?
M: Well, I just feel that the most important message that we can give those who are in grief is to really trust yourself and to trust the process that you’re in and to know that there are times for things. I think that this culture really encourages us to kind of wake up and get over it in a way that simply doesn’t support what grief really needs from us.
G: And also the lessons, as you said, the lessons it has to teach us.
M: Oh, without a doubt. Without a doubt. We have to be willing to be with it, be quiet with it, and to trust ourselves in the process of it and do what feels best and right at that time and not be concerned about what other people will think about that.
G: And ask things as you move away from it and get a little further from your grief, I think one of the things I’m picking up from you, Maria, and one of the things I feel is it becomes somewhat interesting. I mean, there are so many things to learn from it if you listen.
M: What I feel about grief in terms of my experience is, I don’t know that I’ve moved any further from my grief but I think that my grief has become more a part of who I am. I think my life now is about integrating the things that I know, the things that I believe, the things that I understand now about myself into my life that my life has become an expression of who I am and what I have learned from my experience.
G: All right. Well, Maria, I want to thank you so much. Having Maria Housden on the show has just been absolutely fabulous. I love your book. I’m going to get the second one. Hannah’s Gift and Unraveled and you can get hold of Maria at hannahsgift.com and if you just google Hannah’s Gift, you’ll be also able to get a hold of her. And thank you so much for being on the show. You’re a great writer and a great woman.
M: Well, it takes one to know one, Gloria.
G: Thank you. Next week on our show we’re going to have Rex and Nancy Gleim, retired educators who will explore the needs of families during the holidays and they’ll share tips on making the holidays brighter for teens and young adults who are grieving the death of friends and loved ones. In 1992 Rex and Nancy’s son Ryan died in an automobile accident and after his death they founded two local chapters of The Compassionate Friends in Indiana and in 2002, in response to their community’s need, they founded Ryan’s Place, a grief center for families. This show is archived on my website, www.healingthegrievingheart.org as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org and www.voiceamerica.com websites. This is Dr. Gloria Horsley. Please stay tuned again next Thursday at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time, 12:00 Eastern, for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope and renewal and support, and remember others have been there before you and made it, and you can too. You need not walk alone. Thanks for listening. I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley.