Honoring the Memory of a Loved One on Social Media

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When a loved one passes away, it can be difficult to express your feelings and emotions. Social media can be an effective way to honor their memory and share stories with friends and family. Here are some tips and suggestions for how to do so in a respectful way, shared below by the Temple of Solace.

Take Time to Gather Your Thoughts

When posting about the passing of a loved one, it is important to take time to gather your thoughts before you post. This will ensure that the post is meaningful, heartfelt, and respectful. Writing down your thoughts or talking through them with someone else can help you organize them into something meaningful that conveys what you want to say.

Write a Heartfelt Expression of Feeling

Writing a heartfelt expression of feeling when posting about the passing of a loved one is important. It should be something that expresses how you feel about the person who has passed away as well as any memories or experiences that you shared together. The goal should be to create something that accurately reflects how much they meant to you while also honoring their memory in an appropriate way.

Alleviate Stress by Expressing Feelings of Sadness

When writing about the passing of a loved one, it is important to remember that expressing feelings of sadness can actually help alleviate stress. Writing down your feelings or talking through them with someone else can help provide an outlet for those emotions which can make coping easier. It also allows friends and family members who may not have known the person personally to understand how much they meant to you and why they were so special in your life.

Include Personal Stories and Memories

When someone we love has passed away, it’s our fondest hope that the stories and precious memories left behind become a beacon of light for those mourning their absence. That’s why writing personal anecdotes about your loved one can be such an important part of honoring their legacy and providing comfort to all who have had them in their life. By sharing these moments with others through posts online, you help keep alive beautiful reminders of lives no longer here yet never forgotten

Know What To Share And What Not To

The loss of a beloved friend or family member can be difficult enough without adding the complexity of their worldly possessions. It’s important to remember that when publicly discussing any assets such as money and property, it should always be done with care and respect for those involved. Instead, work with a real estate professional who can assist you with things like selling your loved one’s property with the privacy and respect the situation deserves.

Be Sure To Include Photo

Including photos when posting about the passing of a loved one is always appreciated by friends and family members alike as this helps keep their memory alive even after they have passed away. Photos should be chosen carefully so that they reflect the person’s personality in an appropriate manner. This will ensure that everyone remembers them fondly when viewing your post online or elsewhere on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

Consider Raising Money For A Bronze Memorial Plaque

If desired, consider raising money for a bronze memorial plaque which can be placed at either their final resting place or another public location where people can visit it in order to pay tribute. This is a great way to ensure that the memory of your loved one will live on for years to come. Doing so will help ensure that everyone remembers them fondly while also providing comfort during difficult times such as holidays and anniversaries.

Posting on social media about the death of a loved one is never easy but there are ways we can honor their memory respectfully while also providing comfort for ourselves during this difficult time. Taking time beforehand to gather our thoughts, alleviating stress by expressing feelings, and knowing what info we should and shouldn’t share, are all great ways we can honor our beloved ones online and offline.

How to Heal After Difficult Events

Setting goals for self-improvement can help motivate you, even during times of grief and struggle. You can make small, manageable changes to your life that bring you comfort and help you pursue healing. Here are some tips from Soul Food Cafe to get you started!

Learn a New Skill or Hobby

Picking up a new hobby or skill can open new horizons and help you deal with stress and negative feelings. Research suggests that practising a favourite hobby can lower blood pressure and encourage brain development. When choosing a new pastime, consider the activities you enjoyed most as a child. For example, if you loved colouring, you take an art class or try painting. You can also use your new hobby as a way to make friends by joining an in-person or online community of fellow hobbyists. Your expanded skillset can boost your career, and you can even start a blog or small business once you have some experience.

Enjoy a Weekend Getaway

Taking a vacation is a great way to relax and recharge after a stressful event. A quick, affordable weekend getaway can give you the space you need to care for yourself. Reconnect with nature by taking a hiking or camping trip. 

Practice Healthy Fitness

Exercise isn’t just good for your body; studies show that a fitness routine can improve your mental health, too. Physical activity improves blood flow and neuroplasticity in the brain. Furthermore, exercise can alleviate stress, insomnia, and symptoms of depression. If you’re new to fitness, you can visit a local gym and ask the trainers on staff to help you get started. If you prefer working out at home, there are many apps and videos you can access. Finally, look into local sports teams and running groups if you want to socialise and spend time outdoors while you get fit.

Connect With Loved Ones

Friends, family, and loved ones can provide immense support during difficult times. It’s important to maintain these connections during your healing journey. Opening up about your experiences can help your loved ones support you better. If you are interested in making new friends, consider volunteering or joining an organisation in your community. You can also reconnect with classmates and coworkers you knew in the past. You don’t need to limit yourself to human companionship either. Pets help you stay active and reduce mental stress. Adopting a pet from a shelter or rescue can give you a greater sense of purpose.

Seek Out Positivity Services


When you’re feeling overwhelmed, you should reach out for help. Talking with a therapist or counsellor can help you process your emotions and gain coping skills. You can look for a mental health provider in your area or access virtual mental health services. Online therapy is private and secure and can save you time and money. Furthermore, it’s convenient and less of a commitment than in-person therapy. 

You can also do yourself a big favour by trying to surround yourself with as much positivity as possible – especially at home. Let your residence be an oasis of positivity, free from self-doubt and criticism, in which you try to maintain your own health and wellness and avoid being too hard on yourself when some things don’t necessarily go as planned.

Healing is a complex process, and it doesn’t happen overnight. However, setting realistic goals allows you to navigate difficult times and move forward. 

Heather Blakey of Soul Food Cafe is an artistic midwife who is in her element when she works with artists and writers to assist in the delivery of their artistic hopes and dreams. Feel free to check out our archives!

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Together Alone in Nature – Lockdown

This has been a tough time for many, making adjustments endlessly, with the shifts and changes in the alternating lockdown world. Taking solace in the natural world provides time for new ways of thinking, and gives the certainty that the cycles of Nature are there for us, when everything else is uncertain. Keep strong and stay safe!

copyright imogencrest 2020

Pet Loss Support Available

A recent experience supporting a friend who has lost her small dog, a treasured soul companion who had seen her through many life crises, has served to highlight how important it is to be provided with some strategies to cope at this time.

It is now well documented that those of us who enjoy living in harmony with multi-species suffer very intensely when animal companions are dying. Many find the void almost unendurable to cope with. Unfortunately, not everyone understands the depth of grief associated with the passing of an animal companion.

If you are anticipating or coping with a significant loss in your life and wish to better understand the grief that accompanies such loss, you may need to spend some time connecting with someone who has had personal experience.

Having experienced considerable loss, I have found my own way through grief many times.  As one who’s always wanted and needed animals in my life, over the years I’ve loved, lost and mourned a number of cherished companion animals as well.

Last year I formally graduated as a Master of Social Work but over the years I have helped individuals understand and cope with their grief.  As a former volunteer at the Melbourne City Mission, I worked with carers who were mourning the loss of their partners and family. I have also supported a number of friends who have lost cherished animals. The Temple of Solace offers visitors who have signed in a safe place to express their grief.  All you need is a WordPress account.

My years of bereavement counseling have taught me that grief is indifferent to the species of the loved one who was lost. I believe that anyone who loves greatly in life and grieves deeply in loss is deserving of whatever respect, caring and support I can offer.

This site was designed to meet the needs of those who are mourning the loss of their loved ones, whether human or animal.  Whatever your particular circumstances may be, I hope that you will feel welcome and that you will find some comfort here.

If you need personal support I charge a minimal, one-off fee and I will maintain contact via email and offer creative suggestions to help ease the pain.

Taking Time To Listen

An elderly woman calls her country’s emergency hotline. Her 95-year-old husband is suffering from “complications”, she informs the operator.

But when police show up on her doorstep, they discover the man was not in need of medical attention at all. The couple was just so lonely they fabricated the story out of desperation for someone to talk to. So the cops did what anybody with a heart and a pulse would do; they sat with the couple “for a brew and a chat“.

This true story out of the UK is a bittersweet tale that betrays a widespread but largely hidden social tragedy; we are failing our elderly.

A 2013 survey by Australian community care franchise Just Better Care found that loneliness and social isolation was the primary concern of elderly people living at home, eclipsing financial worries, lack of independence, and loss of mobility.

Read More and take action

Insights into Loss and Grief

After facing one death of a significant other after another, and another, words stuck well below my throat. I was silenced and spent many years lying fallow. Time, adjustment, resettling and reading articles like these have helped to finally break the silence.

Most of us live in parts of the country where there is a distinct change of seasons. Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall each have their own unique qualities. Grieving is also like the seasons – there are a variety of events that we experience as we grieve, much as we experience a series of events as the seasons change.

So, as we explore these seasons of grief, let us turn our reflections to the power of these seasons of grief – pre-grief, a time to grieve, a time to heal and renewal.
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Sometimes when I can’t sleep I walk through my grandparents’ old house in my head. I sit in the breakfast nook and watch as my grandmother shakes from a jar the handful of raw almonds she would eat each morning. Or I watch myself – I’m six and wearing a dress Grandma crocheted for me – pester her for the liquorice allsorts she always kept at the back of a cupboard.
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Summer’s here and Canada-wide, tomatoes are in the ground, mine included.

I live alone now, and at 61 years of age, I have little need for all the food I gr ow. But I do love my own produce, my pesto made with home-grown garlic and basil, which lasts me into the following summer.

I have been thinking of my connection to the land, of closely observing the daily, seasonal and yearly changes that occur. I like that every day something is happening: Another rhododendron opening its buds, the daffodils dying back, the asparagus poking out of the ground, the hummingbird flying past to the flowering red currant, beetles mating.
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Crow country

There is an undeniable sadness to Ireland.  The history of the country is mired in despair.  Littered across landscape are the ruins of celtic Christian abbeys,  Norman castles, famine houses abandoned in the 1840s and more recent homes left during times of trouble.

                   

I spent  the month of May, 2011 out in the desolate uplands that mark the border between County Kerry and County Cork.  Day after day crows swept across the windswept hills, their mournful, lonely cry echoing across the wilderness.  Photographing the landscape became a way for me to connect with the spirit of the place.

It is hard to describe how I felt during this time.  The landscape over there has a power, a potency and an energy  that speaks of ancient despair and grief but also of  something far deeper –there is a sense that the land is inhabited by a spirit as old as time – a vast and essentially unknowable spirit that transcends the limitations of human life spans.  The ancient goddess Sheela still lives amongst the craggy rocks and misty mountains. The plaintive cry of the crows wheeling in the wind echo her cry.

Historically Ireland is a place people leave.  This exodus continues today as the global economic crisis bites deeply into the Irish economy.  Young people leave for America and Australia  as soon they graduate.  Others wish they could go. My own daughter is among them.  Her vengeful ex-husband will not sign the papers for the children to come to Australia.

I pray for Ireland and all her people.

The Soul Rests Eternal

“… the landscape that emerges through my music is rather like the misty dawn of a new day; a day not yet ripened by the sun, but one that shows the promise of a warmer future – a way through the emotional morass.”

Take the time to read the delightful new interview in the Salon du Muse at the Soul Food Cafe. Heather Blakey, web mistress of  Soul Food, takes the time to interview British composer, Mike Sheppard. This interview explores spirit and soul and shines some light on the path for those suffering from bereavement.

My Old Dog Is Dead

“And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing.”
— Mary Oliver (Blue Pastures)

Jaari and Douglas

Old dogs lie buried in the garden here, a place where, in another lifetime, my husband, children, companion animals and I once lived, where my parents once came to share our lives and bear witness.

Dougie and I grieved for each one who departed; when we sold and left the only home he had known behind.

We moved to a sheltered place and comforted one another.

Now my old dog is dead too. I know! I held him close to my heart as he died.

Dougie is gone, joining those, so many whose hands/paws we held, watched as they went.

Soon I will be leaving this place that offered safe harbor, taking his ashes to mix with the ashes of others.

I am moving to make yet another fresh start, selling more, giving away more, but, taking memories of happy family days to weave and wrap around me.

I will go to another place where I will scatter mixed ashes and, little by little, piece by piece, rebuild.

should have known

I have been descending into a well of grief for my daugther, for both the children I raised, for the abscence of one and the betrayal of the other.  I don’t know why now, why it was necessary to be overwhelmed once again by the evil intent and the lies that took my child, my freedom, my reputation, and my well-being.  But down I go.  Today in particular I found myself made almost helpless by the pain.  Why?  I didn’t call it to me.  I didn’t go digging for it.  It came to me.

Finally I put aside my attempts to do anything productive and went upstairs to lie on the old couch and just listen to the traffic whoosh by until I fell into an uneasy half-slumber.  And then…Ah…there it was.

I am sensitive to the energies of certain people, extraorindarily so, and you can just balk at that if you wish, but I heard her voice through the window, my heart went THUD, and I knew what was stirring my wounded soul such as it is.  The child returned.  The child I raised.  The one who accused me of terrible things that almost put me behind bars.  The accusation that had my daughter taken away and kept from me until her death.  The one who devastated my life.  She came to visit for Father’s Day.

And so we sat together at the table making cautious small talk.  Avoiding talk of what she’d done to me, to all of us, lest she get up and walk out.  The idea in my mind to build back the relationship (with her fatehr, at least) to the point where she’s again old enough(17 now) to face me over what she did.  *sigh*

What bullshit.  I’m such a fool.  Eventually I just came right out and called her on the audacity of faking an injury in order to destroy my life.  Out the door she went.  After she swore that she didn’t fake the injury.  It’s been so many years now she’s convinced herself that her story was true. 

I feel so tired I can barely move.  Utterly joyless.  Weeping inwardly. 

You know what?  I still desperately want my family back.  Death precludes the return of one child.  And the other?  The other just stood in the kitchen and declared, “I just don’t take anyone’s shit.  If you bug me, I’ll make their life a living hell.  I’ll make them wish they were never born.  They just won’t believe what I’ll do to their lives.” 

I believe her.  She was smiling when she said it.  She was also smiling when she – just before that – asked her father to buy her a car. 

It’s time now for the storybook ending: the protagonist (moi) shakes it off and finds something new to fill the void left by Family.

But I am sad.  So sad today. 

steph

when it rains

When it rains, it pours, and sometimes the accompanying winds threaten to take the roofs right off what little shelter we have in the world.  And sometimes…sometimes the roof goes. 

Heather Blakey, webmistress, teacher, guide, guru, Friend, is in the eye of such a storm yet again.  I have not offered her any words of wisdom or comfort because, one, she is older and wiser than I, and two, could any word be true enough to comfort a daughter watching her mother die?  Not from my personal experience on the matter.  And so I’ve read the kind words sent from others and wondered about storms and grief, my own grief and memory of grief rising up like the floods on the Canadian Prairies. 

Heather’s mother has cancer of the eosophagus, and I lost a very, very dear and important friend/guide in my life to that just a few months ago.  Her absence is very keenly felt in my life today.  Tears well for her near daily every time I go near my gardens, a subject we discussed often.  Elizabeth loved gardening and adored all plants, but she was wise enough to assure me that “A weed is ANYTHING you don’t want in your garden, my love.  If you don’t like roses, then OUT they go, and don’t you feel a whit of guilt about it.  A garden is supposed to be a thing of pleasure, not a task to be tended to grudgingly.  Make it what you love and to hell with what anyone else says.” 

The most important women in my life, and I think the most important women on earth indeed, are those who are strong enough and smart enough to encourage the world’s daughters to tell society to “go to hell and just let me live as I was meant to live, in peace, in beauty, in pleasure.”  From what I have heard, Heather’s mother is such a treasure, and so her weakening condition is a heartbreak that touches all intelligent women. 

I wish Heather a continued connection with that deep down still spot inside her that withstands the ebb and flow of every flood, and the force of every emotional hurricane.  I can think of nothing more to say in the face of a normal but nonetheless devastating pain of life.

Love and honour,

Steph