Victoria Noe

Award-winning Author, Speaker, Activist

New Year’s Resolutions…About Friend Grief?

Today is the second day of 2012. Have you broken any New Year’s resolutions yet?
We start the year with such good intentions: lose weight, exercise more, save money, travel. We expect that it will be easy to keep them.
Then something happens. We realize just how hard it is to keep those resolutions. We fall off the wagon once, and decide we’ve failed. So we give up. And it’s not February yet. Pathetic, isn’t it?
But I would propose that you go ahead and make New Year’s resolutions about friend grief.
1.      Don’t ignore your grief. It will bite you in the butt when you least expect it.
2.      Don’t keep your grief bottled up inside. Share it with a therapist, in a group, with a friend or family member, in a journal, online.
3.      Realize that grief is unavoidable: “the price you pay for love.”
4.      Remember that grief takes different forms. It’s not all about crying. You can grieve a friend by doing something positive.
5.      Don’t wait until the funeral: stay in touch with your friends now.
6.      Remember what helped you the most when you grieved, and offer those things to others who are grieving now.
7.      Don’t set a timeline for “getting over it”. Grief can’t be defined by a calendar. Let it take its own course. It will, anyway.
8.      Accept that you’re a different person now - for having loved your friend and for having lost them.
9.      Find a special way to remember them and make it a regular/annual thing.
10.  Continue to join me here or other social media hangouts:

Twitter:  @friendgrief

Facebook: Friend Grief

There’s a lot new in store for this site this year: more guest bloggers, expanded resources page, new opportunities to share stories about your friends, and freebies, too! And suggestions are always welcome, so feel free to contact me at VictoriaNoe@FriendGrief.com with any ideas.

Thanks for joining me here, and I look forward to making our friends proud of us in 2012!

Copyright © Victoria Noe.

Created with Pub Site