Grief

I am writing in response to the article "Drive-By Attack Seen as Fetus Murder Test Case" (June 20). I have had six miscarriages, all 20 weeks or under. Although death certificates are not issued by the Health Department for the loss of a fetus prior to 20 weeks without petition from a physician, my husband and I chose to seek death certificates and held memorial services after the three latest losses because we felt these rituals validated both the life and death of our children lost to miscarriage.

The title of “Grace Notes & Anvils” at the Odyssey Theatre refers to two divergent aspects that those in mourning will inevitably encounter. “Grace notes” are those individuals whose acts of kindness come with unexpected synchronicity. “Anvils” goes the other way, when the almost-forgotten personal loss reenters consciousness with a "thud. " So say Ron Marasco and Brian Shuff, authors of “About Grief: Insights, Setbacks, Grace Notes, Taboos.” Their exploration of the tricky subject of grief is a specialty hybrid of staged reading, topical symposium and group therapy session.

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- People in this idyllic New England town returned on Thursday morning to the church that has served as the centerpiece of its grief and mourned another of the town's young victims killed last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In what has become a tragic daily occurrence this week, people gathered at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church for a funeral, this time for Catherine Violet Hubbard, 6. She was one of the 20 first-graders killed Friday morning when a gunman invaded their classroom area at the school.

Chu Sung-ha says he knows for sure that some of the people shown sobbing on television over the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il are faking it. Once, he was one of them. As a 20-year-old student at Pyongyang's prestigious Kim Il Sung University in 1994, when North Korea's founder and the school's namesake died, Chu and his fellow students were used to illustrate the nation's grief. Television cameras were rolling when the students were ushered into an auditorium to be told the news.

Roshawne Mackey walked into the Jordan Downs community center clutching a pink pamphlet from a funeral over the weekend, her face like stone. Her niece had been 11 - a diabetic who wasn't given her insulin shots. The dozen or so women in the parenting class listened as Mackey described how the little girl used to make backpacks out of cereal boxes, how she'd adored Hello Kitty. Mackey's expression remained stoic, but tears slid from her eyes. Within minutes, most of the other women were crying too. Across from Mackey, Veronica Hale put her head down on the scratched laminate table and wept for her 4-month-old girl, who had recently died in her sleep.

No matter that their royal status, wealth and fishbowl family life are beyond most people's imagining, nor that their divorced parents had widely publicized romances, nor that nannies and teachers helped raise them. Surviving princes William, 15, and Harry, 12, have suffered the same staggering loss as any child whose parent dies without warning, grief experts say. And their grieving, though more public and perhaps more complicated, will likely be just as individual, enduring and unpredictable.

One of my favorite pictures of my children shows them at about 6 weeks, sitting side by side in their infant car seats, crying their eyes out. Except that one is wearing pink and the other blue, you can't tell them apart. You can't tell which is Jessie, a vibrant, robust little girl, and which is Sandy, a little boy who has severe spastic quadriplegia, epilepsy, difficulty breathing and a feeding tube surgically implanted in his stomach.

Emily Rapp is not one to sugarcoat hard truths, including the brutal diagnosis she and her husband received in January 2011 when they took their then-9-month-old son to a pediatric ophthalmologist because of concerns about developmental delays. Ronan, they were told, had Tay-Sachs disease, which was untreatable and always fatal, usually by age 3. How do you live with such a death sentence? In "The Still Point of the Turning World," Rapp describes forcing herself to think deeply about the unthinkable and adjust to a new reality as she steels herself for inevitable, devastating loss.

If you are grieving for a lost loved one during this holiday season, it's important to do what makes life easier for you rather than what others expect, says Jeanne Preble, a therapist who has helped many clients through grief. "There is no correct way of grieving; there is only your way. Trust yourself and do what flows naturally," advises Preble, who practices in Fullerton and Irvine.

The 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, has all but faded into the bloodless abstraction of a diplomatic bargaining chip in U.S.-Libyan relations. With "The Women of Lockerbie," the Actors' Gang recaptures the emotional weight of that watershed terrorist attack through the visceral immediacy of first-rate live performance.