HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 9/10/18
September 3, 2018
Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)
“He’d begun to wake up in the morning with something besides dread in his heart. Not happiness exactly, not eagerness for the new day, but a kind of urge to be eager, a longing to be happy.”
– John Hassler
It comes upon us so gradually that we scarcely recognize the change – this moving out of the valley of despair, where the future looks perpetually grim, into a more pleasant land. Then one day we may think to ourselves, “Wait a minute. This feels different!” For now, instead of a sorrowful landscape marked by only occasional moments of happiness, we realize we inhabit a land where we are happy and content most of the time than not. The periods of desolation are now the exception, not the rule.
Without knowing it, we have slipped into a new country. This will take some getting used to. Of course we’ll have relapses, which are really not relapses at all but a way of continuing to deepen the grooves in the brain that tell us who we are now that our loved one has gone. But the shift is a matter for astonishment and gratitude, and sometimes for a quiet waiting to see what other wisdom and self-knowledge may come to us.
I welcome, as a blessing from my loved one, the return of light and joy to my life.