Grief Speaks Out

This book is all about Grief. It explains what Grief is, the stages of grief, the types of grief, the different losses associated with grief, and how to cope with grief. Grief is just not about the loss of a loved one. You can grieve other things, and they are also included in this book such as divorce, job loss, financial loss and much more. There is a section dedicated to adult grief, children's grief and teen grief and grief associated with suicide. It covers basically everything you need to understand grief at every stage of life no matter what you are grieving.

I am a wife and mother of three children. I have survived a traumatic childhood. I put all of that behind me and I was making a very good life for myself and my family when things took a horrible turn. My youngest child went off to college and was introduced to drugs and alcohol. The first weekend there he had alcohol poisoning and ended up in the hospital.
Within a matter of months, he got his first OWI. He was drunk and hit a parked semi-truck. We ended up doing a diversion on it, so he was on probation. He made it through his first year there. Then he ended up using drugs. He got caught smoking marijuana in his dorm room. This got him kicked out of school for an ethics violation. Once he came back home, things went from bad to worse. He got involved with the wrong crowd and began using meth and heroin. We battled his addictions for the next 11 years. He was in and out of jail multiple times and was in and out of different rehab programs several times. He ended up dying from an overdose at 29 years old in 2019. I struggled with regret, sadness, depression, suicidal ideology, and dealt with a lot of "what ifs". You know what I am talking about…What if I did this or what if I did that then maybe he would still be alive. I beat myself up so badly that I became seriously depressed. All I wanted to do was die and go be with him. This turned my world upside down and I realized I had gotten stuck in complicated grief and needed help. So, I went to a grief group, and I needed help with my grief.
It was very helpful having other people to talk with about all I was feeling and going through who understood me because they had also gone through the same thing and feelings when they lost their loved ones. After a year, I became the grief group leader. I enjoy helping others, but I did not feel like I had the proper training to be able to help them the way they needed me too. I went back to school and got my grief coaching certification. I am now a Certified Grief Coach. This gave me the knowledge and the tools to better help the women in my group. But as new people joined my group and talked about their losses and the struggles their children were also dealing with; I decided to take the courses to become a Certified Children's Grief Coach. So, I did, and I passed, and I am now also a Certified Children's Grief Coach as well. This helped me to be able to give them good suggestions on how to handle their children and what they were going through. But I realized I had trauma in my life and some of it came from unresolved grief. The more I took a good long look at my life, the more I realized I needed to address some of the traumas I had gone through to properly heal from them. This realization made me go back to school one more time. This time I went back and became a Certified Trauma Coach. Looking back on my life, I see where everything that I had gone through my whole life was not a punishment, it was a lesson. God was preparing me for a completely different life than the one I thought I was going to live. My future is now helping to guide people through their grief. And I do this in honor of my son Nick. Armed with all this knowledge, I felt like I was now qualified to help others struggling on their grief journeys. But I was only helping people in my small groups. And I realized that there is a greater need for someone to help people on a larger scale.
So, I decided to take all that I have learned and compile it into a series of books, hoping that it can reach even more people. I have since decided to condense the 4-book series into one book. A one stop shop so to speak. I hope this can help you understand your grief and help you to heal from it.