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Companion Through The Darkness: Inner Dialogues on Grief
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About Companion Through The Darkness: Inner Dialogues On
Product Description As a result of her own experience with many kind of loss, Stephanie Ericsson offers an intimate, profoundly touching guide for those in grief, legitimizing the complex and often taboo emotions we all feel when loss transforms our lives. In Companion Through the Darkness, Stephanie Ericsson defines grief as "the constant reawakening that things are now different." Using a very simple format -- which combines excerpts from her own diary writings with brief essays -- she vividly speaks the language of loss and captures the contradictory, wrenching, and chaotic emotions of grief. The book can be opened at any point to chapters no more than a few pages long on such themes as: Abandonment: The sudden state I am forced into. I no longer belong to you. I no longer belong to anyone. Rage: The state I use to survive seemingly moments of intolerable pain. Humor: The backside of agony. Pity: The look on people's faces when they haven't a clue what to say to me. Transition: The moments, strung out over months, when I know I am no longer the woman I was, but not quite the woman I am becoming. The result is compelling, intimate, and heartbreakingly truthful -- a book that promises to be enormously sought-after support and touchstone for all those making their own journey through grief. About the Author Stephanie Ericsson is a screenwriter and advertising copywriter and the author of ShameFaced and Recovering Together. She began writing a journal of her experiences after the loss of her husband while she was pregnant with their only child, and later published a widely acclaimed excerpt from the book in the Utne Reader. A frequent speaker on the subjects of loss, she lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Companion Through the Darkness Inner Dialogues on Grief By Ericsson, Stephanie Perennial Copyright © 2004 Stephanie EricssonAll right reserved. ISBN: 0060969741 Chapter One The Act of Fate abandonment: The sudden state I am forced into.I no longer belong to you.I no longer belong to anyone. Who expects life to change suddenly? Little pocket calendars map out everyday life.Pick up the kids. Drop off the proposal. Finish the laundry tonight. Send Mother a birthday card.Life--listed on pages--predictable, orderly, preplanned. The priorities of daily existence are made according to our needs, and the needs of those we care about or to whom we have obligations. Then one day, a bomb is dropped. Yesterday, there was a house--with walls, a roof, and the smells of life steaming up the windows. Today, only the rubble of disaster. Shards of broken confidence and the dust of dreams litter a cracked foundation. The calendars are forgotten. Priorities reorder themselves with "surviving" first on the list. What was eminently important yesterday is indisputably trivial today. Like the victims of war and natural disasters, the sudden loss of someone so important plunges us into a realm where we have no control. The lives we planned will never be as we planned. The rubble has to be swept up. But it looms like a mountain. How does one move a mountain? How do you piece together something that may someday resemble a life again? Not without many hours, days, months, even years. Not without blisters, cuts, bruises, and tears. And the only place to begin is in the shadow of the mountain. When you died, I was thirty-five, and two and a half months pregnant. The shock was beyond anything I could put into words, a big tumble into a blackness of sounds and cold hands clawing at me. Minutes were slow motion, and all that wasn't imperative to my survival was edited out of my memory. My psyche had been slammed against a brick wall. Every time I thought about you, about your dying alone on LaSalle Avenue in midday traffic, I felt the slam again and again. My breath was sucked out through another opening deep inside me, sucked out to oblivion. Your plane was leaving in
