... It's still so FRESH.

All I know is that I wish I could just do a Google search and find someone going through the same thing as me... a 37 year old widow with two little boys - one 7 years old and one who is a 7 month old preemie with a feeding tube.  ...2 months out from losing her dear husband suddenly and unnaturally after he stopped breathing during a wisdom tooth extraction.   

I know... every grief scenario is unique, and I will never find one exactly like mine involving a person exactly like me.   However, there ARE common threads.  If I couldn't generate the link I needed, then I decided to CREATE the link people may be seeking.  Enter, JOY SCAVENGER. 

I can't speak for all, but I know that when tragedy struck my life (loosing both a child AND a spouse), I appeared to have but TWO choices:  Lay there and pretty much die myself, or keep it movin'.  Often times, the option I chose - to keep it movin', came with the task of finding the MOTIVATION... searching for little pocketfulls of peace... giving my mind a well deserved break.   It involved sometimes even forcing happiness... cause sometimes we can form a cocoon inside of our grief, and not even allow ourselves a little happiness when it appears.   All in all, I literally had to dig through this rubble of despair, and be a scavenger of joy - no matter how big or small...

... and its not about filling holes with unhealthy habits... it's not about putting a Band-Aid on grief and that being THAT.  It's certainly not about a quick fix for grief.  It is however, about riding these grief waves as best we can, and reincorporating those joyful moments in life we deserve.  It's about self-care, feeling our feelings, and loving ourselves through the pain and the anxiety.   I invite you to take this real-time journey with me - as I am not AT ALL far-removed from my own losses.  But I want to build a community around finding joy in life again.  Feel free to tell me your stories of loss below.