HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 10/15/18

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love the only survival the only meaning.”

-Thornton Wilder

We know without being told that the bridge is love. We know that we have not stopped loving, and that wherever our loved one has gone, our love has followed. 

And surely that love is reciprocated. Sometimes it seems almost palpably in the room with us. There are people who have had visions of their loved ones standing nearby, heard the sounds of their voices, even felt their intervention at a critical time.

A man who has written widely in the field of grief tells how he went to get on an airplane and it was as though a force field would not allow him through the door. After several attempts he walked back down the stairs and took another plane. The first plane subsequently crashed. Later, the image of his dead son came to his mind, saying, “Remember the time I wouldn’t let you get on that plane?”

What is at work here, we do not know. We do know that love binds us to the dead and they to us – in stretchable, but not breakable bonds.

I know that love does not cease with the event of death.