Grief and Resilence at the CA Women's Conference

Elizabeth Edwards was one of the speakers at the Lunch Breakout at the CA Women's Conference hosted by CA First Lady Maria Shriver.

This session was about grief, healing, and resilience.

I thank Indyvoter for this wonderful h/t.

http://www.californiawomen.org/the-womens-conference-2009/lunch. It's about 1 hour and 41 minutes before one sees the Grief panel.

One Carolina Girl found the pic above. This is a powerful emotive group. Elizabeth is maintaining composure, but it's clear she is totally empathetic. She's right about the triggers, you never know when you have them. Gifts are great.

Thank you First Lady Maria S. I understand about the recent loss of your mother; it happened to me over 6 months ago.

Unlike Susan St. James who lost her son, the man who wrote to her with the comment, "I know what you are feeling, I lost my dog recently" this was an initial thought. She made a small joke about it, and the joke wasn't totally unfeeling, but Elizabeth was right to point out that not everyone means to say the wrong thing. Usually they mean well even if it's not what you expected.

Grief is not all about the human losing a human experience, Ms. St. James. It is about losing family members. I'm mourning the loss of our beloved girls, Sydney and Mattie, our Aussie Shepherds, who went to Rainbow Bridge 50 weeks apart in the last year. They were family too. I'm hoping Ms.St James will pay heed to EE in her words of being sensitive to many of us, even if we were human parents to pets. Many of us loved being humans of pets whom we loved them. And spent thousands or hundreds of dollars to save them when they were stricken with diseases challenging to fight. Many of us didn't want to give up our pets and ran bills to our plights.

We had to sacrifice $405 to get our Sydney diagnosed, and she expired 2 days later. But it was worth knowing what could happen, and our vet was pretty much on the mark. It was a challenging on our budget of mainly from one income, but we wanted our options for our Syd. I will not accept from anyone that pets aren't as acceptable as humans. Just my opinion.

Please, grief is about humans and our pets.