HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 12/31/18

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

“…I put down these memorandums of my affections
In honor of tenderness, 
In honor of all of those who have been 
Conscripted into the brotherhood
Of loss…”

– Edward Hirsch 

When we are drawn into the brotherhood or sisterhood of loss, tenderness seems to be our natural state. We are so vulnerable. Everything brushes against the raw wound of our grief, reminding us of what we have lost, triggering memories – a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of walking, a touch, a particular conversation. These images are like beads strung together on the necklace of loss. Tenderly, we turn them again and again. We cannot bear them. We cannot let them go. 

Then, gradually, bit by bit, the binding thread of grief somehow transmutes, reconstitutes itself as a thread of treasured memories – a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of walking, a touch, a particular conversation as gifts from the life we shared with the one we have lost, gifts that can never be taken away.

May I honor – and trust – the process of grief and of healing, knowing that, in time, a new day will come.