Malcolm R. Campbell, author and fellow blogger, posted an article yesterday entitled, Are you afraid to say what you think?
He mentioned, among other things, penalties imposed on people for exercising their right to free speech, the lack of civility, allowing violence under threat of more violence, and mob-enforced political correctness. He was also brave enough to say that most of us see and hear enough stuff daily to know how and why the problem is larger than what can be put in single blog. And he admitted that he no longer felt safe enough to say how much larger the problem is.
I responded to his blog: I’m certainly afraid to say what I think. I study everything, including both sides of an issue, and often my views end up being on the quiet end of the spectrum rather than the burning-down-buildings end. When I was on FB and shared something interesting that a conservative non-white said, people accused me of being racist rather than seeing that I had just found an alternative point of view interesting especially since it didn’t follow the official narrative. Some people don’t mind causing conflagrations, either real or virtual, but I don’t have the stomach for it. I brood too much. In fact, I’ve been wanting to write a blog mentioning some of the ironies of the current situation, and I simply don’t want to have to deal with the backlash. Or even worse, the quiet condemnations that I don’t hear about until much later. Even more than that, mobs scare the hell out of me, and I certainly don’t want to bring myself to the attention of a flame-wielding, rock-throwing, gun toting mob with but a single mind.
This being loath to speak my mind started long before the current volatile situation, and was a direct result of Jeff’s death.
Jeff was the only person I ever met who I could talk to without censoring myself in some way. No matter how outrageous my opinion might have been, no matter how much it went against the current belief and what we were taught, he always treated my remarks with respect and in fact could come back at me with a clarifying point, a different way of looking at the situation, perhaps even the title of a book I could read that would take my points a step further.
I hadn’t realized how spoiled I was being able to say anything, think out loud, express what to others might be unpopular opinions. It was a freedom I hadn’t found before Jeff and certainly have never found after him.
Some of the things I want to say to people I am conversing with aren’t full-fledged ideas, but rather the beginning of a complex thought buried somewhere in the back of my mind, but even the most intelligent person seldom can get beyond my inciting comment, so we end up arguing a point I didn’t even wish to make until I finally tell them to forget it, to ignore what I said, and let’s agree to disagree. This makes them uncomfortable and leaves me with a nest-full of half-formed ideas with no place to fly.
After a few such misunderstandings during the first years of being without Jeff, I’ve gotten good at gauging what ideas people will accept or not accept. Sometimes, I put a toe (or a claw if I want to keep up with the bird metaphor) in the conversational waters, and quickly draw it back if I find resistance, so generally, I end up listening to people way more than I speak. Because of this, not only can I gauge what people might be willing to accept, I also learn how they think. And all too often how they think is an indication that they don’t think at all; they simply react.
If people today can get killed by doing nothing but wearing the wrong hat or the wrong tee shirt or the wrong smile, then it’s no wonder so many of us are afraid to tell the truth even in our personal online spaces. (Because when it comes to an online space, there is no personal space with unbounded freedom from rancor to say what one wills.)
If I weren’t fearful of hurting people’s feelings or having hatred rained down on my head, I really would like to write a blog discussing some of the ironies of the minority rights issue, such as the way successful minorities, especially conservatives, are called “Uncle Tom”s, as if a person can’t be anything other than the color of their skin, which itself is the basis of racism, right? Adding to the irony, the original Uncle Tom wasn’t an Uncle Tom in the sense it’s used today, meaning a racial sellout, but was instead based on a real life heroic character who died to protect two runaway slaves.
There are many such instances where anti-racists turn out to be more racist than proclaimed racists, sometimes by infantilizing minorities as if they can’t think or do for themselves, which makes it even harder to say anything about the melanin issue without being tarred with the “r” word.
But oops. I’m straying from the point, and perhaps disproving my point in the process, which is being afraid to say what I think.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator
WordPress is planning on getting rid of their classic editor box, the one I used from the first time I posted a blog. It was easy for a neophyte-blogger me to learn because it was so much like an email editor box, with everything right there that I would need.
I’ve been hesitant about using the new block editor, which is what they call the new blog editor, because it’s based on various blocks or boxes, for example, a box for images, one for text, one that combines both, one that uses a collage format for images, an embedded calendar, and all sorts of other “blocks” I will probably never use. The new format isn’t as intuitive as the old way, so I thought for the first few days of blogging with the new editor, all I’d be able to post is a few words with bizarre formatting, especially since, like most new applications and programs, the directions leave a lot to be desired. To be honest, even the original editor didn’t explain things very well, so I had developed my own tutorial to teach people how to blog.
For the past couple of days, I’ve been playing around with the new format, trying to figure out how to do things so I can keep my current and future blogs more or less in line with my previous posts. There’s virtually no help from any site that claims to explain how to do things (mostly they just say that the block editor is easy to use, all you have to do is pick the block you want to use), but that didn’t work for my basic needs.
But yay! I figured it out, as you can see from my past few posts. Today, I even learned how to use a couple of the blocks, such as this tiled image gallery:
And this block for recent posts:
I would have preferred smaller images, but the gallery is dependent on the width of the blog itself, and apparently, I have a wider blog than most. (For now. I dread the day when they retire this theme, which they do occasionally.)
As fun as all this learning was, the new way seems too distracting for a simple blog post.
Eventually, I’m sure, I’ll find this new blog experience as satisfying as the old one, but for now, it feels clunky. Even worse, it feels as if my words don’t count — that the look of the thing is more important than what is said. But that seems to be the way of the world.
Still, it’s something new for me to play with, so that has to count for something!
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator
Playing computer solitaire has become my way of doodling while my mind is occupied with other things, such as trying to capture a single thought to blog about, but my mind is restless nowadays, and a single interesting thought is hard to capture.
I worry, of course, about what’s going on in the world today. I wish I could believe the so-called truths we are fed. I wish I could believe the simple slogans that are being bandied about, but unfortunately, as with everything else I do, I look beneath the surface to find the blind wiggly things that will not, cannot be ignored. A business or organization can call itself anything it wants; it can use a popular slogan to name itself. But that slogan is simply that: a slogan. A way of keeping people from looking deeper, and if one does find the blind wiggly things, one can’t say anything because of that slogan.
What a world!
My mind is also scurrying about trying to find a new password for my bank account. Every six months, mine becomes defunct. Oh, the pressure!
And, even more pressurizing — my blog platform is discontinuing the simple, classic editing program that I’ve used all these years. (I just realized, in just three weeks, it will be the thirteenth anniversary of this blog, and the end of a year’s worth of daily blogging.) I suppose I should be lucky that although they have changed their editor box several times over these years, they have also kept the classic editor, so I was able to ride out all the changes.
But that ride is over. They are gradually changing all blogs to the new editor, which means when my time comes, they will be changing things on my blog itself, not just the things I want to change. In a way, it will be easy enough — there are only a few blog posts that consistently bring people here, so those are the ones I will start putting right, and then gradually bring all the other 2,280 posts into line. I’m hoping the new way of doing things won’t be as confusing as it sounds. I do know I am an old style blogger, where I just post an essay plus an accompanying photo, but apparently, people like a lot of different styles of content in one post — videos, polls, apps, multiple columns, etc. Although I don’t consider myself a neophyte at this sort of thing, I’ve never been able to figure out this whole block content thing. The photo never ends up where I want, I can’t edit the html the way I want. In other words, the promised simplicity just is not there.
So, although I will be continuing my daily foray into blogging, don’t be surprised if you see a post with just a word or two while I try to figure the whole thing out. Luckily, I still have time before they force me into this new mode, so I might be able to make the changeover seamlessly. But not, as you can see, without a lot of cogitation and restlessness and infinite games of solitaire.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator
I’ve opened my computer several times previously today so that I could write a blog post, but each time, I’ve played a few games of solitaire and then closed the computer.
Almost anything I want to say about the situation in the world today would put me even further beyond the pale than I already am. Many of my blog readers seem to appreciate my struggles to understand the truth in light of two very different narratives being told today, but other people . . . not so much. They believe what they want to believe, and call everything that doesn’t fit in that belief system lies. Or fake news. Or however else the current lexicon defines an opposing viewpoint they consider invalid.
I did find it interesting that the tarot card I picked today said I was an intelligent and complex woman, a truthseeker, open to hearing the thoughts and opinions of others but able to filter through all the rhetoric to see what is true. It’s how I like to see myself; how I hope I really am.
Which brings me to another point — a pointed stick, in fact.
I looked up the origin of “beyond the pale,” and the “pale” (aka “pole”) was a pointed stick (or a lot of pointed sticks) indicating a boundary. This phrase has been around since the twelfth century. Apparently, when the Normans invaded Ireland, they built a palisade around Dublin to protect themselves from the barbarians who lived beyond that pale.
Considering that I have built my own “pales,” both the fence around my house and the small area I have staked for my own on the internet (this blog, of course), perhaps it is others who are beyond the pale — my pale, anyway — while I am solidly within my own pale.
We all create our pales, I suppose, beyond which lie dragons (and barbarians). The problems come not when people stray further beyond some ideolgical pale, but when they physically force themselves into someone else’s pale.
Ah, see what I did? In a roundabout way, I ended up talking about that which I didn’t want to talk about, but it really is hard not to stray into that particular pale when it is so much on my mind.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator
Apparently, Facebook isn’t the only entity that thinks my blog is spam. A couple of days ago, a friend called make sure I’m okay because she hasn’t been getting my blog via email, and she worried that something had happened to me. I told her I was fine and that I was still blogging every day (even though I don’t always have something to say) and suggested she check her spam folder.
Sure enough, the last four blogs had been classified by her email provider as spam.
I think I know what the problem is — the brief bio at the bottom of every post. Even though it is just a small fraction of the post itself, apparently the spam-eating bots have been picking up on the duplication. (One message from FB mentioned that repetition was considered spam, which corroborates this surmise.)
I never used to put anything at the bottom of my posts because it seemed redundant — after all, all the information about me and my books are on sidebars and pages — but some sites illegally repost blogs without attribution, and I used to find various of my articles on those sites. (I’m sure such sites are still around, though I’ve stopped looking.) Since there’s often nothing that can be done about the theft, one suggestion I came across to counteract the attack was to make sure every blog had a bio and links so that if anyone came across the blog on other sites, it would refer back to me.
I’m glad I got in the habit — phone apps for the various blog platforms generally don’t allow for sidebars, so no one who reads my blog via their phone would see who I am and what other things I write without the bio. It’s not a problem for regular readers since they know who I am, but many new people find me via search engines (most often for questions about grief) and I want them to know about my grief book.
I could, of course, do a new bio every day if the bio really is the problem, but then I probably wouldn’t post something every day, either, because it would be too much extra work. I could also do several different bios and rotate so that the repetition comes once a week rather than every day, but my stubborn nature won’t let me be accommodating (though I did remove the link to my website, in case the links were the culprit).
And anyway, the bio itself might not be the problem. If it is, I’m grateful — it was the impetus to get me off Facebook, at least for now, and I must admit, I’m much happier living in my own little world without the contention and opinionation and strife that comes with the FB territory.
So, since I’m maintaining the current state of this blog, if you generally get my posts via email and you happen to notice that I have disappeared, please check your spam folder. I’m probably there.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator
I’m not sure it’s worth continuing to fight Facebook over their blocking this blog from their site, but people I respect have urged me to write them a letter and send it by USPS. So, here is the letter I came up with. What do you think?
Facebook Customer Service
1 Hacker Way
Menlo Park, CA 94025
To Whom it May Concern:
On April 29, Facebook erroneously blocked my blog from the networking site. They said the blog goes against community standards for spam, but it didn’t go against any such standards when I was paying to boost various posts.
Because of the block, all links to my blog posts, included the boosted posts, have disappeared as well as the comments and discussions the posts generated. I have left messages via the onsite support center concerning this matter, but all such messages have been ignored.
Please, a thirty-second perusal of bertramsblog.com will tell you that the blog is not spam. It’s a personal blog, a diary of sorts, telling about my grief after the death of my husband and how I learned to survive the loss. These posts have helped tens of thousands of people deal with their own grief and were often shared on FB. Although I don’t talk about grief much anymore, writing instead about being a new homeowner, people still find my posts inspirational since the posts tell them that there is life and maybe even happiness after grief.
If you won’t unblock my blog, please refund the $355 I spend boosting articles that you have since removed from your site. You have also removed all mention of these ads, but I can send you documentation of these payments on Paypal.
Thank you for your consideration.
Pat Bertram
https://www.facebook.com/PatBertramAuthor/
https://www.facebook.com/patbertram
https://bertramsblog.com/
When I started with the internet, blogging first then signing up for various networking platforms, I had no patience for people who posted about the minutiae of their lives. I especially didn’t care what they ate — it didn’t seem to have any relevance in the grand scheme of a thoughtful literary life, and it certainly had nothing to do with my objective of making a name for myself as an author.
Well, here I am, a dozen or so years later, writing about my latest meal. In my defense, with the isolation, meals are basically the only thing I do of any value. And generally, if I stick to a healthy diet, my meals are boring. Salads get tiresome, as does any sort of vegetable eaten regularly for any length of time, and trying to find healthy proteins is a lost cause.
Today I decided to put some effort into making something different. (It was either this or ordering a pizza I really do not need). It might not look like much, but this spinach mushroom quiche alternative (baked eggs without a crust) turned out to be quite good.
I’m continuing to wean myself away from the computer, which leaves me with little to do but read. Since I finished my emergency stash of books, and since my email to the library with a list of books for me to pick up curbside resulted in no action, I’m in emergency-emergency mode — immersed in The Wheel of Time, a 4,000,000 word literary work that I’ve read many times before. The best thing I can say about it (besides its length — no need to look for books to read for a long time!) is that it has to be the quintessential good vs evil story. Or more accurately — sort of good some of the time vs, mostly evil all of the time.
It’s exhausting, not just the constant conflicts between the good and evil, the good and good, and evil and evil, but the sheer amount of activity. All the characters are always on the move, traveling from one part of their world to another, on foot, by horse, or by ship.
And the food they eat is even less interesting than what I generally eat — so often, they are on short rations of porridge, cheese, dried meat, and crusty rolls or bread sometimes flecked with weevils. (I must admit, though, that bread or rolls hot from the oven does sound wonderful. Minus the weevils, of course.)
I’m getting to the point where I can’t imagine a different life, though I don’t know if that is a good thing or a not-so-good thing. But it is what I have, at least for now.
And anyway, even if I couldn’t find anything more relevant in the grand scheme of things than my insular life to write about, at least I’m still writing every day.
That’s something to the good. At least, I hope it is.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.
I took a chance today and posted one of my blog links on my Facebook author page, hoping the ban was a mistake on their part, but nope. This blog is still banned for violating their spam standards. It upset me, though it shouldn’t have. I know what they had done, and to be upset about it yet again seems a bit foolish. Still, not being able to post the link to my daily articles so that people I know on FB can see what I write, coupled with having deleted a couple of posts that were bringing hordes of the wrong kind of people has played havoc with my readership and search engine referrals. (The more people one has viewing one’s blog, the higher one’s ranking in the search engines, and the higher one’s ranking, the more people will view the blog.) Still, the people who want to read my posts follow me, and the people who need to read my grief posts should be able to find me . . . eventually.
In an effort to change my attitude after stopping by FB, I decided to make pierogi. (For those who don’t know, they are a Polish potato dumpling served with sour cream.) The long-drawn-out process — preparing the potato and cheese filling, preparing the egg-noodle dough, filling the dough squares, boiling the dumplings and then frying them — is complicated enough when more than one person is involved in the preparations, but with one person doing it all, it takes hours. But those hours were spent not thinking about anything since mostly it’s muscle memory work, so that was all to the good.
Now I’m back to myself, taking things as they come, which is even better. And for the most part, what comes is pleasant enough. I can’t go out for walks yet, but a bit of research told me that an elliptical is a great exercise for knees, and it just so happens, I have an elliptical — a hand-me down from a brother who didn’t particularly like it. I hadn’t been using the machine because all the boxes that were stored in the old garage are now stored in my exercise room, but I moved things around so I could get to the elliptical. The exercise is not something I can do for more than a few minutes at a time since it’s a much harder workout than simply walking, but it isn’t hurting my knee any, and perhaps it’s doing some good.
One of the things aggravating my knee was the steep step up into the house through the back door. Now that I know that the step was putting too much of a strain on my knees, I use the front door, even though I end up tracking dirt into the living room. (Which is why, obviously, I was using the back door.) There are plans for a new back stoop area that eliminates the steep step, but since it will be a ramp from the back door of the house to the pedestrian door of the garage, it can’t be done until the garage is built.
The garage has been on hiatus the past ten days or so — although the local lumber yard has my garage door, they won’t be able to deliver it until next week (something to do with The Bob — maybe people out sick?) So, with a bit of luck, there will be some progress made on the garage next week.
Meantime, there are many volumes of The Wheel of Time left to be re-read.
So, despite the whole insulting spam thing, there are reasons for gratitude. I’m mostly healthy, mostly well-fed, mostly content. And if I am isolated, at least I am isolated in my own house. And for that I am especially grateful.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.
When Facebook blocked my blog URL from their site, it made me rethink a lot of what I’ve been doing online. Not writing this blog, of course — that is a given. But other things, such as keeping friends on Facebook that I don’t know simply because we are authors or because it wouldn’t be politic to remove them. I figure my current boycott of the site — if FB doesn’t want my blog, they don’t get any part of me — would be a good time to quietly unfriend those folks I don’t know or don’t want to know.
When I first came online, all the marketing hints for authors mentioned how important FB was, so I did my best to work the site. At one time, I had the maximum number of friends allowable, but as the years passed, and I realized none of these people had any interest in me, I started removing those who annoyed me. From 5,000 to 200. That’s a lot of annoyance! A few of those 200 I keep only because . . . well, I don’t really know why except that I know them. When . . . if . . . I ever return, I might remove some of them too.
After cleaning up FB, I turned my attention to Twitter. Twitter has never been a favorite of mine, so mostly all I do there is have my blog URL posted automatically to the site. Although a writer friend once walked me through all the ways Twitter can help an author, none of those ideas ever worked for me. Twitter seems to work only if you have more that 10,000 followers, and I fall vastly short of that number. I did go through and do some housekeeping, though, such as unfollowing people that I follow but who no longer follow me.
Finally, I did something I never thought I would do, I removed some problematic blog posts. As I explained in my post Repercussions, shortly after my first two novels were published, I had a text conversation with my sister, who had just finished reading the books. I asked her if it was strange reading a $&X scene written by her sister. (Just so you know, I am not averse to using the word, I’m just trying to hide it from google.) I posted the conversation on my blog because I was so tickled with her observations.
A couple of months later, on the list of search engine terms people use to find my blog, I noticed a lot of incestual queries. There was no mistaking the meaning of the terms. They were explicit.
Not one to sneer at a gift from the writing gods, even such a sleezy gift as this, I wrote a blog: “$&X With $ister Tips — Writing Tips, That Is.” (The more views a site gets, the higher it’s ranked by search engines, and so the more views it gets.) It was actually a good post, talking about how to make the scenes motivated and a part of the story rather than simply adding prurient interest.
As uncomfortable as the whole incest thing made me, it never occurred to me to remove the posts. Ever since the quarantine, though, the number of views on those posts have skyrocketed, and the comments increasingly frightening.
Since this is a time of reworking my online presence — what is left of it — I finally trashed those particular blogs.
It feels good, all this online housecleaning. Refreshing.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.
Where do you get your news? Television? Newspapers? Magazines? Online sources? It struck me the other day that since I don’t have television and don’t subscribe to newspapers, Facebook is the main source of news for me. I know that sounds horrible and frightening, but it isn’t, at least not in my case.
Facebook is one of those sites that everyone experiences differently. For some people, it’s a place to keep up with family and friends, to play games, to see cat or dog photos, to be inspired or amused by the ubiquitous memes, to promote.
When I first joined Facebook, the groups had discussion boards that were separate from links and photos and promos, and those discussion boards were my joy. Back then, authors were joining in huge numbers to make names for themselves but they didn’t know what to do once they got there. So every week, I’d sponsor a discussion, asking one or another author to post a brief article about a particular aspect of writing, and then lead a discussion. It worked. It was fun. Authors had a place to go where they could feel at home as they tried to figure out how they fit into the larger FB scheme.
Then FB, in its infinite wisdom, did away with the discussion boards, and the promos that were once set off in a special area now flooded the group, and discussions became impossible. I finally reclaimed the discussion aspect by setting up a special event every Saturday for promos and sending a group message giving people the link. That, too was fun, with everyone getting together to promote each other’s work. Then FB banned me from ever sending another group message. So I set up a separate group for those once-a-week promos. I kept that going for a long time until I realized that everyone was promoting one another but ignoring my posts. In a snit, I disbanded the group, which was not at all fun — to delete a group, you have to first remove each member, which takes awhile if you have more than 1000 members. When that’s done, you remove yourself. And that’s the end.
I still have the discussion groups, though they mostly sit there with no activity. And I still have a lot of literary friends, most of whom are very smart and very well read. These people span the whole political and idealistic and artistic spectrums, and each person posts links to articles that interest them. Hence, my feed is like a news magazine, though like no magazine you’ve ever read since for every point of view espoused there is an equal and opposing view presented.
This really has nothing to do with FB except that it’s the platform this private news magazine is fed into. People complain about not being able to see everyone’s posts, but that is a simple fix for me — if I notice that I’m not seeing someone, I go to their profile. But mostly, the FB algorithms work in my favor in that the more you view and interact with someone, the more of their posts you will see.
During the past twelve years, I’ve found a way to work around every single one of FB’s ridiculous changes, but there is no way to work around a ban. They do not hear, do not respond, do not care. There’s also no way of knowing if the ban on my posting links is permanent, or if after three months in “Facebook jail,” my ability to post will reappear as silently and as inexplicably as it disappeared.
So far, they have not completely banned me — just my blog — so I can still check in occasionally, but without a need to see who, if anyone, commented and to respond if necessary, there’s really no compelling reason to spend much time looking through my feed.
It might be good for me, not knowing what is going on. I was always much happier living in my own little world and eschewing a broader outlook. Except for books, of course — during all the years of my boycotting the news, I read history. That’s all news is, anyway — history in the making, and for now, I’ve had enough of the making.
Makes me wonder (jokingly) — if I get no news from any source, will that mean all is well? Because as we know: no news is good news.
Speaking of good news: my lilacs are in bloom!
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.
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