Healing After Loss

by Hickman, Martha Whitmore

• ISBN13: 9780380773381
• ISBN10: 0380773384
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-10
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

For those who have suffered the loss of a loved one, here are strength and thoughtful words to inspire and comfort.

Excerpts

Healing After Loss:
Daily Meditations For Working Through Grief

January 1

I put down these memorandums of my affections
In honor of tenderness,
in honor of all of those who have been
Conscripted into the brotherhood
Of loss . . .

-- Edward Hirsch

When we are drawn into the brotherhood or sisterhood of loss, tenderness seems to be our natural state. We are so vulnerable. Everything brushes against the raw wound of our grief, reminding us of what we have lost, triggering memories -- a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of walking, a touch, a particular conversation. These images are like beads strung together on the necklace of loss. Tenderly, we turn them again and again. We cannot bear them. We cannot let them go.

Then, gradually, bit by bit, the binding thread of grief somehow transmutes, reconstitutes itself as a thread of treasured memories -- a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of walking, a touch, a particular conversation as gifts from the life we shared with the one we have lost, gifts that can never be taken away.Healing After Loss:
Daily Meditations For Working Through Grief. Copyright © by Martha Hickman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Healing after Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief by Martha W. Hickman
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.