Ana Niziolek

“When I lost my husband due to drowning in Lake Michigan the grief was extremely hard. You still deal with it every day; it doesn’t go away, it just gets easier to cope. Grief never goes away, it’s always there, it’s just how you cope with it. The first year was miserable; I didn’t cope at all. But with time you just start getting back on your feet and you start engaging in life again, engage with friends or family, or you leave the house, you know–that really made the difference in engaging in life or what I like to call engaging in life again. Because when you’re grieving you just don’t want to do anything–you’re so depressed, and so sad, and grieving that just going back out, reaching out to friends, reaching out to family, engaging, doing things, leaving the house, going on vacation. One of the things that I did after my husband passed away, about six months after, I went to Hawaii on my own just to like explore and do something different. It was terrible. It was so frightening but I did it and then now today I sit here and I am so proud I did that. At the time you’re like “Oh my gosh,” and you know a lot of crying and a lot of “What am I doing?” and it was probably a good thing to do, it’s something I can say that I did during my grieving journey that helped me,” Alexa Davis said.