...and your loved one lives on.

While participating in the "Writing Your Grief" program, I kept wondering about the "meaning, power, intent" of writing about grief for 30 days. Was it just immersing me in self-indulgent wallowing? I really couldn't figure it out since some days the prompts triggered me into deep despair...

The day after the "program" ended, I got a letter from the Grief Support Services at the Hospice agency that oversaw my elderly mother-in-law who died in our home in December (under my care.) They seem to send me something every few months, and I have not availed myself of their services because I am not in mourning for Frieda.

The title of the one-page form letter was "When Meaning Seems Lost" and the point was that "it is in story that you can begin to take the first steps toward..."learning again how to be and act in the world without those we love by our sides." Story not only provides us the opportunity to re-learn, but the opportunity to re-member, re-store, re-claim and re-renew."

The final paragraph made some sense to me: "In the days to come as you begin to re-learn the world and seek to find meaning in it, I challenge you to find a place where your story may be told, lived and honored. (WYG?) Be grateful for what your story has to teach, both to yourself and others. Remember that all stories have a life and that when they are told they shape both the person who hears the story and the one who tells it. It is in that shaping where life is renewed, meaning begins to emerge, and your loved one lives on."

I'm going to try to figure out more about these "stories." How do they work to keep my love for my Ben alive? I'm still a little skeptical that this kind of writing is more "lyrical" than deep truth, at least, for me. But I will keep working on it.

I created this little cairn yesterday from rocks I had in the corner of my garden. The article I had received from Providence Hospice had a photograph of a similar sculpture and I realized that it definitely has some symbolic significance for all five losses tin my life this past year.