Healing After Loss

SEPTEMBER 7 Snail, snail, glister me forward, Bird, soft-sigh me home, Worm, be with me. This is my hard time. —THEODORE ROETHKE ...

SEPTEMBER 8 I know that we live in the lives of those we touch. I have felt in me the living presence of many I have loved and w ...

SEPTEMBER 9 On the wings of time Grief flies away. —LA FONTAINE There are many variations of this theme—that time is the great h ...

SEPTEMBER 10 As I write this it sounds rather negative and hard but I do not mean it to be so. Happiness grounded in reality is ...

SEPTEMBER 11 Be still and listen to the stillness within. —DARLENE LARSON JENKS It is not enough just to be still. Often in our ...

SEPTEMBER 12 I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming...This all so ...

SEPTEMBER 13 O! that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew; Or that the Everlasting had not fi ...

SEPTEMBER 14 Watch your way then, as a cautious traveller; and don’t be gazing at that mountain or river in the distance, and sa ...

SEPTEMBER 15 Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently c ...

SEPTEMBER 16 But I am no more I, Nor is my house now my house. —FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA The death of a loved one shifts the whole ...

SEPTEMBER 17 Take rest. The field that has rested gives a beautiful crop. —OVID One of the things we learn about grief is that i ...

SEPTEMBER 18 An additional strain, connected with Fritz’ long illness...was my inability for two or three years to recall him as ...

SEPTEMBER 19 There is really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast-off cell maroon ...

SEPTEMBER 20 The main impact is just the loss, the incredible loss. The ex- pectations just were gone. The old age that I expect ...

SEPTEMBER 21 I don’t believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something diff ...

SEPTEMBER 22 Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical disguise. ...

SEPTEMBER 23 Great peace is found in little busyness. —CHAUCER Such a monumental event has occurred. Our response to it is so to ...

SEPTEMBER 24 When my father was an old man, he surprised me by remark- ing that he understood what my mother’s death meant to me ...

SEPTEMBER 25 It was coming to John that when the great people in one’s life die, one is forced to be more oneself. One is forced ...

SEPTEMBER 26 The pattern has shifted...I am no longer anybody’s child. I have become the Grandmother... The rhythm of the fugue ...