Healing after loss daily meditations phần 3
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JANUARY 1
…I put down these memorandums of my affections
In honor of tenderness,
In honor of all of those who have been
Conscripted into the brotherhood
Of loss…
—EDWARD HIRSCH
When we are drawn into the brotherhood or sisterhood of
loss, tenderness seems to be our natural state. We are so
vulnerable. Everything brushes against the raw wound of
our grief, reminding us of what we have lost, triggering
memories—a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of walking, a
touch, a particular conversation. These images are like beads
strung together on the necklace of loss. Tenderly, we turn
them again and again. We cannot bear them. We cannot let
them go.
Then, gradually, bit by bit, the binding thread of grief
somehow transmutes, reconstitutes itself as a thread of
treasured memories—a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of
walking, a touch, a particular conversation as gifts from the
life we shared with the one we have lost, gifts that can never
be taken away.
May I honor—and trust—the processes of grief and of healing,
knowing that, in time, a new day will come.
JANUARY 2
The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all. It will
take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather
the details and thus learn and know the whole extent of the
loss.
—MARK TWAIN
In case we are feeling driven to somehow “get done with”
our grieving (if I do it faster, maybe I will feel better sooner),
let us be reminded that, as in many of life’s pro-foundest
experiences—making love, eating, and drinking—faster is
not necessarily better. Perhaps the reassuring thing about
grieving is that the process will not be cheated. It will take
as much time as it needs. Our task is to be attentive when
the messages of mind and memory come. If we let them go
by unattended the first time, they will probably cost more
in the long run.
If I can let my resistance down, be calm in my soul, my grief will
tell me what it needs from me at each step along the way.
JANUARY 3
Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread
beyond all boundaries.
—CORITA KENT
One of the most healing things it is possible to do when one
is experiencing profound grief is to try to isolate occasional
wonderful moments from the stream of time.
While we may wonder—How can I bear it, all those years
ahead without him/her?—we live our lives in moments, hours,
days. The future will have its aspect of emptiness. But if this
moment is wonderful—this gathering of dear ones, this walk
in the woods, this exchange with a child, this bite of apple,
this cup of tea—let’s savor it.
I once participated in a human relations workshop on
setting limits—a task at which I, like many women, am often
neither wise nor skilled. The exercise was to walk around
in the roomful of people, imagining you were enclosed in a
transparent globe, the dimensions of which were of your
own choosing. It was a wonderfully freeing adventure—this
imagined moment of being-without-connection. Perhaps in
just such a way we can try to cherish the good moments of
our lives. Instead of thinking: Before this I was sad. After this
I will be sad, we could try: For now, I will be in this moment
only and relish its goodness.
Sometimes the long view is not what I need. I need this moment,
without hostage to past or future, experienced for itself alone.
JANUARY 4
It is the nature of grace always to fill spaces that have been
empty.
—GOETHE
Not that we can’t tell the difference. Not that we are being
disloyal. But if life gives us something else to do with all
those impulses toward the one no longer with us, how can
we not be grateful? It’s like an extra inheritance—a blessing,
even—from the one we have lost, going to someone else
who needs what we have to give. So we are refreshed by
the memory of the loved one, and at the same time offering
a gift, creating a new relationship.
Keep me on the lookout for someone who needs me now.
