John Pavlovitz writes on a wide range of subjects and attracts a lot of attention within his community.  This one caught our eye: The Grieving Need You Most After The Funeral (Stuff That Needs To Be Said, January 5, 2017). “The early days of grief are a hazy, dizzying, moment by moment response to a trauma that your mind simply can’t wrap itself around. You are what I like to call a Grief Zombie, outwardly moving but barely there.”

There is heaps of support until the day of the funeral, and then everything begins to subside. Right about the time you need people the most, most people aren’t there. “Most people understand grief as an event, not as the permanent alteration to your life that it is, and so they stay up until the funeral and imagine that when the service ends, that somehow you too can move ahead, that there is some finishing to your mourning.”

But, says John: “if there’s anything I would tell you, as someone who has walked through the Grief Valley, it is that the time your presence is most needed and most powerful, is in the days and weeks and months after the funeral, when most people have withdrawn.” Read the full story at: http://johnpavlovitz.com/2017/01/05/the-grieving-need-you-most-after-the-funeral/