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A new anthology, Grief Like Yours: A Story Collection of Life After Loss (Carpe Vitam Press), contains 55 personal essays and poems, mostly from women, from around the country, Turkey, Italy, Canada and England.

“Loss looks different for everyone who is experiencing it, and no one gets to tell us what that should be,” said editor Cindy Eastman. “For example, there is great loss in caregiving situations when an adult child has 'lost' a parent who no longer recognizes them. Or the anticipatory loss that hasn’t quite happened yet because someone you love is dealing with a terminal disease or diagnosis.

“And grieving a loss isn’t only about death; loss of the familiar, the constant, the sustaining shows up in the loss of community, the loss of friendships and the loss of pets. All loss is grieved in some way or another,” said Eastman, who also wrote True Confessions of an Ambivalent Caregiver: A Memoir in Essays.

“The stories of grief collected here are united yet disparate. There is no single note to sing together, the only common chord is loss. The death of 25 years ago can be as fresh as the death of yesterday; there are no rules. That’s why it is important to share these stories because they impact everyone differently. And in the sharing, we don't have to feel alone.”

Eastman is a writer and an educator. Her career has taken a wide and diverse route from introducing computer skills to elementary schoolchildren, teaching first-year English as an adjunct at a community college to facilitating a writing course for seniors for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. In her weekly essay on Substack called “Silver Linings," she discusses getting older with a sense of humor — a must! Read her post about the origins of the anthology and her piece about editing it.

Eastman makes her home in Connecticut with her husband, Angelo.