HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 6/11/18

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

What is essential does not die but clarifies.

– Thornton Wilder

One of the ways we can enrich our lives after a great loss is to sink ourselves into the study of that one’s past. Now that he or she is no longer with us in the physical sense, we begin to understand in a new way the life of the one we love who has died. What were the silent spaces in that life like? Perhaps we can only conjecture, using our understanding of the person and what little we may know of particular periods in his or her life. But we can sit quietly and let our imagination play. What was that person’s early childhood like? Are there old photos? Old memories? What can they tell us? Why was this particular handkerchief saved, this bunch of dried flowers?

While our memory of the person and the stories he or she told us are still fresh, are there things we could write down to preserve those stories for the person’s descendants? A dear friend whose brother died wrote for his children an account of her years growing up with this beloved brother. What a treasured gift for them! And what a cherished journey of remembrance for her.

It is a wonderful and astonishing comfort to rediscover my lost love.