Healing After Loss

if we need to, or save it for a time when we feel stronger.
We will be able to feel the spray on our face without a fear
of drowning, even to savor the taste of the salt on our lips
because, in addition to the poignancy of loss come the rush
of love for the one we have lost and perhaps a sense that in
the mystery of the universe, we still inhabit that universe
together and are tied together in a love that cannot come
untied.
“What is essential does not die but clarifies,” wrote
Thornton Wilder. And again, “The greatest tribute to the
dead is not grief but gratitude.” Eventually, we will find our
way through this particular “valley of the shadow,” and
while there may always be a tinge of sadness, there will
come a sense of our own inner strength and our ability to
rejoice in the life we have shared, and to look toward a future
in which the loved one, though not physically present, con-
tinues to bless us.
Each of us speaks and writes out of our own history of
sorrow and gladness. My life as a writer and as a human
being has been heavily affected by my experience with
grieving—in particular, by the death of a sixteen-year-old
daughter who, on a bright summer afternoon while our
family was on vacation in the Colorado mountains, fell from
a horse and died. It was a long time ago. Grief takes its time,
and for a while it occupies all our time. I know whereof I
speak.
So it was with a particular sense of being in the right place,
of congruence with my own life, that I undertook this book
of meditations for those who grieve. The meditations follow
the course of the year, but you can start anywhere—in any
month, on any day. They are brief because, particularly in
the early stages of grieving, our attention span is short, and
a seminal thought will serve