Last Thursday I began a grief class led by Joanne Petrie to help me deal with my grief about my mom’s death. I feel privileged to be taking the class from her; I’ve heard her on the radio a lot and she speaks from experience about finding hope after loss.

She told us, among other things, that this will be the hardest thing we’ll ever have to do. I believe it and we got started right away. One of our first assignments was to make a list of all our losses, starting from small kid time. And that means every single loss we can think of. I started mine and the tears began flowing. I thought of important people in my life who are no longer here, like Roy-chan, my wonderful dad-in-love. I thought of Mildred, my spiritual mom for so many years. I thought of my grandparents, and my horse, and about the time a neighbor’s dogs got into our pasture and killed all of our sheep and goats save one.

The other assignment was to begin a grief journal. I am a prolific journaler so it won’t be a problem for me to write down my feelings. But I’ve always kept my sadness stuff as part of my everyday journals so this will be a bit different. I’m going to include blog posts in it too.

In this class we’ll learn how to grieve, how to say goodbye, and how to find hope. On Thursday I learned that my almost constant headaches are a symptom of grief.

One thing we did Thursday was to go around the room and briefly describe why we were there. The pain in the room was palpable.

This isn’t going to be easy. But I’m glad I’m doing it.