“Since meaning is the movement of speech, our thought crawls along in language.” Merleau-Ponty

• By Eileen Vandergrift
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I have spent a lot of my life, in and out of the office, attempting to reveal experiences-lived as experiences-formulated-in-words. I believe that language, and our ability to share our experiences through it, connects us to one another, relieves us of some of the isolation that comes with being human and offers us different ways to appreciate what our experiences can mean as we grasp how our losses change us.
Loss is often hard for us to talk about deeply and freely, because it is difficult for people to bear our pain (and their own sense of helplessness in the face of it). Because I believe that children, in their need for a stable and comprehending adult world, are especially challenged by the need to make sense of significant losses, I decided to write a book for them.
My story is about a little monkey moving through love, loss and adaptation after the death of his mother. It’s on Amazon.com and can be found by searching www.amazon.com/Story Monkey On Memory Mountain. My book is intended to encourage ways of speaking to children as they grow into and through their losses. My hope is that it invites conversation between children who are grieving and the adults who are trying to provide a safe space for them to speak about it!