HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 4/16/18

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

“Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks…And suddenly, at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as though the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier.”

– C.S. Lewis

“Sometimes we are unconsciously fearful that if we begin to move away from our grief, we will lose what contact we have with the one we miss so much. But maybe it is likeleting go of one’s children when they are ready to move off on their own. If we loosen our grip, the chances of their returning are much greater, and in ways that are commensurate with who they are now. Perhaps the relinquishing of our most intense grief makes a space into which a new relationship with the loved one an move. It is the person, after all, whom we want, not the grief.

May I hold my grief lightly in my hand so it can lift away from me. My connection to the one I have lost is inviolate; it cannot be broken.”