Tuesday, May 26, 2015

When Someone We Love Dies


"They whom we love and lose are no longer where they were  before.  They are now wherever we are."  
                                           St.John Chrysostom

When someone we love dies, there is no denying the profound sense of loss, sadness and sometimes actual physical pain we feel. Whether the passing is quite sudden…and therefore shocking…or expected through what sociologists call “anticipatory grieving,” the experience itself always seems to bring with it a thud of finality that is surprising. There is a question we sometimes ask: Could this really be happening? But, of course, it is, and what is left to us is making our peace with it.

Re-gearing....

If our loved one is someone we lived with or saw every day, we will be faced with the task of re-gearing our entire daily lives. If he or she lived at a distance, there will be the ache of knowing we will not see them again. A warm, loving presence is gone, and it is the memory of him or her that will have to fill the void.

Love...that binds...

If we practice a spiritual belief system, we may be blessed with the eventual sense of connection we share with our beloved, however that unfolds. It can’t take the place of breathing flesh, but it erases the waste of oblivion. I personally have always believed that it is love and not blood that binds us together anyway.

Small thoughts...

Obviously we do gather up the threads of our lives and go forward, and I do think that, with the healing passage of time, we will really come to know how very much those we love have added to our lives. How much less might we have been without them, whether our time together was short or many years? I offer these small thoughts, not mine, and unfortunately, anonymous. They are not sentimental but I think they carry great and varied meanings.

"Goodbyes are sad things"...

“Goodbyes are sad things. We leave behind the dreams that we’ve worked to make real, friends that we suffered with and grown to love, and sometimes a quiet security that was built with what seems to be half a lifetime. In life everywhere we move along and leave our efforts behind us in the dust, knowing deep inside that we will never find them exactly the same again…Life teaches us to accept goodbyes as a part of saying hello to things that are newer. It teaches us also that what was lost was loved and what was learned in the past can never be lost.”

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You might also enjoy "On Compassion"


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