Each morning I read a page from “Healing after Loss. Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief”. I have found these reading to be helpful as I move through my sadness surrounding Shannon’s death. With Andy’s encouragement, I will share a selection of those meditations.
I will go back to the day I started reading, July 19th. Each page has a quote from known and unknown people followed by an in depth interpretation by the book’s author, Martha Whitmore Hickman. Then a closing with a suggested mediation for the day. Depending on the mediation, I may or may not include all three pieces. I may also skip a day or two depending on how I feel about the particular day’s offerings.
July 20
My resolve to live “one day at a time†also means “one world at a timeâ€. But where my loved one is, a fragment of my spirit lives, and waits.
July 21
…All those who try to get it sole alone,
Too proud to be beholden for relief,
Are absolutely sure to come to grief.
– Robert Frost
We all need people to help us cry.
July 23
People in mourning have to come to grips with death before they can live again. Mourning can go on for years and years. It doesn’t end after a year; that’s a false fantasy. It usually ends when people realize that they can live again, that they can concentrate their energies on their lives as a whole, and not on their hurt, and guilt, and pain.
- Elisabeth Kibler-Ross
No one is asking us to forget, to turn away from all that we loved and cherished in the one we have lost. We couldn’t do that even if we wanted to.
The task before us, and it can take a very long time, is to incorporate this grief and loss into the rest of our lives, so that it doesn’t continue to dominate our lives. It’s no longer the first thing we think of when we wake up in the morning, or the last thing we relinquish before we sleep.
A child said ot his mother, in regard to the outpouring of kindnesses after his father’s death, “There are so many good things. There’s just one bad thing.â€
The “bad thing†will always be there, but when it begins to take its place among the good things life offers, we’re on our way.
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Even in my sadness I will be open to new adventure.
July 24
My heart is in anguish within me…
And I say “O, that I had wings like a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest.â€
Psalm 55:46
I will choose my flights carefully – but where might I go
July 26
I am a citizen of this day. Tomorrow will bring its own demands, its own gifts.
July 28
God, bless to me the new day,
Never vouchsafed to me before:
It is to bless Thine own presence
Thou hast given me this time, O God.
Celtic Prayer
May this day be a New Day for me.
July 30
In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpse. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to s a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
-Dag Hammarskjold
In the community of love, all are at home.
July 31
Pain has an element of blank.
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A time when it was not-
-Emily Dickerson
I will be present to the moment as each day unfolds.
Aug 1
Faith is a way of waiting-never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost. There is a doubt hard on the heels of very belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope.
-Fredrick Buechner
We recognize ourselves here – “all but a little lost.†Because we can never really be sure of along that the particulars of our faith, our hope, are what we would like to believe they are. But not quite lost, either. Because as sunshine follows rain follows sunshine, faith, as it waits moves from confidence into doubt onto confidence again. So, in a comforting solidarity with the rest of the waiting faithful, we make our conjectures, hope our hopes.
And every once in a while some minor miracle of insight and confidence. Some serendipity with no explanation other than grace, renews us, and we are wiling to relinquish our need to know the details. Instead, we trust that all shall be well.
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I will wait in faith, trusting that One I cannot know, knows and cares for me.
Aug 2
We cannot do everything at once but we can do something at once.
- Calvin Coolidge
I cannot beat to look down the long road of years without my loved one. But I don’t have to. I have today. And I will, today, do one new thing.
Aug 3
Is there no pity sitting in the clouds. That sees into the bottom of my grief?
-William Shakespeare
Grief is one of the great common experiences of human beings, and yet sometimes we feel so alone in out sadness. Even when family members share the same loss, the grief is different for each one. Our history with the person is different. Our place in the family constellation is different. We are of different temperaments. Sometimes our very closeness to one another makes the differences in the way we express grief hard to understand. Yet we long for common understanding.
Or do we? Our grief may be in common, but is is private as well. Our loss is unique, our own turf. No one can feel just as we feel.
Well, is there some other force-some “pity sitting in the clouds� Some god? Some force of nature? Again, it is our longing to be known, to be accepted, to be comforted.
In time we will find solace, as we walk around and around this grief, walk through the middle of it, look at it for every angle. But we can do that only if we know that beyond our fingertips, our friends and loved ones are loving us, wish us well. As we do for them.
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I have what I need to see my way through this-if you, my friends, are with me.
Aug 4
Nothing can fill the gap when we are away from those we love, and it would be wrong to try and find anything. We must simply hold out and win through. That sounds hard at first, but as the same time it is a great consolation, since leaving the gap unfilled preserves the bond between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; he does not fill it, but keeps it empty so that our communion with another may be kept alive, even at the cost of pain.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is strangely reassuring-this suggestion that the pain of the empty space will always be with us. Because while we do want to feel better, we do not want, ever, to forget.
We will, of course, find new places to put the affection and love and time that we used to pour out to the one we lost. Not to do that would be to turn inward, refuse to be vulnerable-a poor memorial, a poor stewardship for the life left to us.
But our ability to love and care is not limited to some finite number, so that taking on a new love means replacing an old one. Time does not expand, but love does-as with a parent who has three children, and then has another.
What was once loved and cherished is not replaceable.
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Mon Petite, There is a space in my heart that is always yours.
Aug 7
By discovering my own inwardness I am in communion with all other human beings, with nature and beauty and the goodness of all that is.
-Maria Boulding
I am a part of all that is. The great mystery of creation holds me at its heart-as it holds my lost love. In this we are together.
Aug 14
This is not way out, only a way forward.
-Michael Hollings
I stand at the threshold o new life. What will I do? I can stand still. Or I can go forward. Those are my choices.
Aug 15
Can we, in the air that surrounds us, the sunshine that bathes us with its warmth and light, the life that surges in our own being, imagine the abiding presence of our love done?
Aug 23
I am grateful for words that heal.
Aug 25
The moods of grief, like the moods of the day or of the year, are to be honored, and will pass.
Aug 26
I will try to be present to this day.
Aug 29
I was in a garden at the Rodin Museum. For a few minutes I was alone, sitting on a stone bench between two long hedges of roses. Pink roses. Suddenly I felt the most powerful feeling of peace, and I had the thought that death, if it means an absorption into a reality like the one that was before me, might be all right.
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I will watch for my own moments in the garden.
Sept 2
What restraint or limit should there be to grief for one so dear?
-Horace
Only from within me can my timetable of grief be discovered.
Sept 4
This is a land of living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love – the only survival the only meaning.
- Thornton Wilder
I know that love does not cease with the event of death.
Sept 6
Who sees Me in all,
And sees all in Me,
For him I am not lost,
And he is not lost for me.
– Bhagavad Gita
What we are grieved and sometimes terrified by is the sheer fact of loss. The loss of the loved ones’ presence, the loss of his or her love, the loss of his of her Being. How can we be content in a world from which our loved one is forever gone?
But the wisdom of this passage from the Bhagavad Gita, and of passages from other sacred Scriptures, is that the creation continues to embrace us and all those whom we love. We are still somehow bound together in a giant conspiracy of love, mutual care, and ongoing life. As we are not lost to creation, we are not lost to one another.
This is not to deny the pain of separation and the uncertainty of Not Knowing. “Faith, said the apostle Paul, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” What we can be fairly sure of, from our own experience and from the experiences of others, is that there is more going on in the universe than we can detect with our five senses. “Now”, Paul also said, “I see in a glass, darkly. Then I shall see face to face.”
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Creation holds us, one by one, and all together.
Sept 8
I know that we live in the lives of those we touch. I have felt in me the living presence of many I have loved and who have loved me. I experience my daughter’s presence with me daily. And I know that this is not limited to those we know in the flesh, for many guests of my life shared neither time nor space with me.
– Elizabeth Watson
All of us experience a kind of spiritual communications with friends who are not necessarily in our immediate physical presence. When we get together after long absences, it seems”as though it were yesterday.” Is this perhaps partly because we do carry one another somewhere in our unconscious minds, though we are separated?
If with the living, why not with the dead? And this sense we have of knowing those whose words we read or whom we hear about, so that if they walked into the room we would know them–is this, too, evidence of a communication of spirits?
The world os the spirit is a world without walls–of time, of space, of physical reality. We can close our eyes, retreat into ourselves, and be at home with the throngs of people we know and love. Surely this is in some way akin to the “communication of saints” of which the mystics write.
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When I am alone, I can choose some company to be with me. Mon Petite, I choose you.
Sept 9
On the wings of time Grief flies away.
-La Fontaine
Years from now. I may agree grief flies away in time. But don’t push me.
Sept 10
In the midst of darkness there is light; in the midst of sorrow, joy.
Sept 11
Be still and listen to the stillness within.
-Darlene Larson Jones
I have a place of peace within myself. I can find it…and do.
Sept 12
I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming… This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I feel happy–seep down. All is well.
– Katherine Mansfield
Through this experience I will find in myself new strength and wisdom–perhaps, even, new joy.
Sept 15
Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem. And, more that once, that impression which I can’t describe except by saying that it’s like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.
– C.S. Lewis
I suspect that a large part of the energy we spend in pondering the various possible scenarios of life after death is just the energy of grief needing a place to go. But since we are given to speculating and since there is a persistent conviction found in many religions that there is life beyond human death, perhaps we could throw our hats into the ring of hope, and surmise that while we don’t know what God is doing in creation, God knows, and will see us through.
In attending to the mysteries of life after death, I will listen for the chuckle in the darkness.
Sept 17
Take rest. The field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.
-Ovid
I will care for myself in honor of my life and all who have shared that life with me.
Sept 19
There is a really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast-off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.
-Lewis Thomas
I am organically connected to all of life. I am not alone!
Sept 20
The main impact is just the loss, the incredible loss. The expectations just were gone. The old age that I expected is different. It just never occurred to me that she would not be in the next rocker… At the Catholic school that I went to, the motto was hic et noc, Latin for “here and now.” What they meant was you do what is necessary-here and now.
-Cokie Roberts
This is the only day I have for sure. May I use it well.
Sept 21
I don’t believe you are dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe like God, you changed into something that I’ll have to speak to you in a different way, but your not dead to me Nettie. And never will be. Sometimes when I get tired of talking to myself I talk to you.
-Alice Walker
Sometimes the veil between the living and the dead seems thin, and lighter than air.
Sept 22
As I am able , I will reenter the world around me with courage and expectation.
Sept 25
It was coming to John that when the great people in one’s life die, one is forced to be more oneself. One is forced to grow up.
-May Sarton
I will carry with me forever the strength Shannon bequeathed to me.
Sept 27
To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.
-Mother Teresa
I have the power and responsibility to keep my life moving.
Sept 29
Haste, haste, has no blessing.
-Swahili Proverb
With out hurry or panic I will dwell in the house of my grief.
Sept 30
All that we do
Is touched with ocean, yet we remain
On the shore of what we know.
-Richard Wilbur
I trust that what is unknown to me is for my good and my ultimate peace and joy.
Oct 2
All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means we had something worth grieving for. The ones I’m sorry for are the ones that go through life not even knowing that grief is.
-Frank O’Connor
Saddened as I am by loss, my heart lifts in gratitude for the richness, love, and silliness Shannon has brought to my life.
Oct 5
I sit on teh rich,. moist earth, green earth, and draw my knees to my chest. All is not lost. The birds have simply moved on. They give me the courage to do the same.
-Terry Tempest Williams
Can we say goodbye to our loved ones not in the expectation that they will come flying back in the spring, but that, in way we cannot know,. they will continue to be present to us, continue to love us, as we continue to love them?
IN teh turning of the seasons, I find promise and hope.
g
