As I Lay Living: Thoughts on Grief and Death

By Caitlin McColl

An ebook collection of articles on death, grief and impermanence written by me on the mindfulness website Elephant Journal. Will be expanded with new articles as required.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caitlin McColl
• Release date: Apr 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005495930

Caitlin McColl

Since childhood, Caitlin has written mainy fantasy - with dragons, wizards and other fantastical monsters. But now she writes Steampunk, stories that makes our world just a little bit more interesting, with the ability to mask the humdrum days we all have - those cold, grey, rainy, depressing days. The days you accidentally sleep in, lock yourself out of the house, battle morning rush hour and realize your still wearing your slippers. Caitlin lives in beautiful Vancouver, Canada with her husband and her dog.Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/caitlinmccollInstagram: instagram.com/caitlinmccollauthorSeptember 2020-Published The Clockwork Universe and The Stained Glass Heart, follow ups to Under A Starlit Sky. Also re-did covers for books.-Published All That Remains - a free short story collection from 2017-Republished The Diary of Dr Jekyll that was published by a Seattle based publisher that is no more2015-Released a free ebook compilation of stories from her short story blog, Under A Starlit Sky, collectively called The Dark And Shadowy Places.Hope you enjoy!

Book preview

This ebook is a collection of articles that I’ve written for the mindfulness website Elephant Journal on grief, death and impermanence which is something I have been trying to accept, be comfortable and come to terms with since my mom passed away at the end of 2015. Even though I’d lost other family members before that - an aunt and uncle to illnesses (one physical, one mental), and both my grandfathers, these deaths didn’t hit me as hard as my mom. Because, well, your mom is your mom, right? She’s the person who is the reason for your whole existence. If it wasn’t for your mom, you wouldn’t be here right now reading these words. It’s one thing to lose grandparents, who are elderly, because when you get old, it’s kind of expected that death will come to you sooner or later. But my mom was 65. Sixty five isn’t old. Or at least not all that old.

So when my mom died, I did what any lover of books does - got a massive stack of books from the library on grief, loss and death, and read through them at a lightening quick pace, hoping that one of them would somehow be able to help explain to me why my mom was living one moment and then the next no longer existed and I would never be able to see her again. And of course, none of those books really gave me the answers I was looking for (and I don’t even know what the questions were that I had anyway). I’ve been a fan of reading Elephant Journal for quite a few years but only in December 2020 did it click that I could actually submit writing to them to get published! So I started writing articles on there in December 2020 and it seemed that quite a few of the pieces I wrote about, which surprised me if I’m honest, was about this not-so-cheery subject: Death - something that the amazing late great Fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett wrote about with such humor yet grace in his fantastic Discworld series of books. And so here we are, with this ebook of my articles, that I will add to and expand whenever I write new articles on Elephant Journal around the subject of death, loss, grief and the Buddhist notion of impermanence.

Thanks to all the editors of Elephant Journal for their work on my articles: Lisa Erickson, Farah Hany, Sukriti Chhopra, Elyane Youssef, Rasha Al Jabi.

May these words be of benefit!

Caitlin (first published April 2021. Updated August 2021)

You can get in touch with me here:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/caitlinmccoll.writer

Twitter: @caitlin_mccoll

Instagram: @caitlinmccoll_author

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlin-mccoll/

How Grief Changes You: A Journey of Post-Traumatic Growth

January 10th 2021

Edited by: