HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 5/6/19

May 6, 2019

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

“She sat there and began to learn patience, staring at the floor, where a dusty track from the door of the sitting-room to the door of the empty bedroom had been marked by rough, heavy shoes.”

– Colette

– Colette

The writer is describing her mother’s attitude in the aftermath of her husband’s death. The service is over, the excitement has passed. Now the long learning to do without the presence of the loved one begins.

It is a task demanding the utmost patience, and a willingness to look again and again at those paths and places where the loved one walked, sat, lived and slept and does so no more.

After my grandfather died when I was eleven, one of the most heart-wrenching things I recall was seeing his shoes standing neatly by the closet door. They were black leather, high-top, lace-up shoes, the leather configured with creases and bumps that conformed to his feet and his walking. I was accustomed to seeing them on his feet – and now they stood empty.

The moods of grief, like the moods of the day or of the year, are to be honored and will pass.

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