I have been working with people in grief and bereavement for the last couple of years now. I started this work despite my husband's, mother's, and some friends' objections and worries. "Why do you do this to yourself?" some asked. I didn't understand the question and none of my answers were relatable to the question's bearer. I know people who loved me wanted to protect me from feeling sad or getting hurt. The inevitable nature of loss is embedded in any organism's organic livelihood. We humans carry the torch of logical thought, emotional understanding, and the highest cognitive abilities among all mammals. Yet we forget this simple fact every day: just like we are born, we die. I am not writing this to make anyone upset. I want to write about the preciousness of every breathing moment we have in this beautiful experience we call life.  

In the early days of April 2020, the COVID-19 virus caught me. I was nailed in bed, continually checking my fever and oxygen level, feeling scared and lonely. My husband was stuck overseas on a business trip and my daughters had to take care of me.  It was a strange time. The virus held me tight, put me at a standstill in my life. I felt almost suspended in the air looking down at my life, thinking "What if I die today?" I wanted to see my 50th birthday in August. I wanted to see my husband again. I wanted to hold my daughters again.  I wanted to have a cup of tea with friends again. I wanted to swim in the Mediterranean sea again. I wanted to be able to get up and cook and then eat with my family again. The richness of my life and my experiences overwhelmed me. My desire to work and help many more in grief and bereavement grew ten times more. I wanted to help many more people find meaning and hope in their sorrow. 

It took me eight weeks to feel physically almost normal again. I don't think that I will ever forget the experience. A young man whom I knew to be a healthy athlete got sick with the Corona virus around the same time that I did. Unfortunately, he died. Why him? Why not me? Those questions shook me to my core. I still have no answers but now, every morning, I open up my eyes and tell myself that anything can happen today. It could be the last day of my life or the last day of any of my loved ones' lives. How do I want to spend my day? What are my choices? How can I help my first Lyme and then COVID-19 hit body function better? How can I be helpful to my family, friends, and clients? Every night going to bed has become a whole celebration… another day spent in this beautifully rich existence. And I have got to see my 50th birthday! I lived half a century! Who knew?

While we go on with the usual craze of our daily lives, sometimes a piece of breaking news can hit us hard and shatter our perception of control. Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna and their seven friends, losing their lives unexpectedly on a friendly, family-oriented outing, shook the nation. Ever since the news broke, I can see how everyone talks about this accident with the feeling of having the rug pulled beneath our feet… It is as if we are trying to regain our balance, the sense of control.

We live with the practice of progress, growth, and development in a linear fashion. Nothing in our daily lives prepares us for the unexpected, untimely ends. Loss and death are such complicated subject matters that we don’t like to talk about. Grief and bereavement are lonely journeys people have to take. We expect those who survived the death of their loved ones to heal in the same linear fashion that we practice progress and growth. Yet grief is the only journey that has nothing linear or straight. Death and loss is the one time that we are reminded of the fact that life is actually fragile, and there is no guarantee for tomorrow.

I didn’t write to upset anyone about the accident and the beautiful people who died during that accident. I wanted to write to remind us parents how precious and wonderfully valuable each day we spent with our families. Our children need to hear how much we love them every day. They also need to understand that we know about how much they love us every day. I also wanted to write to remind us, parents, how much we need each other’s support in our parenting journey. That need becomes bigger in magnitude when one survives death and loss. So let’s reach out to those who are in bereavement even if we don’t have the right words to say. And honest approach combined with a genuine desire to help goes a long way. Without the expectations of quick fixes, fast recoveries, counting stages of standardized grief recipes, and “moving on,” let’s stand by our friends in grief. Let’s be their witness in moving forward in this messy, hard, rocky, and one of the unescapable journeys in life we call grief. If you like to learn more about how to help our friends and loved ones in grief and bereavement here are some local and online resources:

Online: https://www.dougy.org https://www.bosplace.org/en/ https://www.ourhouse-grief.org

Local: https://www.bcwtreehouse.org https://www.rtor.org/directory/family-centers-the-den-for-grieving-kids/