6 Months of Grief Project: Day 83

Dead Plants Return to Life

This is Day 83 of my #6MonthsOfGrief Project. To learn more about this practice, feel free to visit Day One, where I explain this project in more detail.

I have some amazingly sturdy plants in my garden. They withstand extreme elements of high winds, blazing hot sun and cold frosts. Often they look dead, but I will always see a little sprout of green hanging in there. Now that Spring is here, my seemingly dead plants have returned and come alive again, growing tall and bursting with flowers. My late husband really took care of the garden, and I have had a hard time doing basic gardening chores, since that's what we did together. Every time I go outside to pull weeds, I break down crying, looking at the planter boxes he built for spring vegetables, that he never got to plant.

I'm grateful for these sturdy, tough plants that return from death every year. I am also returning from death and trying to flower.

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I am very aware that this project can bring up a lot around yours or other's grief and loss, I will always follow every post with some online grief support resources that have helped me. Please feel free to let me know of online support that you have found healing in your grief, as well:

Art with Grief:

• Photographer [Sarah Treanor] Takes Moving Self-Portraits to Cope with Her Fiance's Death by Jillian Wong
• When the Fall Comes, a film about Grief by Adriana Marchione
• Self-Portraits: Expressing Emotion Through Art on What's Your Grief?
• The Hard Romance of Grief by Mark Liebenow
• The poetry of John O’Donohue

Resources for Widows:

• Widowed Village
• Camp Widow

• Soaring Spirits International

Living with Grief Resources:

• Modern Loss's excellent resource list
• The Rules of Grief are for Other People by Shawn Doyle on The Good Men Project
• Grief Bibliography on Grief Healing
• Teresa “TL” Bruce's What to Say When Someone Dies
• They Brought Cookies: For A New Widow, Empathy Eases Death's Pain by Ann Finkbeiner on NPR
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
• Megan Devine’s Refuge in Grief
• The Geography of Sorrow: Francis Weller on Navigating Our Loses, interviewed by Tim McKee in Sun Magazine
• How to Be a Friend in Deed by Bruce Feiler in the New York Times
• 12 Things to Know About the First Year of Grieving Someone You Can’t Live Without by Laurie Costanza in Elephant Magazine

And remember, I am sharing this project on a variety of platforms, including my Instagram, Twitter, & Facebook feeds, as well as my Pinterest page on Grief. I use the hashtag #6MonthsOfGrief, so it can easily be found on any platform. Please share this project with anyone you think might need it.

Thank you, and see you tomorrow.