What started as one friend reaching out to another while they were grieving, has turned into a book series to help others deal with loss.
Marina Reed and Marian Boyd are the co-authors of the book series Remember, It’s OK. The series aims to provide support for people in grief, whether they are dealing with the loss of a partner, family member or friend.
Boyd is a psychotherapist, adoption practitioner and grief counsellor with over 30 years of experience living in Guelph.
She said she has always wanted to write a book on grief, but wanted their books to allow space for people to be present with their grief.
“We wanted to keep them very gentle, one thought per page, per moment,” said Boyd.
All the books in this series share stories of loss in the form of first-person journal entries, which Boyd responds to with advice based on current information about how to work with grief.
Reed, the writer of the series, explains the entries were created based off of interviews with real people going through grief, but were written without referencing religion or gender.
"So anybody in grief should be able to read these and resonate with them, and that was our really big goal," she said.
The pair have known each other for seven years, but the idea for the series began six years ago after Reed’s husband, Luke, passed away from a sudden heart attack at home.
“I was in a pretty bad place,” said Reed about his passing, “I was living in an isolated area and Luke was gone and I had five days off from my job because that's all they gave me. So I was really in a dark place."
During that time, Boyd was asked to check up on Reed to see how she was doing.
“My friend Nancy was getting pretty concerned about how Marina was doing, ” Boyd recalls, “I am a psychotherapist, I've done grief support for years and she said, 'Why don't you go knock on Marina's door?'”
“She didn't tell me what to do, she didn't push anything on me,” said Reed about Boyd visiting her for the first time, “She kind-of found these little moments, where she would say something, and she kind-of got me to a better place."
Afterwards, Boyd came to visit Reed a couple more times before they started emailing back and forth. Boyd said she remembers those emails, describing what Reed was writing about her grief as 'powerful'.
“She's put into words all kind-of things that grieving people have been trying to tell, maybe didn't quite know how to tell me,” Boyd recalls, “She was expressing it and expanding on it."
In 2018, Reed was working on a project in Costa Rica and asked Boyd to join her for a couple of weeks. During that time, they decided to create a series of books on how to deal with grief, and the emails became the template and format for the six books in the series.
"The emails gave us the vision for the book," said Boyd.
For their books, Boyd explains that they wanted to get away from the stages of grief. The stages of grief come from psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who used them to explain what people preparing to die experience, not people grieving the loss of someone.
“Our society is so quick to grab onto something that, 'OK now grief makes sense! I can put in all these stages and know what's happening to me,'" said Boyd, “But to a person, who are actually in a deep stage of grief, 'Those stages don't make sense to me.'"
“And you don't finish," Reed adds, "and people will say, 'Oh, when you finish that stage, you go to the next,' and I remember people saying that to me, and that's not what it feels like at all."
With this in mind, Boyd and Reed created a new way of explaining the grieving process called the colour spectrum, which involves the use of colours to explain the types of grief. The colours are red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise and pale blue.
“But it still isn't linear," Reed explains about the spectrum, "Because people who have been grieving for six years, can still be in a red moment.
"These colours can weave in and out throughout your life."
The books not only provide comfort for those dealing with grief, but they also provide insight to those who are supporting someone who is grieving.
“They can get a glimpse into the mind of how the person is feeling," said Reed, "They can see what Marian's response is, so that people can learn what to say and what not to say."
Along with the colour spectrum, Reed said she added additional resources on her website for people to check out for more information on PTSD, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Meditation and more, which can be found here.
With all three books released back in May, the duo plan to release another three books in May 2021. Currently, books from the Remember, It’s OK series can be found online on Amazon or Indigo, or at the Bookshelf in Guelph.
To learn more about the series, go to rememberitsok.com.
