HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 12/4/17

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

“Something within me is waking from long sleep, and I want to live and move again. Some zest is returning to me, some immense gratefulness for those who love me, some strong wish to love them also. I am full of thanks for life. I have not told myself to be thankful. I just am so.”

– Alan Paton

“It is like returning to health when one has been desperately sick. Each day seems a gift – the sun brighter, the air clearer, the taste of food a wonder on the tongue. 

The word ‘rebirth’ is not too strong a word for this return to happiness, to deep contentment with life. But it is in some ways a different world into which we are reborn. There are things we recognize from the world we knew – the same furniture, the same town, most of the same people – but everything has a new coloration. The foundation has tilted, threatened to slide us into the abyss, then righted itself. We are the stronger now for having survived the storm.

Because it seems a new world, time almost slows down, as it did when we were children. And our gratitude for the wonders of this world is almost as profound and simple as a child’s – gratitude for a world washed with our tears, as fresh now as a landscape after rain. 

To come through great sorrow is to be reborn into a new world.”