HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 1/7/19
January 7, 2019
Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)
“Dying is a wild night and a new road”
– Emily Dickinson
One of the things so astonishing and costly about losing a loved one is that while the sun continues to rise and set, newspapers continue to be delivered, traffic lights still change from red to green and back again, our whole life is turned around, turned upside down.
Is it any wonder we feel disoriented, confused? Yet the people we pass on the street are going about their business as though no one’s world has been shaken to the core, as though the earth has not opened and swallowed us up, dropped us into a world of insecurity and change.
It is, as Emily Dickinson says, “a new road” – for us as surely as for the one we have lost. It will take us time to learn to walk that road. Time, and a lot of help, so we don’t stumble and fall irretrievably. Those who have had their own experiences of loss will probably be our most helpful guides – knowing when to say the right word, when to be silent and walk beside us, when to reach out and take our hand. In time, we will be helpers for others.
I have entered a new country. I will be patient with myself. I will look for companions of the way.