Erica Staab

I love reading  Audrey Kletscher Helbling’s blog – Minnesota Prairie Roots. She covers a wide variety of life in rural Minnesota, festivals, small bits and pieces of the ordinary, the extraordinary and the little bits that weave together a good life. If her blog were a food it would be a tator tot hotdish. Warm, comforting and what you reach for when you need a little taste of home.

I was thrilled when I woke up to this beautiful review of The First Christmas: Finding Your Way After Loss.

Here is a brief snippet of her post:

GRIEF: “A WILD MESS OF THINGS”

She calls grief “a wild mess of things that can’t be anticipated.” That seems such a spot-on assessment as we all grieve in different and unexpected ways. Erica advises us to be gentle with ourselves, to allow grief in, to listen to what our hearts need.

I found this statement particularly profound: When grief is invited in…it is then that it loses its power over you, it is then that grief offers itself to share its gifts. It is then that there is space made for joy.

I appreciate that Erica embraces and acknowledges grief in all its pain and darkness. Yet, she writes with the light of hope, of joy-filled moments returning, of strength gained. When I emailed Erica to tell her that her writing touched me and caused me to cry as I thought of losses in my life, she responded, “…that was my prayer…that people would feel heard, understood, and not alone in their grief journey or their choices.”

After you write, read, reread, rearrange, re-write and redo the process ad-nauseum sometimes your words start to lose their shine. The act of being handled, thrown around, taken out and put back in and taken out again makes them look a little weary and a bit stale. So as a writer, when you release your words out into the world it is through the magic of looking at them through others eyes that the words come alive again. Then you can see them shimmering with the hope that they will find the heart they were intended for, and I am reminded that hearing people’s experiences of them is the best part of the journey.

So thank you to all of those who have shared with me their responses to the book as it finds its way in the world. I am thrilled that it has been able to meet people where they are at, to bring the peace and healing that I intended when I first wrote the very first draft so long ago.