bereavement

Each loss brings growth with it, and learning to handle new experiences and taking charge of your needs is part of the transformative process.

Everything assumes a different intensity when you are feeling the pain of loss. Be prepared. A minor annoyance that you might once have managed with a shrug now becomes a nuclear crisis! You are no doubt going to do things perfectly imperfectly. That is part of our path as humans. Forget about striving for perfection while dealing with grief! If you beat yourself up every time you forget something, have a breakdown, or don't do something correctly then you're going to end up very black and blue. I guarantee you won't want to look in the mirror! So be kinder and more patient with yourself.

I believe I gather strength from the generations of women who came before me - that together we all hold the suffering of the world.

...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you__e like me, when you just sit quietly, just be, and let yourself feel what you feel, the guilt creeps in. Because you__e alive and the world is big, and you should be feeling some freakin_ Christmas spirit.

It is true that the grief journey is very lonely, but it is also up to you to decide just how lonely you will make it.

Remember to view yourself and your humanness with a kind heart.

It is okay to release your feelings when you feel the waves coming. It's all part of the process of having to let go of your relationship with your loved one as you once knew it. And remember, letting go is not the same thing as forgetting!

Someone experiencing the stages of grief is rarely aware of how his behavior might appear to others. Grief often produces a __oom lens effect,_ in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.

Death is never easy when you know the people doing the dying.

Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

Mourning is never really complete. The mappings of the old play remain in the cortex, like those mappings of the phantom limb.

Loss is only temporary when you believe in God!

My mom__ smile is genuine,A lilac beamingIn the presence of her Sun.Indentions in the sand proveTime__ linear progression,Her hair yet unblighted,Carrying midnight__ consistency.Clear tracks fading as theMovement slips furtherIn the past.CheekbonesHigh, soft,In summer__ hue,Hopeful.Each step__ unknown impact,A future looking back.My father__ strength:One whoseLife is in his arms.Squinting past the camera,He rests upon a rockLike caramel corn half eaten,Just to the leftOf man-made concrete conventionDaylight__ eraserRemoving color to his right.Dustin sitsIn my father__ lap,Open mouth of a droolingBig mouth bass;Muscle toneOf a well exercisedJelly fish,He looks at meHalf aware;His wheelchairPerched at the edgeOf parking lot gravel graftedLike a scar on nature__ beach,Opening to the ironic splendorOf a bitter tasting lake.I took the picture.Age 11.Capturing the pinnacle arcOf a sonTo my lilacWhoOutlived him and weeps,Still.Their sky has staple holes __aybe that__ how theLightLeaked out.

He may take long walksin the raining darkalmost aimlesslyto a spot of soaked grassin a neighbor__ open field.He__ decided this is the placefor you and him to meet again.

We get sombre about death. Think about Charon the ferryman rowing the souls across the Styx to the Isle of the Dead. Pretty grim stuff. Unless you think that, perhaps, at times, old Charon rows souls back to the land of the living too. Perhaps I have merely gone to rest awhile_

Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body and if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death is unendurably as before it.

Do youOr do you not knowYou're with me more deadThan you were livingReach me some timeIn a dream may beLet me remember how sweetYour presence can beReach out your handsAnd call to meFor soon it will beAnother anniv