HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 4/1/19

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

“Grief comes in unexpected surges…Mysterious cues that set off a reminder of grief. It comes crashing like a wave, sweeping me in its crest, twisting me inside out. Then recedes, leaving me broken. Oh, Mama, I don’t want to eat, to walk to get out of bed. Reading, working, cooking, listening, mothering. Nothing matters. I do not want to be distracted from my grief. I wouldn’t mind dying. I wouldn’t mind at all.”

– Toby Talbot

Anything can set us off – a fragment of music, a piece of old clothing we come upon when cleaning out a closet, a slip of paper that falls out of a book, with that familiar handwriting on it. Just when we thought we were feeling better, gaining some stability, something comes to plunge us right back into that raw, overpowering sense of loss.

Not only are we unable to think of anything else, we don’t want to. There is nothing on the horizon but this. Our grief occupies our life out to the edges. If we try to look to the future, our glance is stuck in this mire of grief. Is it any wonder we think of our own death as not such a bad idea?

This mood comes without warning and it is devastating. It also passes. So…live in your grief, yes, but also wait.

To accept the surges of grief when they come is also to know they will pass.