An 18 minute read
The Grieving Project is a unique, inventive spoken word audiobook that sets the stages of grief to music to help us move from surviving to thriving. The entire audiobook, all 22 tracks, is spoken over original musical compositions. Four characters with four different chronic illnesses plunge through 14 stages of grieving and thriving, through a melding of words and an emotional orchestra, and take us on a moving journey from surviving… to thriving.
I’ve lived with a rare chronic illness, a progressive muscle weakness autoimmune disease called dermatomyositis, for more than 12 years while obsessively creating to express and heal. I realized only recently, that in all this time-through creating albums, musicals, films, even writing my memoir and adapting it to an audiobook, through hospital stays and monthly infusions, and recently running a two-week online summit I planned over a year to help others with chronic illness thrive, I forgot to grieve. Or perhaps, I didn’t ever realize I needed to grieve an illness…
Eight months after John died, Neustadter started sending emails to his old Yahoo address, because “communicating with John was truly the only thing I wanted to do at that time,” she said. It gave her a way to keep the conversation alive.
