HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 7/24/17

July 24, 2017

“Healing After Loss” Martha Whitmore Hickman

“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

-Walt Whitman

Where have the dead gone? Where can we find them?

We will wear ourselves out, asking these questions, and yet we do. We look in the last place we saw them. We return to their favorite haunts, hoping for a sense of their presence.

We may find there what we are looking for. And if we do, it may make us sad, or happy.

There is no predicting. People tell of encountering the spirits of loved ones at places they had visited together – or at places with which they have had no connection at all.

Sometimes it seems they are notable only for their absence. Sometimes it seems we can almost call them forth. And sometimes they surprise us.

A friend tells me how, sitting alone in a church, playing the organ, he was visited several months after her death by the presence of a young woman, a presence so strong that after a while he stopped his playing and said, “All right, Mary Beth.” Then, he says, “I felt her smile.”

Dear love, I wait for you. Do you wait for me?

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