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Anna Sweat
Dec 10, 20184 min read
Grief Multiplied
One loss does not prepare you for another. My father passed away last week. He was 77 years old. He had a pacemaker, a bevy of bad...
425 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Nov 16, 20183 min read
Ghost Town
I live in another woman's house. I drive another woman's car. I wear her clothes and sleep in her bed. Sometimes, I stand in her closet...
372 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Oct 3, 20186 min read
Living When You Don't Want To
I can recall with perfect clarity the exact moment when I first realized I wanted to die. It was four weeks to the day after our daughter...
1,472 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Sep 17, 20187 min read
Accommodating Grief
Every day, I make accommodations for this grief. Every. Single. Day. Without exception. On a "good" day, that might look like excusing...
189 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Sep 5, 201811 min read
Envy: The Lost Stage of Grief
When you lose someone, everyone begins talking about the stages of grief, ticking them off to you one by one: denial, anger, bargaining,...
2,899 views3 comments
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Anna Sweat
Aug 28, 20186 min read
Progress in Grief: What It Actually Looks Like
A year has passed since we lost Ev. Well, for everyone else anyway. For myself, this has been one, long, agonizing moment. The dictionary...
870 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Aug 1, 20188 min read
A Love Letter To My Predecessor
I wrote this letter to myself, to the me on the precipice of disaster, on the last day, final moments, of what was my life. It is a...
2,180 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Jul 22, 201813 min read
Our Story
In The Before, we were a happy family of five—myself, my husband, our oldest daughter who had just turned 20, Evelyn who was only weeks...
3,095 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Jul 1, 20184 min read
The Universal Message of Trauma
Trauma has a mouth. Not a quiet, puckered, whispery, thin-lipped mouth with careful, clipped words. Trauma's mouth is more like a...
464 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Jun 17, 20185 min read
Grieve, Pray, Love — Not Necessarily in that Order
The following quote was taken from an Instagram post Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling author of Eat Pray Love, wrote just last week...
228 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Jun 4, 20184 min read
Stolen Tomorrows
Last week, my daughter and I loaded ourselves into the car and drove the hour and ten minutes to Santa Fe High School. I'm not sure what...
212 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
May 9, 20186 min read
A Dose of Awe
I never much felt like I was made for this world, if I'm being entirely honest. I don't care about the things I'm supposed to care about....
249 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Apr 18, 201811 min read
What Bereaved Parents Wish Everyone Else Understood
Maybe it's presumptuous of me to write this post. After all, I am only one broken-hearted mother. Who am I to speak for the parents of...
2,722 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Mar 28, 20186 min read
Happiness, The New Normal, and Other Common Myths
Happiness is a myth. I should know. I have paid the ultimate price for my liberation from it. It is a thing of bedtime stories, the...
296 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Mar 14, 20185 min read
Unraveling
I have spent the last two days trying not to die. That's not exaggerating or overstating it. I am not being melodramatic. It's not a...
322 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Mar 7, 20184 min read
The Birthday Letter
Evelyn, My beloved girl, today you would be 19. A year ago, I never dreamed that this is how I would be celebrating your 19th birthday. A...
299 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Feb 22, 20186 min read
The High Cost of Great Loss
Death comes at a steep price. This grief has cost me much. My heart. My soul. Or at least a large chunk of each. My family as they were,...
1,618 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Feb 13, 20185 min read
Unanswerable Questions
The grieving mind is a swirling, bitter soup of unanswerable questions, a miserable cocktail of what ifs and if onlys. My mind is steeped...
389 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Feb 5, 20184 min read
A Hundred Thousand Shades of Feeling
When did we decide that being honest about our feelings was unforgivable? With ourselves, with others ... why are we so threatened when...
323 views0 comments
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Anna Sweat
Jan 25, 20184 min read
Grief Dreams
Last night, I dreamt of Evelyn. I have these dreams a lot. They are not the PTSD nightmares of the early weeks—those come far less...
315 views0 comments
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