The funeral home has sent me a series of booklets over the past year by Doug Manning, a leader in seminars on grief care. I easily connected to some of the quotes in the last book I was sent.
- It is important, when dealing with grief, to keep the process moving. The temptation is to freeze, to stay perpetually recoiled against so terrible a blow. –Martha Whitmore Hickman
- Time does restore to us our quiet joy in the spiritual presence of those we love, so that we learn to remember without pain and to speak without choking up with tears. But, all of our lives, we will be subject to sudden small reminders which will bring all the old loss back overwhelmingly. –Emily Watson
- I understand so little of this process of grief, yet this I know for sure. The theory about stages is wrong. We bereaved don’t reach acceptance. We don’t recover from grief. If we are lucky and if we are strong, we simply learn how to live with it. –Andrea Warren
I wish I could write until it would all go away, magically disappear, and suddenly fade. I wish the words I struggle to find could bring some lasting comfort. I wish my journals would answer all my questions and bring some peace of mind. But, it seems that no matter how many times I recount the pain, I can not find a way to cross back in time to a happier place. Maybe I have started to confuse the idea of passage with the idea of flight. I believe that I will fly again. I just can never fly back to what I once had. I have been rerouted and my writings now serve to document the course.
Doug Manning will be speaking at the Roberts-Eckert Funeral Home in Forest Lake on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 7:00 PM.
