During my presentation at last year’s Camp Widow,  I was asked ‘when do you stop feeling perpetually sad?’ Of course, there is no conclusive answer to that. We are all different and our timeframes will be different. Grief doesn’t follow a pattern, or a continuum or a circle. Grief is individual.

We live in a society that doesn’t always do grief well. People want to try to cheer us up, they long for us to move on because our pain is often too raw and too difficult for people to manage.

However, the only way over pain, is through pain. We have to feel to heal (and ‘healing’ from grief is most definitely not about getting over it).

In this session, I will answer the question ‘when does the sadness end?’ I will discuss strategies for coping, for self-care, for honouring our grief, allowing our ‘sacred tears’, managing special anniversaries, dealing with the cumulative nature of grief and enabling ourselves to ‘return’ in our way, in our own time and on our own terms. We can rebuild (I promise you that), we can be happy again and our grief can (and will) co-reside with our sadness (we don’t need to eliminate one to enable the other).

We will look at how to honour our emotional scars and how to face society again – bruised but not broken, changed rather than challenged and most of all, real and authentic, with the whole colourful tapestry of emotions that we need to manage the life we will build.

I want you to leave with hope – hope for a future that will embrace and honour the kaleidoscope of emotions, and most of all, I want you to leave with strategies, for how to manage that kaleidoscope when the wheels are turning, and the colours are spinning.

I look forward to seeing you there.