Hi, I’m Tamara
Welcome. If you have dropped in on me here it is likely that you are grieving the loss of someone or something special to you. I’m sorry.
How I got here…
I’m no stranger to grief. In a 36-month period I lost my father to cancer, was laid off from a job I loved, and my perfectly robust husband was diagnosed with and died from cancer. I was my husband’s primary caregiver while learning a new full-time job and caring for our two children. No pressure. I weighed less than my 15-year-old. My hair fell out. A simple conversation with my husband involved the external dialogue and a running internal scream of “How am I going to live without this man?!” And then came the day that I became a young widow.
Putting the pieces together…
My life is much like the jigsaw puzzles my grandfather and I put together when I was a child. I assembled the perimeter first so I could better see how to fill in the center. The boundaries were important to understanding where the other pieces fit. Most of the time my grandfather would sit back and watch but at times he handed me pieces, “Here, you will need this later.”
My circumstances taught me, some of them seemingly normal and others major by anyone’s standard. Being raised by a single mother gave me insights I thought I would never need. That was not the plan my husband and I had for our lives when we got married. But I became a single mother and only parent. Then there was the decision to remove my grandmother from life support after a major stroke. “Here, you will need this later.” Indeed.
My puzzle is not complete but I’m beginning to see how the pieces fit together.
The grieving processes I went through with each life event were unique. There was some overlap – fear, for instance – but each experience was not the same. Surprise! I also figured out that the theory of the five stages of grief did not fit what I was living. I felt that I must be “doing it wrong” and was therefore never going to recover any sense of normalcy. In fact, some of the feelings I had caused me to feel guilty because I didn’t have any information to tell me that they were perfectly common.
Why I do this…
My call is to support people to be with their grief without judging it. You are not sick, you are human. These days that looks less like one-on-one support and more like practitioner education. I teach through The Creative Grief Studio (CGS), where we train grief support practitioners to work with people using creativity, contemporary theory, and approaches grounded in belonging and agency. If you are a practitioner, or thinking about becoming one, that is where I can be most useful to you.
The resume stuff…
I have a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology with a concentration in Psychology and have had a twenty-plus year career in Human Resources. I worked for a prominent Fortune 100 company for the majority of my career. Part of that time was spent coaching employees on everything from career goals and job loss to more personal issues such as the death of a loved one. I also did a good bit of very left-brained work and added a Six Sigma Black Belt certification to my Professional of Human Resources certification. If you would like more details, you can see my online resume by going to LinkedIn.
In 2011, I took a leap of faith and left my job to be a stay-at-home mom for the last year of my oldest child’s high school career. After some soul searching, I became a Certified Creative Grief Support Practitioner. (Yep, I’m a fan of certification!) I also volunteered with Soaring Spirits International for 8 years to create a safe space for widowed people in Atlanta, GA to meet and talk with others who “get it.” As a grief educator now, I teach hospice workers, pastors, grief coaches and others through the Creative Grief Studio.
The artist in me…
I am a potter, photographer and writer. My camera and my journal have helped me in my attempt to make sense of the world after loss. Pounding mud into functional shapes gets me out of my head and back into my body. I can’t draw worth a hoot, but I like playing with other mediums and in collage and paint from time to time. I have found that I need creative pursuits to keep my balance and turn off my analytical mind that wants to “figure out” grief. It can’t.
And if you can’t draw worth a hoot either…
Creativity is not about being able to draw. It is about having access to ways of knowing yourself that words alone cannot reach. Collage, photography, clay, music, even crayons. Whatever you are drawn to is the right place to start. My pottery practice lives at that intersection, where making something with your hands becomes a way of being with what you carry. You can see my current work, which includes memorial pottery such as urns and meditation stones, at the Art Shop.
If you found your way here through grief and you are also a practitioner, or someone considering that work, the Creative Grief Support Certification program trains people to offer this kind of support well. I also write regularly about grief, practice, and the work of showing up for people in hard seasons. You can read and subscribe to the CGS Substack. And if you are ready to build or refine your practice, Shaping the Work is a planning process I offer specifically for grief practitioners.
