Blog
"Meet Me at Metropolis"
Feb 02, 2011 by Victoria Noe
All you really need to know about Delle Chatman can be summed up in one story. It was November, 2002, and she was in post-op after ovarian cancer surgery. Not all of the cancer could be removed, and the surgeon told her she wouldn’t live to see spring in Chicago. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “We don’t have spring in Chicago; we go right from winter to summer.”Delle was a force of nature: a tall, elegant African-American woman whose many talents included playwright/author/photographer/screenwriter/professor, with a deep spirituality and a great laugh.A year later, a coffeehouse opened around the corner from the Academy of the Sacred Heart, which our daughters attended. Metropolis soon became the school’s unofficial annex, with...
"It's Not Like They're Family"
Feb 01, 2011 by Victoria Noe
It wasn't the response you expected when you told someone your friend died. You expected sympathy. You expected the importance of your friendship to be respected. You expected understanding.A shrug and "well, it's not like they're family" wasn't it. You were shocked that they didn't "get it".Welcome to Friend Grief. This blog will raise awareness of a powerful experience in all of our lives: the death of a friend. Millions of people each year suffer the pain of a friend's death, and many of them suffer more because those around them don't respect their grief. I was surprised to find that there's a name for it: "disenfranchised grief". The term was coined by Dr. Kenneth Doka at the College of New Rochelle to...
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