HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 4/2/18

April 2, 2018

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

“Keep the door to her life open.”

– Edith Fogg Hickman

“How many of us know people who, out of grief, hardly ever mention again the name of a loved one who has died? As though the mere speaking the name will bring the rush of grief back in unendurable strength. And as though to avoid the name is somehow to avoid the grief. 

This device doesn’t work.

When my daughter died, her great-grandmother, who had also endured the loss of an adolescent child, wrote to us, ‘Keep the door to her life open.’ I think we would have done it anyway  – spoken of her, with decreasing heaviness as the time passed, but it helped to have this dear woman’s wisdom right then.

Though the loved one has died, the memory, the sense of the person’s presence, has not – nor the possibility, after a while, of taking continuing joy not only in the reminiscences from the past, but in the extension of the person’s spirit into our ongoing lives. 

Into the nebulous, ongoing mystery of life I welcome, as if through an open door, the continuing spirit of the one I have loved.”

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