I was 43 when my daughter Maya, 19, was declared brain dead after massive head injuries caused by a fall from a horse she was riding bareback. The day before her accident, we learned that she had been accepted by UCLA in its theater arts program. They would provide a full scholarship. It was a monumental achievement for a community college transfer student. Maya was out celebrating when her fall cut her life short and changed mine forever. Grief became my new normal.

That was 1992. For the last 30 years, I’ve bemoaned the way our society leaves grieving families unsupported and alone to grapple with heartache. As a single mother, I dealt with crushing grief after my daughter’s death, but I also had to summon the energy to care for my surviving daughter, 11-year-old Meghan. I searched for resources to provide emotional and psychological support for Meghan and me. Somehow, I continued to earn a living in a high-stress corporate job.

How I Survived

I’m one of the lucky ones. My employer, Pacific Bell, allowed me to take an extended bereavement leave of six weeks. I had a network of friends, a supportive spiritual community, and a fantastic therapist. The Compassionate Friends, a group of bereaved parents, grandparents, and siblings provided peer support. I had long years of therapy to fall back on, yet as a childhood abuse survivor who already had PTSD, the shock of Maya’s death triggered prolonged complex grief.

My memoir Swimming with Maya tells the story of our journey. I wanted to offer hope to other grieving parents that healing was possible. My mission was to make readers more aware of how losing a loved one radically alters a family’s life.

A Grief Warrior

Three decades later, the kind of advocacy bereaved families have long needed has arrived. Evermore, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit founded by bereaved mother Joyal Mulheron in 2014 has teamed with Modern Loss founder Rebecca Soffer to lobby the Biden administration to create a White House Office of Bereavement. With Mulheron’s guidance, Evermore successfully advocated for Congress to include bereavement care in both the 2021 and 2022 budgets.

For the first time, Health and Human Services agencies must report what they are doing to support grieving families and individuals.

The conjoined crises of Covid deaths, mass casualty events like the Uvalde school shooting, and an epidemic of suicides, homicides, and drug overdoses mean we don’t have a moment to lose. American children and families are hurting.

Effects are Long Lasting

After her five-month-old baby daughter Eleanora died, Mulheron transformed her suffering into a laser focus on reshaping grief policy in America. She was determined that other grieving families would not face the vacuum of awareness and support she had to contend with.

She began compiling data on grief, and she established a platform where bereaved people can share their stories. With a background in public policy and public health, Mulheron set out to improve the landscape for bereaved families.

“Research shows that bereavement causes significant health declines, even early death among survivors, including bereaved parents, siblings, and spouses. Yet, our nation spends little to no funding to support the health of family members in the aftermath of losing a loved one,” she says. For her, this is a public health crisis.

As she dug into the data, she found a troubling pattern: families of color are more adversely affected by loss with fewer resources to cope with it. Black children are three times more likely to lose a mother and twice as likely to lose a father by age 10 as compared to white children.

The lack of societal support compounds the trauma. Evermore is working to address these gaps.

National Grief Awareness Day

Angie Cartwright is the founder of National Grief Awareness Day, occurring on her mother’s birthday, August 30. A motivational speaker, author, and grief activist, Cartwright experienced intense grief after multiple losses – her younger sister when Cartwright was only five, her newlywed husband, and her mother in 2010.

She learned the hard way that grievers are often misunderstood, so she vowed to change how our culture views grief. She works to support grieving people worldwide through social media, her website, and her Grief Release Course. Her goal: Help thousands of grievers find solid footing after loss. National Grief Awareness Day provides a focal point for raising awareness about the needs of grieving people and families.

Grief Resources

Discovering the work of these two women gives me hope that at long last our society is willing to face grief honestly, and to provide support for bereavement, a disorienting state that has long remained invisible. After three decades of doing my grief work, I know that it is possible to survive and thrive after a loss – but it takes effort, love, commitment, and most of all support.

To learn more about Evermore, visit https://live-evermore.org/ and view an extensive list of resources, videos, and stories of grieving families.

For more information about National Grief Awareness Day and Angie Cartwright’s work, find her at https://www.linkedin.com/in/angiecartwrightgrief/