Saturday's Sayings - Finding Hope Along the Journey, ~The Grief Toolbox

Saturday's Sayings

Finding Hope Along the Journey  

~The Grief Toolbox

Tools for finding hope along the journey: Understanding healing


Can we heal from the death of a loved one? When we are grieving sometimes our answer is NOT EVER! What does it mean to heal? If we look to physical wounds we can learn something about healing a broken heart. When we are severely cut or break a bone they heal, but they are never the same; residual pain and scarring can be there for a lifetime. The initial constant, searing pain of a broken heart will subside but the aching will remain. Healing is not the absence of pain; it is the recognition that sorrow and joy ca co-exist.

~ ©The Grief Toolbox

 

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"In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all…it comes with bitterest agony…Perfect relief is not possible except with time. You cannot realize that you will ever feel better…and yet this is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have experienced enough to know what I say."

~Abraham Lincoln 

(In the U.S.A.,) Twenty-two of our 44 presidents and their wives are bereaved parents:

• John Adams, lost his son Charles, 20, while he was president. 
• Thomas Jefferson had six children and only two lived to maturity. One daughter, Mary, 26, died while he was president. 
• James Monroe lost a son two years of age. 
• John Quincy Adams lost a daughter in infancy; a son died while Adams was president; and another son died five years later. 
• William Harrison had ten children; six died before he became president. 
• Zachary Taylor had six children; two died as infants and a daughter died three months after her wedding. 
• Millard Fillmore's daughter Abigail died at 22. 
• Franklin Pierce lost two sons in infancy. Two months before his inauguration to the presidency, their only child, Benjamin, 11 years old, was killed in a railroad accident
• Abraham Lincoln, lost two sons during his lifetime: Edward, four years old, while President Lincoln was in office; and William, 11 years old. 
• Rutherford B. Hayes had eight children, three of whom died in infancy. 
• James Garfield had seven children; two died while still infants. 
• Chester Alan Arthur's eldest son died in infancy. 
• Grover Cleveland's eldest daughter, Ruth, died at 13 years of age. 
• William McKinley, lost both children: Ida, four months old, and Katherine, four years old. 
• Theodore Roosevelt's son died at 21 years of age. 
• Calvin Coolidge had a son, Calvin Jr., who died at 16 while his father was in office
• Franklin Roosevelt's son, Franklin Jr., died in infancy. 
• Dwight Eisenhower's son, Doug Dwight "Icky," three years old, died at Camp Mead, Maryland. ©The Grief Toolbox

·      John Kennedy’s two-day-old son Patrick died in 1963.

·      George H. W. Bush’s daughter Robin died of leukemia at the age of 3 or 4 in 1953.

Quote by Barbara Bush about her daughter Robin:

"So I am glad, not that my loved one has gone, but that the earth she laughed and lived on was my earth too. That I had known and loved her, and that my love I'd shown. Tears over her departure yes but also a smile that I walked with her a little while."

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Tools for finding hope along the journey: Honor the hole of grief

When someone dies we are left with a hole. It can seem dark and empty and something that we try to fill. It may seem a strange or impossible thought, but we can learn to honor the hole that is left, knowing that it represents and reminds us of the love that we have given and received.

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Tools for finding hope along the journey: Trust

There is a certain innocence that is taken away when someone we love dies. We not only come to understand the fragility of life, we also find out how difficult it is to find support and understanding even among our family and friends. Life is unpredictable and we are no longer able to trust that things will continue as planned, to do so is like putting a building on shifting sand. What is solid and able to be trusted is the knowledge that each and every one of us can survive and flourish no matter what comes our way.

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Grief is crazy making not clinically but our emotions are so all over and that is difficult for others to understand. It is important to interact with others who are on this journey. That gives us strength to face the ones who say the wrong things.

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Tools for finding hope along the journey: Perspective

Shortly after the death of my 4 year old son someone asked me,

“Given all the pain you are feeling do you think it would have been better not knowing him?” 

I answered immediately, 


“I would suffer a hundred times this pain for the privilege of having known him.” 


How could anyone imply that it would have been better for me if I had never known my son? Thinking about it I realized that if he had never been a part of my life I would be spared the pain but also denied the joy. I wouldn’t be who I am today if I had not known him. I would choose knowing him, even knowing all the pain of his death.










Pictures, Quotes, and Content thanks to grieving mother, Tanya Lord's "The Grief Toolbox"

Tuesday's Trust - A Journey through Grief ~by Alla Bozarth, Ph.D.

Tuesday's Trust

A Journey through Grief

~by Alla Bozarth, Ph.D.

Here is one of Dr. Bozarth's poems, and some quotes from her book, A Journey Through Grief: Gentle, Specific Help to Get You Through the Most Difficult Stages of Grieving:

A Journey Through Grief

I bear down hard

on all life's losses.

Each one is unique, it's true.

As no love is the same,

no loss is.

I have to let each one

out of me separately,

give each loss the scream

that belongs to its

own love's ecstacy (sic).

If I succeed, one by one,

in letting go, in remembering

myself, I may again know

that dreamy sweetness,

the smells of love,

what life is, the feeling

of emergence from bliss.

Grief is a passion, something that happens to us, something to endure. We can be stricken with it, we can be victims of it, we can be stuck in it. Or, we can meet it, get through it, and become quiet victors through the honest and courageous process of grieving.

To surrender to one's own grief and to become actively engaged in it require tremendous courage. This courage is vastly different from putting up a good front, showing a cheerful face to our friends when we're really hurting.

Real courage is. . .owning up to the fact that we face a terrifying task. . .admitting that we are appropriately frightened. . .identifying sources of strength and help, both outside and within ourselves. . .and then going ahead and doing what needs to be done.

***

This constructive kind of hurting is what we feel when we lance an infected wound, or pour iodine over a cut, or force ourselves to get up and walk, no matter how stiff we might feel. And, there are ways to bring about healing which are not necessarily painful.

At the very beginning of the grief process, become aware of ways in which you unnecessarily hurt yourself more. For instance, when you hold yourself in, choking back tears, tightening facial and throat muscles, swallowing down surging emotions, or suffocating feelings, it hurts and it doesn't hurt good--it hurts bad. It hurts in the way a physical wound would hurt if, instead of responding to the pain and bleeding, you ignored it, allowed dirt and gravel to get into it and then, even worse, if you actually ground the dirt and gravel down deep into the wound.

You need to treat a spiritual wound resulting from loss as carefully, tenderly, and realistically as you would treat any physical wound. . .

...Treating an emotional wound involves avoiding the neglect that may result in being hurt, even endangered, by your own defenses. Ultimately, the injured organism heals itself.

Your body has its own healing wisdom within it--and so does your soul, the expressive container of your emotional life.

***

Two vital external things are essential to the self-healing process--time and cooperation. Time speaks for itself. A line from a popular song says, so truly, "What a friend we have in time."

Cooperation is what you bring to the healing process. First, you locate the injury. Then do the necessary things to treat the injury. The essential treatment after sustaining the injury of a loss is that you express fully what the loss means to you. Not expressing grief can lead to depression, repression, and even unconscious oppression of yourself or others.

So, seek out persons whom you trust, close friends or relatives, or competent professional persons. Talk to them about your loss and its meaning. Talk until you have exhausted talk. Before you wear out the patience of your friends, relatives, or professional helpers, or become boring even to yourself...

Talk about your loss and its meaning. ...there is very much that can be said--and the saying of it will help heal the wound.

What you cannot say, write. You might keep a journal. I...began...a grief journal, and I used it solely for the self-therapy of grieving. The blank paper could reject none of my pain and was never bored by it....

Besides talking, let yourself cry as often as needed. You need not cry in front of others, if this inhibits you. First, let yourself cry in private. Then gradually entrust your tears to another person. Let yourself ask to be held. Let yourself be held, but choose the person you ask wisely.

It is better to cry in someone else's presence than to do so alone. In deep pain or genuine sorrow, that is true not because you need an audience, but because you need a witness to your pain, a witness in the religious sense. You need someone to testify to the validity of your feelings, to acknowledge them and to say yes to the good work you are doing in expressing them.

If you feel too uncomfortable to cry much in front of other persons, or if you worry that you will bore them with your tears, then place yourself in the presence of God, and entrust your tears to (Him).

I know that with help I can complete what was left incomplete within myself. I know that I can find my own time and create my own way.

...In grieving, I need to say what was left unsaid and to let myself hear what was left unheard--anger, uncertainty, forgiveness, care, love.

Eventually the life inside me will prove to be more stubborn than the death.

***

I can learn to live creatively with a bruised or broken heart.

A broken heart is a heart made larger and more open than before. And you too can do what you need to do to be healed.

I wish for you the courage to continue and to discover a new possiblity for life and for love.

I wish you well and I send you light, until you can see again the light within you.

~by Dr. Alla Renee Bozarth

Dr. Alla Renee Bozarth is a Gestalt therapist, Episcopal priest, and author of numerous books of prose and poetry, including this book, A Journey Through Grief: Gentle, Specific Help to Get You Through the Most Difficult Stages of Grieving. She is also the founder of Wisdom House in Oregon, where she guides those in need to emotional and spiritual health.

Picture, thanks to FotoSearch.com