By Jacob Sawyer, Ph.D. Most know the phrase that nothing can be certain except death and taxes. However, despite the universal experience of loss, death, and grief, relatively little is known about specific factors that influence one’s experience during bereavement, at least from a scientific lens. Research around death and dying (or thanatology, as it […]
The following guest blog post was originally published in Still Standing blog in August of 2017 and is republished here with the permission of the author. It speaks to the experience of leaving religion following a profound loss, and contains language often associated with faith, such as “blessed” and “prayer,” but repurposes the words to […]
By Nicola Ginzler Sun is red, moon is cracked, Daddy’s never coming back. Nothing’s ever yours to keep, Close your eyes, go to sleep. —Tom Waits, Blood Money So I’m driving the 25 miles down 101 from San Francisco to Belmont, CA, listening to the ever-cheerful Mr. Waits and crying my eyes out. I’m on […]
By Rebecca Hensler, Founder of Grief Beyond Belief For a while you just feel broken. Like grief just cracked you open. Maybe it happened all at once, like an explosion that blasted you from whole to shrapnel in one moment. Or maybe it started with a hairline fracture that spread until you split. You feel […]
By Rebecca Hensler, Founder of Grief Beyond Belief I started thinking about teaching professionals about how to provide appropriate support for grieving nonbelievers a long time ago. I can’t remember when I realized we need this; maybe it was when I discovered that the UC Berkeley Extension program in The Study of Grief and Loss […]
After over two years of hacking, downtime, and sundry other technical difficulties, Grief Beyond Belief’s blog and website are up and running again. Huge thanks to Tasha Millhouse, our new webmaster, for the redesign and for keeping things running smoothly for the near future. And of course, thank you to the community for your patience. […]
Elizabeth Rubenstein, a grieving mother who describes herself as an agnostic atheist, originally posted this on the Facebook page Walking with Forest, a page on which she and her husband have shared the story of their son Forest. If You Want to Comfort, Don’t Assume by Elizabeth Rubenstein We don’t believe in God. We fall into […]
By Tim Kingston I have been suffering from what could best be termed “temporal whiplash” lately. I am part of a group that organized a June reunion of AIDS activists for the 25th anniversary of the VI International AIDS Conference, held in San Francisco in 1990. At that time, I was a reporter loosely affiliated with the […]
Three months after my son Jude died in 2009, I discovered the Facebook page of a worldwide parental grief organization called The Compassionate Friends. In those dark months, their community provided invaluable support — and inspired the eventual creation of the Grief Beyond Belief Facebook page, which provided the same sort of online grief support, just […]
by Hank Fox, author of Red Neck Blue Collar Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods & Faith, reposted from his blog, A Citizen of Earth. Three years later, I don’t dwell on my Dad all the time. When I do dwell on him, I can have these surges of sorrow, missing him with painful intensity. But it’s […]
