Author Hopes To Help People Through Hurt With ‘The Grieving Project’

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…

Grief Help: Using Writing to Help Us Process Our Sorrow

Using Writing to Help Us Process Our GriefEight 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.

“And it felt symbolic and ritualistic to send an actual letter out somewhere into the unknown,” Neustadter said.

Neustadter also used writing to make sense of John’s suicide—why did he turn to suicide? what signs did she miss? She wrote down everything about John that she could remember.

Writing gave Neustadter “some sense of purpose.” She wanted to write the book she wished she’d had: “a book about a young woman, effectively widowed at 29, struggling to make sense of the loss of her soul mate and why he took his life. There were a lot of parts to this, and I had a lot of questions. None of the books on grief that I found helped me with understanding how to navigate my loss.”

“If I could offer other women (or men) like myself a book that made them feel less alone and helped them navigate through traumatic grief, then maybe, just maybe, it would make my experience of John’s death worthwhile in some way.”

More on this Grief Help….

Grief Help: Authors Start Book Series On Infertility

Despite all the medical approaches to infertility, two Chandler women think those who struggle with the problem might want to consider divine intervention.

That’s why Evangeline Colbert and Angela Williams wrote “Borrowed Hope: Sarah’s Story of Triumph Over Infertility” – the first in a series of books aimed at bringing comfort to women who have struggled with infertility and miscarriages by examining the struggles with infertility that are recounted in the Bible.

Colbert, a certified professional life coach, already wrote an earlier book on the subject, titled “A Seed of Hope: God’s Promises of Fertility,” and began working with Williams, a counselor and mediator, two years ago on the joint creation.

Now they’re working on publicizing that first joint effort, starting with a book-signing party at 2 p.m. Jan. 26 at Sunrise Faith Community Center, at 800 W. Galveston St., Chandler.

Both women think their own lives back up their encouragement and words of hope to women who struggle with infertility and miscarriages…

Source: Santan Sun News Staff