Signature Reads

I measure every Grief I meet With narrow, probing, eyes – I wonder if It weighs like Mine – Or has an Easier size.” Emily Dickinson, #561 The English word “grief” is derived from the Old French verb “grever,” which means “to burden.” Implicit in the word is the idea that it is a weight to be borne; as Dickinson alluded to in her poem, “I measure every grief I meet.” And yet the notion of a weightiness to grief does not cover the morass of emotions that accompany this profound sense of loss. While Elizabeth Kubler Ross stamped order onto grief by describing the five stages a person moved through on the way to what we now call “closure,” my experiences of grief have been anything but orderly. I remember moving through all five stages in the space of an hour, not in the order she delineated, and then repeating the process in a … Read more