I wrote Good Grief!, the blog you'll find below, some months ago, but I'm dedicating it today to my friend Carol, who died recently at 87.  For several years, I've been a friendly visitor for Carol through a wonderful volunteer matching organization called Friends & Co.  I was hoping to be paired with someone who was living with dementia, given my background (and my book), but Carol did not have one iota of dementia. (Yes, I felt a little guilty and selfish being disappointed about that.)  Carol had plenty of anger and frustration to tell me about when I first started visiting her. And she talked a blue streak. Dark blue! There were times I pretty much only voiced "hello", "goodbye", and "uh-huh". I wasn't sure I could go on like this! But I did, every two weeks at the appointed time, and one day I realized Carol was smart, skilled, resourceful, and extremely funny! We started laughing together, and I started to get some words in edgewise here and there. We talked on the phone a few times before she had to go on hospice, and she was full of sincere gratitude for our friendship. By this time she had moved away, closer to her niece, who was now in charge of her care. She so looked forward to reading my book, which, alas, didn't come out in time for her. Her stay in hospice care was only several days. She was ready to go, and I'm sure she's now chatting up as big a storm as her spirit can manage. 

You never know how things will turn out. Carol taught me a bundle of lessons about not giving up on friendship and connection, and how important it is to have patience with that process.  

And so, in honor of my one-of-a-kind, fiercely independent, and supremely talkative friend, Carol, I share:

                                                                            Good Grief!

                  Long before Charlie Brown’s gang had their own Christmas special, my family was obsessed with the comic strip Peanuts. “Good grief!” is the phrase I most associate with the frustrations of Charlie, Lucy, Linus and company, and I love that this expression has woven its way into American English. I wonder, do people in the UK ever say “good grief!”?  I doubt it. “Crickey!” and “bloody hell!” surely serve their purposes quite well. 

                 Before I digress any further, I want to share my central point: I’m grateful for grief. Grief is good, natural, and necessary. It may not feel good; it may weigh us down; it might settle in our hearts and never leave us completely—but why should it? I bet we’d miss it if it were gone.  

                 When someone close to us passes away, we not only feel loss; we are lost without that particular person, that presence upon whom we’ve learned to rely and perhaps have never considered the possibility of losing. And so we grieve. It’s unavoidable. As we mourn, we wonder how we will cope without an individual who means so much to us. Grief draws us toward gratitude for all that we experienced and appreciated about that person. It compels us to be more like the one we have lost. It stirs us to share what we have learned and loved about the deceased, and it gives us purpose and a call to action. The untimely deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti surely prove that. 

                 At age 74 (almost), I have many personal losses to count: my father and mother, two older sisters, a brother-in-law, a sister-in-law, a great-nephew, a high school friend, yet another friend, and my husband, Phil, who died in 2013. Phil was an actor, and he had an amazing brain. He was terrifically funny, smart, creative, and caring. We were unabashedly, deliriously happy. I spent several years after he died writing a play about him, his devotion to theatre, and our relationship. My mom died in 2008. Her dementia had, ten years earlier, propelled me into dementia care, which changed my life forever. When I became semi-retired in 2022, I started writing Looking Past Dementia, inspired by my mother and others living with dementia who taught me so much. Grief made both projects possible.

                 Grief is good. It’s normal, mandatory, and ultimately helpful. Can you imagine not feeling grief when a loved one leaves you? We need grief to reveal how we will cope with the loss, to allow the emotions it inspires to have their way with us, and ultimately to move us forward in the direction the spirit of our lost loved one is surely encouraging us to go.

By Marysue Moses, Author of Looking Past Dementia

My book is readily available via this website (click on Books), Amazon, and Barnes and Noble online.