I drank for twenty years alcoholically. During the last seven years of that time, I "sped my bottom" by adding prescription drugs, mostly diet pills and Valium, but some street drugs too. I had a Mount Everest of problems.

I think we, no, I should say I, often forget that grieving is an extremely individual process. No one can really experience grief in the way I do, and no one can experience it in the way you do.

Elizabeth Kubler Ross wrote about the five stages of catastrophic loss in her book," On Death and Dying". While she was speaking to the terminally ill patient, most people have found that the stages she defines work as well for almost any kind of grief.

No one could have been more amazed than this devout atheist when I was first in AA and discovered through the exercises discussed in the book Getting to Know God, that there was a God, a good God, a loving God, even a joyful God.

It is both a wonderful and terrible aspect of God's love that when we lose someone we love, the deep pain we feel can draw us closer to God, the author of life and death. As Christians all our relationships are a triangle, with one another and God at the head. Our deepest selves are connected to one another and to God because it is in Him we live and love and have our true being.

When Lorelle and I first wrote this grief devotional, Mourning Glory, the world of grief, as well as the world at large, seemed much smaller.