HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 10/23/17

October 23, 2017

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

“…how complicated and individual mending is; the time required for healing cannot be measured against any fixed calendar.”

Mary Jane Moffat

“All kinds of factors go into the matter of how long it takes to pass through the heaviest stages of grief. The end of the first year is an important milestone: one has then passed every anniversary, every special holiday.

But some have suggested that that is just the beginning; now the fact has sunk in, occasion by occasion, and there is still the rest of one’s life to live.

Four years after my daughter’s death, I realized one day, ‘This is beginning to feel different.’ Not that intense grief had left, but it was no longer such a preoccupying burden, the dominant fact of each day. Another writer says it takes seven years to recover from the death of someone close.

These are discouraging numbers to contemplate when one is first plunged into grief and a week looms ahead full of sadness. Time extends itself, stretches.

That will not always be the case. But there’s no predicting. We must feel our way along, trusting the process to reveal its own wisdom.

I live one day at a time.”

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