Saturday's Sayings - If Love Lasts a Lifetime, Why Not Grief?

It's okay to take my time when grieving my child. It just might take my whole life.

Saturday's Sayings

If Love Lasts a Lifetime,

Why Not 

Grief?

"MOURNING is the constant re-awakening that things are NOW DIFFERENT."

~Stephanie Ericsson

~~~

"How do I measure a moment?"

Grief changes all the rules. Success became getting out of bed. My accomplishments were calculated by a different scaling system.

My survival strategy was to get real simple, take it simple, and simply do what needed to be done. Where once I could juggle and multi-task, I started measuring life by one task at a time.

~Benjamin Allen 

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"When they died, was my world turned upside down or right side up? When my heart broke my world shattered. What was once important to me no longer mattered. I questioned everything."

~Benjamin Allen 

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"Telling someone with a broken heart to "get over it," "quit living in the past" or "snap out of it" is like telling a blind person to 'just look harder.'"

~~~

We emerge into the light not by denying our pain, but by walking through it.

~~~

"My grief journey has no one destination. I will not 'get over it.'

"The understanding that I don't have to be done is liberating. I will mourn this death for the rest of my life."

~Alan D. Wolfelt, The Wilderness of Grief

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"What grief does is it puts us squarely in the middle of a fire, and it burns away everything that is not essential to our lives."

~Alana Sheeran

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The Grief within me has its own heart beat. It has its own life, its own song. Part of me wants to resist the rhymes of my Grief, yet as I surrender to the song, I learn to listen deep within myself.

~Alan D. Wolfelt

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"Grief is not just a series of events, stages, or timelines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through grief. 

But how long do you grieve for 

a husband of fifty years, 

a teenager killed in a car accident, 

a four-year-old child: 

a year? Five years? Forever?

"The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, 

but its aftermath lasts a lifetime."

~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D.

~~~

We will never stop grieving because we will never stop loving.

~~~

"Love is how you stay alive even after you are gone."

Top Graphic, thanks to
~The Ugly Shoes Club (2013) / Facebook

All other Graphics, thanks to
2012: Love and Loss / Facebook

Friday's Faith - Child-Loss Grief is For the Long Haul

Friday's Faith

Child-Loss Grief is For the Long Haul

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

(T)here is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way, is always "present," it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.

~Marcel Proust

(Referring to Proust's quote,)

This is a delicate point. Some people feel that to bring up an "old" grief is to reawaken a wound that has perhaps ceased to hurt—or at least to hurt as much.

Perhaps it depends on the severity of the loss.

Where the loss seems lifelong and inappropriate—as in the death of a child—the grief is never "over."

It will be at a different stage, but it is still there, and as parents, we may indeed be grateful that "after all this time" someone is mindful of a grief that, for us, never goes away.

I know that my husband and I were grateful on the several occasions when, a long time after our daughter's death, we encountered friends who had heard of our loss but had not seen us, and they took the occasion to express their sympathy.

I expect that most of us would rather people risk offering too much than adopt some false constraint and leave us wondering whether they know or care.

Yes, I may cry when you speak of it, but I'm still glad for your support.

~Martha Whitmore Hickman, Healing After Loss

Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief ~Martha Whitmore Hickman