Blog: Mel's Muse

With nearly 40,000 deaths due to Coronavirus in recent months, there must be hundreds of thousands of friends and family having to live with the reality of loss. You may have been through Coping With The Initial Shock, learned, in a small way, about Looking After Yourself, dealt with...

Before the days of lockdown - due to the coronavirus - planning a funeral following the death of a loved one might have been perceived as a positive and constructive experience. Although not intentionally so, making funeral arrangements, whether for burial or cremation, could be seen as a welcome...

Last time we looked at Bereavement: Coping With The Initial Shock, using my own experience following my daughter's death, and quoting from the book I wrote some years later. What I learned was that numbness and denial, disbelief and a wandering mind, are common experiences when we first learn...

LOSS & BEREAVEMENT

I was reminded by my Facebook memories this week that it is now ten years ago since I was invited to speak on an American Radio Station about the death of my daughter. I wept. Because no matter how long ago the event, this is something...

What are your New Year’s resolutions?  How likely are you to achieve them?

I read an article recently, which said that 95% of diets fail.  Why?  Precisely because they are diets!   Counting calories or eliminating certain categories of food focuses your mind on the very thing you want to...

Dear Mel,

We "met" on LinkedIn. I recently visited your website and enjoyed a few of the many things you offer. Something that struck me is the similarity of our book covers. You can see mine at www.grief-recovery.org I've written two books on grief recovery (any type of loss) and conduct...

I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to post the second part of this article: blame my recent appointment as Chairman of ACW - a national association for writers.  As I said in the first part of Interviews With Authors About Their Books,  a reader of my blog asked...

Photo: My father in his Flintstone tie on Christmas morning, one week before he died.

My father, known to his parents as Beel, was born in Elgin, Scotland, on 15th April, 1914.  The middle one of three boys, he was raised, largely, by his mother and maiden aunts, because his father,...

Are you in favour of assisted dying?  Would you like British law to be amended to allow euthanasia?  Or is the risk of abuse to the elderly, disabled and infirm too great a concern?

Most of my real-time Book Club members admitted, when we met on 28th July, 2011, that they'd...

If you have come here because you’ve heard that I shall be speaking about grief and loss on the OpenToHope blog radio show (airing at 9.a.m. California time [5.p.m. UK time] on 10th June, 2010) then it’s probably because you are coping with the loss of a child, or have been bereaved in some other...

IF YOU WISH TO USE THIS POEM FOR THE BEREAVED DURING A FUNERAL OR THANKSGIVING SERVICE, PLEASE SEE THE FREE REPRINT NOTICE AT THE END OF THIS ARTICLE.

I lost my daughter some years ago, so I know what it’s like dealing with the loss of a loved one. You wonder...

In the following excerpt from my book, A Painful Post Mortem, one of the characters, Rosie, has been asked by her father to read a poem at her sister's funeral. Curious to remind herself of the long-forgotten verses, she looks out an old book before she goes to bed.

When the baby had been...

Not everyone experiences the five stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance; and even if they do, they may find that they occur in a different order. But frequently, at just the point when we most need them, our friends seem to melt away. They have supported us in the early days with...

It’s a paradox, but there is a sense in which planning a funeral is a positive and constructive experience. Although not intentionally so, making funeral arrangements – whether for burial or cremation – is a welcome distraction from grief and loss. As long as those who are bereaved are actively contacting funeral planning services and...

"Life," said Lewis Grizzard, the original grumpy old man, "is a sexually transmitted terminal disease."

It took me a moment or two to take it in when I read that statement. When the penny dropped, I laughed aloud. It's just such a clever line!

And on a physical level, it says it...