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The past few months have been difficult times for a lot of my friends. I feel like all through the last couple of months of 2014, bad things kept happening to friends: serious illnesses and unexpected major surgeries, deaths of close family members and beloved pets, big financial problems, relationship difficulties, and more.

And then around late January or early February, I think five of my Facebook friends' parents died in a two-week period. And a couple of other friends have lost parents and had other major life issues in the weeks since then.

I've been wanting to write about all that, but I've been having a hard time figuring out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. Eventually, it occurred to me that that was partly because of the “it's all about me” factor. I wanted to express sympathy, but I also wanted to talk about myself. And those are really two different things. So I'll save the all-about-me stuff for a separate post.

So, to all my friends who've been going through hard times, and especially to those who've lost parents recently: You have my sympathies. I'm sorry to hear about everything you've been going through. I think I've said that to most of you individually, but it bears repeating.

I don't know if this'll be of any use to any of you, but just in case, here's a link to a post I wrote a while back about coping with grief, which in turn links to a page that's been useful to me in understanding and dealing with my own grief.