About Me

By the time I was 30 years old, I had attended 13 funerals. Two were for grandmothers, the rest were for friends, neighbors, or coworkers. At the time, I didn’t undertand why I had been to so many when my siblings had not been to even one, but I chalked it up to living in a small town with my husband and his family who had a large circle of connections.

At 45, my marriage came apart and my husband moved out of our family home. We had struggled to stay together for 21 years, and this was one of many times we had talked about separating. A year and a half after he moved out, he died in a car accident. His blood alcohol level was .21 (the legal limit is .08). That was in 2011. On January 1st, 2013, I got a phone call in the middle of the night telling me my mother, who lived 2,000 miles away from me, had died. A few years later, my adult daughter went to rehab. A few years after that, my mother-in-law, who had been more of a mother to me than my own mother, also died.

Then came 2020, the year we will all remember forever! A week before COVID closed down the world, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had two surgeries and radiation and started a new job. Then my father-in-law died, and my daughter moved back home, sober for the first time in ten years. In 2021, I got remarried–yay!! In 2022, my son got married. And then my dad died. A year later, my son announced that he was getting a divorce and blamed me for our “unhealthy relationship.” He wanted to go “no contact” and has not communicated with me for almost two years.

Hoping to repair my body and self-image, I went into surgery in 2024 to repair the scar left from my partial mastectomy. The plastic surgeon accidentally punctured my small intestine, leading to sepsis in my abdomen and breast. I had four life-saving surgeries to debride my belly and breast, and an ileostomy place on my stomach for one year. That ostomy was reversed in 2025. I retired from my 25 year career as a teacher and gave myself time to heal.

Through all of these losses, I have come to learn a lot about grief. I have learned that it is multilayered, affecting our sense of identity, our hopes and dreams for the future, our bodies, our brains. Grief can resurface in all of our losses–death, retirement, health issues, estrangement. In this chapter of my life, I want to use my experiences to support others on the grief journey. Life does not always turn out the way we had hoped it would. I want to share my experiences, the strengths and skills I have gained, and the sense of hope that I hold onto that I will survive and thrive, and so will you.

Please know that you are not alone. There is help, there is hope. Day by day.

Emily Day