.@TakeThisOrg editor Nissa Campbell gets personal talking about fostering #healthyhabits while dealing with depression and anxiety (her three simple ideas apply to #grief as well). #12DaysofSelfCare https://t.co/hMeKypTfvW
— Rader Ward Foundation (@RaderWardFound) December 29, 2018
check your foundation
welcome to midnight
One year is ending and a new one beginning. Is it possible to change? To leave the past behind? Ponder these questions and join the conversation with TWLOHA.
encouragement from beth evans of bethdrawsthings
14.2k Likes, 218 Comments - Beth Evans (@bethdrawsthings) on Instagram: "holiday time, we'll get through it"
coping with loss over the holidays
happy Christmas Eve Mario Monday from Nintendo
gone from my sight
12 days of self-care from Take This
help is available if you're struggling this season
excellent resource: what's your grief
The holiday season continues to be challenging for me. I'm not surprised by this. If you find yourself in need of more support, check out What's Your Grief. They have ideas for navigating the holidays and ways to integrate remembering your loved one into your holiday observances, a bunch of interesting lists of 64 Things, and much more.
30 tips of dignity and respect
December is Universal Human Rights Month. The Dignity and Respect Campaign offers these 30 tips to "encourage each of us to be mindful of our interactions with others."
We at the Rader Ward Foundation believe in equality, justice, and the dignity of all humans.
grief comic: surviving the holidays
#ItsaMeMario!
celebrating chocolate covered anything day!
12 Likes, 0 Comments - @raderwardfoundation on Instagram: "Happy National #ChocolateCoveredAnything Day! I'm celebrating with a fondue breakfast. Chocolate..."
#StandUp4HumanRights
new resource: makeitok.org
I've added makeitok.org to the mental health resources page on the website. Make It OK is a campaign to reduce the stigma of mental illnesses. They also make an amazing podcast called The Hilarious World of Depression which, well, you should just download an episode and listen.
new essay: unimaginable
"I went through hell, and saw there love's raging fire."
― Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Dance of the Soul"There are moments that the words don’t reach;
There is suffering too terrible to name."
— Lin-Manuel Miranda, It's Quiet Uptown (from Hamilton)
We saw the Broadway musical Hamilton again this weekend. We first saw it with our kids for the older one’s high-school-senior-year spring break in 2017. We spent the week in Chicago, specifically to see Wayne Brady, a family favorite, in his limited engagement in the role of Aaron Burr. It was a phenomenal show, a great week, a fun family time. Two months later, Rader was dead. At some point within those first few days without him, I recalled "It's Quiet Uptown," the song in the musical that follows the death of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton's son, Philip. One day I listened to it on repeat as I walked the streets of our neighborhood, too restless to stay at home (much like Alexander Hamilton does in the song). When I returned, I played "It's Quiet Uptown" for my husband and our friends Doyle and Mia, who had come to be with us in our grief, and we clung to each other and sobbed together.
My husband and I had the chance to see the show again in Chicago in March of this year, with our friends Jim and Kristen. This time we knew the song was coming, three quarters of the way through the second act. We braced ourselves as Philip dies onstage, his parents looking on in anguish as the heartbeat accompaniment that's been keeping time during the song "Blow Us All Away" falls silent. William and I held hands and cried with each other as the now-familiar opening bars of "It's Quiet Uptown" began.
Now one of the Hamilton tours has come to our town for two weeks, and because we purchased the season ticket package to the Broadway shows that tour through our performing arts center, we were lucky enough to see it a third time — this time as a family of three, without Rader. As I knew it would, "It's Quiet Uptown" cut right through me. And the tears fell as this time I clasped the hand of my surviving child.
There are moments that the words don’t reach
There is suffering too terrible to name
You hold your child as tight as you can
And push away the unimaginable
The moments when you’re in so deep
It feels easier to just swim downThe Hamiltons move uptown
And learn to live with the unimaginable
How can Lin-Manuel Miranda know how it feels to lose a child? His first wasn't even born until shortly before the show opened off Broadway. But I clung to that word, "unimaginable," because it was. It IS. They learned to live with it. We learn to live with it.
At the end of the song, he comes back around to the beginning lyrics, with some changes in perspective.
There are moments that the words don’t reach
There is a grace too powerful to name
We push away what we can never understand
We push away the unimaginable
I believe in that grace too powerful to name — not in a religious sense, but more universal. There is terrible suffering, and powerful grace, and neither can be adequately expressed just with words. But my heart is going to keep trying to say what it has to say, and I'll keep trying my best with the words I have available. And sometimes I'll live with, and sometimes push away, the unimaginable.
This essay and other pieces of my writing can be found in the blog section of the website by clicking the photo of Rader and me on the home page.
navigating grief during the holidays
Holidays are hard: watch this 6½-minute video to learn what to do, what to say, and how to make an exit plan for when your energy for 'celebrating' runs out.
Oprah Magazine: inside America's suicide crisis
There are several more articles in this Dec. 10 series online from Oprah Magazine.
