Friend Grief and Anger

In 2006, I told my friend, Delle Chatman, that I had an idea for a book about people grieving their friends. I'd never written a book before, but she encouraged me to do it. Six months later, she was dead from the ovarian cancer that had been in remission when we had that discussion. It took several years to figure out what I was doing, and along the way I decided to break up the book into a series of short books, each on a specific experience. I started with anger, an emotion not always associated with grief and not always acknowledged. When she died, I felt like the minister in the movie, The Big Chill, when he said, "I'm angry. And I don't know what to do with my anger." But anger is part of my story about Delle, and part of so many stories about grief. It's time we admitted it.