#grief-and-loss

#grief-and-loss

June 1, 2021 I just finished leading a wellness retreat in Sedona. Six months earlier, I had lost my mother. Two weeks before, I had ended an eight-year relationship. Finally, I was beginning to feel like a phoenix rising from the ashes. I felt as though I was on top of the world and standing in Love. My intuition whispered, "Not quite yet." I quickly squelched that feeling. I recall thinking, "How much worse can things get?"

In many regards, Vince Gilligan's is a one-woman show. Cheekily referred to as "the most miserable person on Earth" in the vague description that Apple TV initially provided, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is the grumpy hero at the show's center, a cynical fantasy-romance writer who suddenly finds herself one of 13 fully conscious and in-control humans left on Earth - the other seven-odd billion having been subsumed into a peaceful hive mind.

The gathering has the vibe of a pilgrimage, the preparations unfolding with quasi-religious grandeur. Several enormous speakers, arranged on a dance floor of sand, have the coldly inanimate majesty of the monoliths in "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), as if they were sonic portals, transmitting pulses from an alien dimension. The music that pours forth, composed by the electronic artist Kangding Ray, is magnificently transporting, and the ravers surrender to the beat with glorious delirium.

Portland playwright Sue Mach's new work, directed by Gemma Whelan at 21ten Theatre, uses the bear - and other characters from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale - to fill in the 16-year gap in The Bard's story and to address some universal issues, such as the pain of losing a child, that will always resonate in the real world. In Shakespeare's play, Leontes, King of Sicilia, falsely accuses his wife, Hermione, of infidelity, even though she's a faithful partner who's nine months pregnant with his child.

Synchronicities can be dismissed as quirky experiences, an anecdote to trot out at a dinner party, but they can also be profoundly transformative and healing. It's for this reason that synchronicity-informed psychotherapy informs my clinical practice. As a refresher, synchronicities are events in the external world that coincide in a meaningful way with the internal world of thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, memories, and dreams, but not due to causal reasons.

Maggie O'Farrell's lauded 2020 novel Hamnet is a dense and lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare's family, full of interior thought and lush descriptions of the physical world. It would seem, upon reading, near impossible to adapt into a film. Or, at least, a film worthy of O'Farrell's so finely woven sensory spell. Film-maker Chloe Zhao has attempted to do so anyway, and the result is a stately, occasionally lugubrious drama whose closing minutes are among the most poignant in recent memory.

Writer/director James Sweeney's "Twinless" took the 2025 Sundance Film Festival by storm. This mordant delight - about two young men who befriend one another in a support group for people who've lost a twin - whipped the Eccles theater into a frenzy with its cuttingly dark laughs and unexpected plot twists. Sweeney's second feature, in which he stars opposite Dylan O'Brien who plays twins Rocky and Roman, also made headlines when sex scenes involving the two actors were leaked online by social media users

Adrienne Jones-McAllister expressed her grief, saying, "His body went limp in my arms and this is still pulsating in my brain." They were at the MRI center for her knee.

Beneath a china cabinet in Meshea Ingram's Georgia home rests a single yellow alphabet block, a simple but symbolic reminder of her late son, Briggs. "He was my sunshine," Ingram recalls, the vivid memories of his bright blonde hair and affectionate hugs lingering in her heart. The block remains untouched, a poignant testament to her love and loss, encapsulating the sentiment that "some things stay right where they are, not because we forgot to move them, but because our hearts never will."