Thursday, March 28, 2024

An Ode to Recovery from Grief – With love, Laura Formentini

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Sourced Photo

You fluff back the pillows, reassemble the books, and put back the scattered stationery in a room that illuminates a different shade of yellow than before. The drawings they drew were immortal, like the memories they etched in your head with every smile, every giggle, and every moment they spent with you. That overwhelming feeling of grief ensues with the news. 

A seed of an olive tree planted in their name, waiting to sprout, for its branches to reach out and save you from the sorrow.

Laura Formentini’s raw and candid depiction of grief addresses that unnamed, unexplainable hollow space in your heart with her book TwentyOne Olive Trees. 

Here’s what readers can expect from it:

Raw and Real 

Most self-help books force nuances of motivation and recovery by sharing tips and routines you must follow to rejuvenate your happiness. If you have faced loss, you can relate to the suffocating feeling. Where your mind is chaotic, the last thing you need is someone to give you unsolicited advice. What you do need is a shoulder to cry on, someone you can feel safe with. Laura Formentini, through her book, gives every reader, every griever, the opportunity to let their guard down. 

In the book’s foreword, she mentions the reason for the book’s inception. One that sets the tone throughout your read. With each story and poem, you can feel yourself walking the garden of grief, searching for peace and finding it at small bends and turns. 

You feel the enormous deposits of energy stuck in your body, waiting to vent out and flow in the form of tears. Laura’s book helps calm down the feeling of debilitation into one of catharsis. 

Words Of Wisdom

A significant theme in the book is the olive tree. Laura Formentini depicts realizations and moments of wisdom in the folk-fantasy flavor. She describes her choice of the folk aesthetic to bring out the child in her. In today’s world, people take things too seriously. She allows the reader to lay back and channel their inner carefree child with tales reminiscent of the ones grandma used to tell. 

And just like those stories, each piece of writing is laced with lessons that will make you wiser in your journey through grief. Her stories are a much-needed reminder to take life one day at a time, to breathe and “rock on.” Something Laura’s son, Blaise, used to tell her before his sad passing.

Something Beautiful 

When people pass away, they leave a trail of memories to cherish. But before such memories come, there is blurriness caused by damp eyes and an aching heart. Laura Formentini’s book vividly portrays her sorrow for her son’s passing. 

She uses poetry to channel her cathartic experience and a journal to document her raw emotions at the time of her son’s passing. Upon her venting, she realized her heart was getting lighter. Slowly and slowly, the realizations are laced with feelings of peace. She suddenly found herself expressing herself through her writing. Her free-flowing and unorthodox artistic aesthetic is evident in the fables featured in the book. 

Suicide 

The book also raises awareness of the aftermath suicide leaves. Laura’s poetry paints a picture of how overburdening the weight left by suicide can be. Laura and her son shared a special relationship. The two explorers found their joy in finding remote areas. She recalls her winter in Oslo, Norway gazing at the Aurora Borealis with him amongst the memories seared in her heart. The impact of these memories is clear in Laura’s poetry. 

As a reader, the pieces give you a newfound love for life and how short it can be. It urges you to run over to your parents and express your love to them with a tight hug. They help you escape the harsh reality, little by little giving you the room to heal and grow. It gives 

It is an ode to life, a message to live it to the fullest. An understanding that we are energy and that energy doesn’t die but transforms. Our loss isn’t a loss per se but simply a natural transformation process, the fundamentals of which we all have to abide by to persevere, to push, and to make a life worth living for ourselves. There will be times when the water will feel like it’s overflowing to the brim. Just know in those moments, somewhere out there, your soulmate is waiting for you back home. They would want you to be hopeful in their absence and know that they are and always will be here. 

A notion that helps you find peace in knowing that the ones you lost never left nor will. 

Click on the link to buy TwentyOne Olive Trees now!

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