Conference Emphasizes Pulling It All Together - Alone

In his book “A Grace Disguised,” author Gerald L. Sittser confronts the kind of grief that brings you to your knees.

In just a few shattering minutes on a fall evening in 1991, Sittser lost his wife, his daughter and his mother in a horrific car crash. The experience tested both his sanity and his faith.

“Catastrophic loss wreaks destruction like a massive flood,” Sittser wrote. “It is unrelenting, unforgiving and uncontrollable, brutally erosive to body, mind and spirit.”

It is grief like this that Solo Strategies tries to handle. For 11 years now, a consortium of local groups - headed by Community College of Spokane - has sponsored annual Solo Strategies conferences as a way of helping people who, like Sittser, have experienced the loss of a wife or husband.

Originally, Solo Strategies was intended as a support system for displaced homemakers. But the group’s emphasis has changed over the years to encompass men as well.

Sittser, in fact, was a keynote speaker one year. And this time the conference is titled “Three Stories: Male Perspectives on Grief.” Keynote speakers will include: Steve Belzman, who was injured in a car accident that killed his wife; Paul Lewis, whose wife died of breast cancer; and Don Barlow, also a widower.

The 1996 Solo Strategies conference will be held April 19-20 at Spokane Community College. For registration and fee information, call (800) 344-SOLO.

Modern attitudes: It’s funny the things we’ll sometimes do for love.

And it’s funny how some of those things are judged by the age of the people doing them.

“During, maybe sixth- or seventh-grade, I had a terrible crush on this girl,” actor Jeff Goldblum told InStyle magazine. “I would ride my bike past her house or sit in front of it. It would be called stalking these days.”

Male-bashing, etc.: In her book “Lip Service” (HarperCollins, $23), author Kate Fillion talks about the womanly alternative to the manly practice of “rating chicks.”

“Men are dissected in the laboratory of women’s friendships, often with a rigorous attention to detail that would be wholly unacceptable in any locker room,” Fillion wrote. “We huddle around the microscope to examine an individual man’s motives and puzzling actions, pooling our information in order to arrive at a better understanding of the species.”

Mountains high: Stacy Allison, the first American woman to climb Mount Everest, will speak at the annual YWCA Benefit Breakfast.

The event will be held at 7:30 a.m. March 26 at the Ag Trade Center. For reservation information, call 326-1190.

, DataTimes