STAGES OF GRIEF HEALING Article Series
“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©
From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storyteller
Welcome back to the fifth in a series of ten special articles of homespun real-life talk about the issues surrounding grief.
Today we’re going to talk about how to find the ‘Light’ of Love and Memories of your lost loved one again, and how you can use this Light to begin to completely change your experience of grief.
You’re probably asking yourself how I could possibly be referring to anything surrounding the issue of grief in terms of ‘Light’; so let me explain my perception and experience of that to you first.
In my previous articles you’ve been reading, you’ve heard me refer a lot to the ‘darkness’ which surrounds our grief process – and you’ll most likely agree it’s a word well suited to the bleak despair of the experience itself.
In the physical world we live in it’s a well-established fact, both real and scientific, that when the sun rises, the darkness of night is banished and our world is flooded with the radiance of light.
Light always wins over darkness in the real world, and it will always win over the darkness of grief in our hearts in the same way - if we open ourselves to it and allow it to come back in!
I’ll never forget the moment this happened to me for the very first time! This was the day everything about my grief experience began to change, toward a genuinely healing grieving path!
Two years to the day from my daughter’s death – the second anniversary date – and I’m holed up in a hotel room during one of my annual sales call trips, to ride out the expected storm of brutal emotions once again.
As you’ll know from your own experiences with anniversary dates, it’s a day that can be terrifying in the depth and ferocity of its feelings.
As a poet who’s been writing for over 35 years of his life, I’m accustomed to the presence of the feelings of inspiration that come over me when I’m supposed to commit words to paper.
Privately, I have long referred to this feeling deep inside myself as being my ‘Muse’ – or put another way – my private angel directing and urging me towards a creation of words.
This day, in the middle of some of the worst feelings of grief since my daughter’s passing, I can feel my Muse urging me towards creation once again. But this time I’m feeling very strongly that the direction of my writing is to change dramatically.
I’m to write down in prose (instead of poetry), all the beautiful and loving memories of the experiences shared between my daughter and I over the short seven years since we had reconnected as father and daughter – and write it in book form!
I’d never written a book before in my life, and was initially stunned with the concept of being able to do such a thing!
But suddenly the real implications of writing it as a book began to sink in.
I realized with a leap of my heart that I’d actually be able to write about all of the incredible, crazy, amazing, and undeniably wonderful experiences we’d shared together in the depths of our love for one another.
It was as this realization took hold of me that the dam holding back all the love and memories of our life together burst inside me – completely overcoming the crippling pain of my anniversary day grief! I felt flooded with the beautiful radiance of this incredible new Light of love and memories!
I knew instinctively that I’d have to write about all the hard parts of our story as well – her dying, the funeral, the torment of its aftermath on me, and such.
But I also understood at the same time that in the writing of it would come my own personal healing of its dark effects. And I knew I’d then be able to write about those parts too.
I had no doubt whatsoever I’d be weeping rivers of tears in the writing and reliving of those memories (and I did), but I also knew in my heart these tears would taste and feel vastly different than before.
Somehow I knew they would actually wash away the bitter emptiness and angry pain of my loss, and replace it with a healing understanding and acceptance of that same loss.
It was a revelation that stunned me with its simple beauty, and energized me to begin writing immediately.
And I did just that, writing fast and furiously as memory after incredible memory washed over me on that day, and bathed my heart to overflowing in the depth and richness of each and every one.
That’s how my book ‘How to Survive the Death of a Child - A Father's Story of Healing Light’ was born out of the darkness of grief - through the Light of my own love and memories of my helicopter-pilot daughter!
Over the course of the two years it took to write it all down, my terrible grief experience began to change into that of a much more normal grieving one, with the anger and bitterness washing out of it, allowing me to finally begin to walk a healing path out of the darkness of my loss.
It turned out I’d been right about the rivers of tears I’d cry. But I was also right about the healing understanding and acceptance part, which followed along with them in the words of my experiences as I wrote them down.
This is the Light I’m referring to today in this article - the Light of your own sweet Love and Memories of your lost one.
This Light and those memories exist in your heart too, just as they did in mine, and they’re probably aching to be seen and heard and felt once again, just as mine were for me.
I can’t imagine your heart being any different than mine in this regard. You must feel it too.
Everyone reading this article will understand and identify with my words in their own way, because each of us is experiencing our loss and looking for recovery in a way unique to us alone.
Yet the one thing common to us all is that we each have hearts ready to overflow with our special memories – and the love that created those memories - still alive within us! Releasing them will change your experience of grief completely and allow your healing to begin taking place in the radiant Light of them!
If this is true Ken, how can I release them into this Light you’re talking about?
You can begin by once again opening your thoughts to these special memories; pushing your mind to look beyond the pain you’re feeling, and consciously directing it to remember the beauty of them.
Your heart will follow the lead and direction you give it.
Yes, it will hurt to remember those memories, but if your experience is anything like mine, you will also suddenly find yourself smiling through your tears in memory, and maybe even breaking out into occasional laughter as they wash over you with their sweetness.
These are living memories, and they carry a healing power within them!
The moment any of this happens to you, recognize it as the Light that I’m referring to, and allow yourself to experience as much of the richness and brilliance of its warmth as you can handle the first time it happens.
Then treasure and savor those moments for yourself in every hour and day that follows.
Continue the practice every single day of opening yourself to these memories, and to the love that fueled them – or as often as you find yourself wanting to feel the beauty of them to replace the harshness of your grief up to this point of your experience.
You too may find yourself picking up pen and paper and writing these moments down in a journal, or on a notepad. Keep all of them if you do, and go back and read them often. They’ll inspire you to remember more good things, and perpetuate the cycles of Light into your world of hurt.
For those less inclined or able to write these times down on paper, I’d suggest you consider speaking them aloud and recording them in the privacy of your own space. Create an audio record of them.
This way you too will be able to go back often and listen – and add even more beauty to the record of memories you’ve begun. This way will also bring the Light back into your life.
The long and the short answer to releasing the Light back into your life is that you can use any method at all which works for you to help create and record it, and that you’re able to use over and over again to grow in your healing.
The Light of your Love and Memories is a real and genuine tool in your fight to overcome grief. Learn to use it every single day as I mentioned. Your worlds of hurt as you know them now cannot help but change for the better.
The saying goes that time will heal all wounds. I would add a little to this by saying that time will indeed heal all wounds - if we allow it to!
Allow the Light of love and memories back into your life!
(If you haven’t already purchased it and want to learn the full story behind the truth of these articles, be sure to visit my website and download a copy of my book entitled “How to Survive the Death of a Child - A Father's Story of Healing Light” available on Amazon Kindle at www.kenmatthies.com/ )
For almost forty years of his life Ken Matthies has been a writer and chronicler of life expressed in poetic form, following the family tradition laid down by his grandfather before him.
Faced with the dramatically life altering experience of his helicopter pilot daughter’s sudden death in 2002 he has grown to also become a literary author of true events based on his own life. Though grief opened his literary doors it is the Light of Love and Memories supplying the fuel of inspiration to write through them.
As a second-chance dad given the opportunity to verbally share his life stories with his newly rediscovered daughter it was she who told him that she believed him to be a ‘worthy man’ after having heard them, and who encouraged him that they should be shared in written form beyond her own life – not yet knowing as she said it that she was soon to leave him behind. As a bereaved father and writer learning how to live life again in the Light of his own Love and Memories of his daughter, he writes those stories now as a testament to her belief and faith in their value.
His full length book entitled "How to Survive the Death of a Child - A Father's Story of Healing Light" was the first of these stories which he wrote in the Light of those Love and Memories.
He lives in the solitude and grandeur of a tiny southern Yukon village with his Tlingit native wife Skoehoeteen and the successor to their venerable old Tahltan bear dog Clancy Underfoot, who now happily awaits them at the Rainbow Bridge in Doggy Heaven. She’s a new female puppy named Hlinukts Seew which means ‘Sweet Rain’ in the Tlingit language, a wonderful phonetic variation in memory of Clancy’s name who was also called C.U. for short. It’s a good place to tell those stories from.
You can read more of Ken's writings and find his Amazon Kindle book at www.kenmatthies.com.