HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 7/3/17

From “Healing After Loss” Martha Whitmore Hickman

“It is important, when dealing with all aspects of grief, to keep the process moving. The temptation is to freeze, to stay perpetually recoiled against so terrible a blow.“

– Martha Whitmore Hickman

It is almost a physical sensation, especially if death has come suddenly and unexpectedly – almost a sense of having the wind knocked out of you. And even if death has been a long time coming, there is an impulse to dig in one’s feet at the moment of death. It is our last experience of our loved one and we want to hold on, keep the immediacy of that memory from growing dim.

That’s all right for a while. But the danger is that we will get stuck there. All of us have known or heard of people who kept a room just as it was while the loved one was alive – even to the point of slippers resting beside a favorite chair and clothes hanging in the closet. This does not honor the truth – either of our own lives or that of our loved one. Wherever he or she is, it is certainly not “back there”. Bit by bit, we need to loosen our hold on a past we cannot keep and get on with the life we have.

As I move on into my new life, can I think of my loved one as doing the same?