After falling in love with my grief after the suicide of my only son I knew the greatest part of my life was no longer my own. The year 2007 delivered Monique Antoinette's Dessert's; my first life purpose. This new venture involved my love for food, commercial problem solving and profit margins. What a surprise this was after building a career as an artist in love with Faux Finish Painting. With much on my plate, the journal entries made during my grief recovery made their way to the pages of my memoir Grateful For Grief:Seasons of Transformation and to the people in the fall of 2010. A new published Author/Life Coach was now my second life purpose.
Three years of discovering and developing two different parts of me simultaneously often stirred my center. I questioned the variances between them. I asked outside myself, “Is this right, how do these two parts of me relate to each other, and am I crazy”? I took these questions with me through the busiest year of my life.
A spring time hysterectomy required healing time that exceeded my doctor’s advice. That healing time was overshadowed with work until the week after my new book was released. I was out of gas, and in pain. As my pain peaked with numbness my mind arrived at a place of peace with what was. It, my mind, found the courage to express gratitude for the now pain. It, my mind found the nerve to delight itself with pleasure in knowing that it remained strong in its curiosity. With flesh finally surrendered, my spirit carried to the levy of my mind a message. The message was the answer to my 2010 repetitive question about my two life purposes.
“Monique Antoinette the Entrepreneur and Monique Antoinette the Author/Life Coach will build a bridge to serve grieving people. The combination of these life purposes will deliver comfort and healing. The Cobbler Cookie Collection, a new specialty dessert will live inside a new product called “The Comfort Basket”. “In this basket will also live my new book and a variety of additional healing products created to meet the need of every grieving consumer, i.e., a Poetry CD, an eBook, an Audio Book, an Affirmation CD with Musical Interludes, a Inspiration Gift Certificate (to chat with me about grief) and a Spa Certificate to help relieve the physical stress that grief attaches to the body”.
What also seeped in was the name of my new charity. Yes, I would be the founder of a charity called……Grieve Through Art. How appropriate was this name. Cooking and writing were expressions of art that had saved my life. Two things I had been in love with forever. I burned my first pancake at five and wrote my first story before kindergarten. “Of course this was right”, of course these two parts of me bridged healing, and I wasn’t crazy”!
The enormous answer was delivered while in the perfect position- horizontal.
I marinade in this confirmation with radiant joy. I close my eyes peacefully with a vision of me standing on a bridge thinking these words out loud,
co-create with deliberate intent to reach with comfort and help to heal the masses of grieving people”.
Monique Antoinette~
