HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 7/9/18

July 9, 2018

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

I am glad [the book] came to be written. It has in some strange way refined some dross out of me. It has taught me – though this was not my first lesson – to accept the joys and vicissitudes of life, and to fall in love again with its strangeness and beauty and terror.

– Alan Paton 

Not many of us will, like Alan Paton, write a book to help us work our way through loss. But many have found it helpful to keep a journal – a simple notebook in which to write our thoughts and questions, express our pain, so we don’t have to carry it around in our heads all the time.

We may want to look back over the journal from time to time – to remind ourselves of the emotional ups and downs of our journey, or to refresh our minds about a sequence of events. If we never look at the pages again, they will still have served us well. Just finding words for the tumult helps us understand it a little better, move through it with less danger of getting stuck, so we can reach the place where we can “fall in love again” with life.

Of course, not everyone likes to write – painting does it for some, or playing the piano – anything to open our emotional pores and let the energy of grief flow out, free us for new life.

Grief is like a refiner’s fire. It will leave me with something beautiful.

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