AN UNCONVENTIONAL LOOK AT GRIEF
In their non-fiction book, Living Life after Losing One (Cedar Fork), Oregon mother of seven, Alice Rampton, and her friend Nikki King, mother of five, joined forces to take on the daunting task of looking at their grief in an unconventional approach.
Contrary to a common belief that grieving is something you do and get through; these women show us great strength. Grief, as a process for the rest of your life, is what we see in their writing; it becomes more bearable, and your emotions are not as intense.
Grief occurs in all lives, and in many ways. Rampton and King’s book focuses on the grief of one child lost to cancer and another one to a car accident, as well as a myriad of other possibilities with additional interviews. They believe that grief does not have to destroy a family or a relationship, but that trauma can give new life and new meaning to families in different ways.
Just as a broken bone that has healed is often stronger than the original, similarly the heart has the capacity to grow stronger from grief. Nowhere is that demonstrated more clearly than with these two women and their friends. While dealing with their relationships under incredible stress, they now know a personal strength they did not recognize previously.
In this work, Rampton and King discuss the roots of grief, the triggers, the ways of coping with it, the process and stages of grief taken on your grief journey, and the secrets to maintaining a healthy healing. Grief is so common and so poorly understood, and yet it was a motivator for them to interview a group of other mothers with the same loss experience, both anticipated or unforeseen.
To look at a new perspective on grief and to choose their futures, all the women speaking to us in the book sought to be alive again. Each one, in their own way, resorted to leaving the constraints of grief to support each other and to give and receive kindness and joy.
They eventually felt free from the restraints of grief and understood they had the right to be happy, to move on, to be optimistic. They began to give themselves, and each other permission to be more than their loss situation.
Grief is a powerful alarm system for all members of a family. The siblings are also studied in the storytelling. Once the women dealt with the acute pain of the loss, of a future without their child, they looked more realistically at where their lives were going.
They each acknowledged the hurt, the guilt, and the mistrust, and began to live again. They found new meaning in all of it by asking questions of themselves and the others who share this unique bond of being the parent who’s lost a child.
What was this all about? What’s the insight? Why did this happen?
Conclusion: Grief isn’t black and white.