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Cherished Friends, I have been widowed twice. I do not share that for sympathy. I say it because there is a particular kind of knowledge that only comes from losing love not once, but twice, and I have decided it is time to share what that knowledge has taught me. When Paul died, I learned how to grieve for the first time. It nearly undid me, and then, slowly, it remade me. I told myself, as so many of us do, that I now understood loss. I had walked through the fire and come out the other side. I thought I had earned some kind of expertise. Then, thirty-one years into a second great love, I lost Ted too. And I discovered that grief does not care what you learned the first time. It does not honor your credentials. It arrived again as though I had never met it before, and once again I had to find my way, slowly, painfully, back to love. But I was not entirely without a map this time. Because somewhere in those years, I had found a small practice that changed everything about how I hold the people I love, living or gone. What Happened at Deepening Roots A few weeks ago, I had the honor of speaking to the beautiful souls in the Deepening Roots group about living you’re your Life as a Work of Art. It was one of those mornings where you can feel the room breathing together, and I left it lighter than I arrived, which is always the sign of a good day. During the questions afterward, a minister asked me how I deal with grief. I had not planned to answer the way I did. But something in me opened, and instead of offering comfort in the abstract, I told the truth: I told them about the practice I use to keep talking to the people I have loved and lost. Not writing letters into silence, but something closer to an actual conversation, one where I write my heart onto the page and then, deliberately, listen for a reply, and let my hand write down what comes. I watched a few faces light up, the way a face catches when something true lands on an old wound. And afterward, a minister came to me, eyes bright, and asked if I would teach this as a class. She was not the only one. I told her I would need a three hour workshop to do it justice. I meant it. But I also felt something larger stirring, the sense that this small, private practice of mine was meant to be shared far beyond that room. Why I Believe This Matters So Much Right Now We live in a culture that is, frankly, terrible at grief. We are handed a few days off work, a casserole or two, and then a quiet expectation that we will get on with things. We are taught to let go, to move on, to find closure, as though love were a task to be completed and filed away. I do not believe that. What I believe, what thirty-one years with Ted and twenty-five years with Paul before him taught me beyond any doubt, is that love does not end when a life does. It changes form. It changes address. And if we are willing, we can still experience it. The dialogue practice I shared that night is not about denying that someone has died. It is about refusing to accept that love died with them. It is about picking up the pen, saying what is true and heavy on your heart, and then, in stillness, letting the relationship continue to speak. What I can tell you is that it gave me back a kind of company I thought I had lost forever. It let keep feeling the soulful companionship Paul offered. It let me keep asking Ted's advice. It let me keep hearing, in my own hand, the particular steadiness of the man who so often talked me down off a ledge while he was alive. A Small Gift, Born of a Big Ache Because of that night, and because of how many of you have written to me over the years about your own losses, I have put this practice into a small, free booklet called Divine Dialogue: A Journal Practice for Continuing Love. It is simple. It will not take you long to read. But I have tried to fill it with everything I wish someone had handed me the week after Paul died, and again, differently, the week after Ted died. If you have ever longed for one more conversation with someone you love, this is my heart, offered to yours. [Download your free copy of Divine Dialogue here] An Honest Invitation I want to say one more thing, gently. Grief, when we let it, is not only an ending. It is one of the great teachers of a life lived as a work of art, the kind of teacher that asks us to find new colors we did not know we had, new depths of tenderness, new capacity to hold both sorrow and gratitude in the same open hand. If you are moving through a loss right now, whether it happened last month or twenty years ago and never quite finished with you, I want you to know that this is precisely the kind of transformation I love walking beside people through. It is the heart of the mentoring work I do. Not to help you get over someone, but to help you discover who you are becoming because you loved them, and love them still. If that speaks to you, I would be honored to talk. You can simply reply to this letter, and we will find a time. With so much love, and with both Paul and Ted somewhere in these words,
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