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 eighth in a series of ten special articles of homespun real-life talk about your grieving process.
Today’s topic of ‘Hearing Their Words Of Joy’ is the third of a three part series within these articles, which began with the article called ‘Talking To Your Lost Loved One’, and dealing with different aspects of reconnecting to our loved ones.
If you’ve been keeping up with this mini-series of three articles, and begun applying their thoughts in your daily grieving life, then what you’re about to read in this one will dovetail perfectly with the previous two.
Those of you who have felt death’s touch in your lives know how important every single moment of joy becomes to you in its aftermath. Your experience has already told you that even with all the loving support of others surrounding you, joy itself has fallen into short supply.
And who could blame you for feeling that absence, given what you’ve lost?
Yet I’m here as a father having lost his daughter, to let you know joy still exists in our world of grievers; and far more importantly, that it can live again in your own grieving heart if you open yourself once more to its possibilities.
I talk a lot about possibilities, because they’ve proven themselves to me over and over again in the last two and a half years of my own experience. And what’s proven possible for me must surely be possible for others suffering an experience similar to my own, wouldn’t you think?
Joy is an experience exclusively of the heart, and can only be experienced in its fullness with the heart as its base of being.
The most wonderful aspects of joy happen when we allow ourselves to take it in. It transmutes itself throughout our entire heart, mind, body, and emotional being – and contributes enormously to our ultimate healing as we express it from our hearts.
Joy also brings the possibility of change into our lives in one of the most positive ways possible for us, not only as human beings, but also specifically as grievers dealing with the effects of our loss.
Because we’re so familiar with the absence of joy, we are also more finely attuned to its reappearance in our lives, in whatever form and from whatever source it may appear.
So how does all of this relate to you as a grieving person being able to ‘hear their words of joy’? Meaning of course, hearing joy from the voice of your own lost loved one?
Last winter, when I first encountered the experience of hearing my daughter’s voice again and talking to her, one of the most powerful aspects of the experience was the utter and unrestricted feeling of joy which radiated from the sound of her voice to my own heartstrings.
Based on my personal spiritual beliefs part of me understood instinctively why she would sound so joyful, given her presence in the heavenly domains where no sorrow, heartache or any other form of humanity’s hurts exist.
It made perfect sense to me in this context, that a place filled permanently with love and peace should also be joyful.
But it was more than that, even in our first conversation. There was also an absolute sense of her joy simply in reconnecting with her dad again, the father who had finally opened his heart to understanding her still living presence in his own heart and memories.
Yet as I’ve discovered in subsequent conversations of the heart with my girl, those have not been her only reasons for expressing this emotion to me so vibrantly.
She was joyful for me that I had found it within my experience of grieving over these years to be able to ‘release her’ – to let her go – to give up my very human hold on her progress to the spirit world of her new life.
I’ve always managed to believe she would be very happy there, but it took letting go of her to free both of our spirits, and to be able to communicate once more with joy.
Her joy came also from the fact that she saw me moving beyond the grief of losing her and beginning to live my life again, as I know she would have wished for me to do.
Living your life again is one of the most difficult things for a grieving person to be able to go back to, but you should know our loved ones would be joyful for us when we do, as my daughter has so beautifully made known to me.
The concept - let alone the possibility - of first of being able to talk to your lost loved one, then beginning to feel the touch of their spirit, and finally to hear their words of joy may seem strange to some.
But they’re in fact one and the same in terms of their source in your own heart and memories, and in their potential to help you heal.
It’s all about what you’re willing to open yourself to once more believe (in the possibilities of), to hear (the sound of their voice and the joy in it), to feel (the touch of their spirit), and to experience (your greater healing) from this source.
Speaking from my own well of experience in these three areas, there’s no doubt in me as to their truth and effectiveness in my life in helping me to overcome and to heal. This has been a clear result I can’t even argue with myself about any longer, let alone with anyone else who might care to.
Hearing their words of joy can become a reality in your own world of grieving once again, if you choose to hear and share those words with them.
Open yourself to their joy, and experience joy once more yourself because of it.
Remember, it’s all about the possibilities you give room to in your heart.
The rest of your healing experiences will follow in the wake of your belief.
(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.