MAY 20 So often, we believe that we have come to a place that is void of hope and void of possibilities, only to find that it is the very hopelessness that allows us to hit bottom, give up our illusion of control, turn it over, and ask for help Out of the ashes of our hopelessness comes the fire of our hope —ANNE WILSON SCHAEF When one is low enough, bottoming out on despair and hopelessness, the thought of going anywhere at all is totally foreign It’s not that it would be too hard, it’s simply that the prospect of any motion is unthinkable Like a mule that refuses to budge, life seems to have stopped in its tracks—and no flattery, no promises, no cajoling, no threats, can have any effect The future has no appeal and no promise At this point the path of integrity and, ultimately, of a return to health may be found by standing still and acknowledging the degree to which one’s life is filled to the edges with grief But after a while even the grieving heart becomes restless and thinks, This will not forever One begins to look around, maybe step out of the picture, as it were, leave that darkness behind, and begin to walk away, noticing a flower growing along the path, a waft of cloud in a blue sky, a friend who has been waiting all along At the bottom of the well, one can look up and see the sky MAY 21 Let it not be death but completeness Let love melt into memory and pain into songs Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way —RABINDRANATH TAGORE So can we ease our loved ones into the land beyond, wishing for them a safe and gentle passage In a holy silence we hold a lamp to guide them on their way It is a leap of faith to trust that all is well, even harder to fantasize holding a lamp to guide them, since we probably are not ready to have them go But the choice is not ours, whether they go or stay Our choice is how we respond to their going, how we think about it If we can think about it in the lyrical imagery of Tagore, maybe that in itself will ease our pain I cannot know where you are going, but I hold the lamp of my love aloft to accompany you on your way MAY 22 Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened up again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare reality, the wallowed-in tears For in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs Round and round Everything repeats Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? —C S LEWIS It comes without warning, the feeling of being plunged back into the freshness of new grief—the same bewilderment, the feeling of being disoriented, our life disorganized Often we don’t know just what has set us off again And we thought we were doing better! The loved one we have lost has probably been with us for a very long time, perhaps all of our life—as when a parent has died It is going to take us a long time to adapt to that loss It won’t happen smoothly, either, in some sort of gradual uphill climb out of the valley of despair It’s more like the work of clearing a rock-strewn New England field With great labor the rocks are removed, but then the land shifts, the seasons change, and new rocks work their way to the surface Eventually the land will be cleared, but it may take a long time! I will be gentle with myself, accepting these storms of the psyche as part of my passage on the road to recovery MAY 23 All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposes, and luckier —WALT WHITMAN Can we read in the flow of life, in the return of songbirds and roses and blueberries, some reassurance that it is life’s intention to waste nothing, but to keep the basic substance of life itself going? And if this is true for the smaller, less complex works of creation, surely it must be true for the intricate and wondrous creation which is a human being Death helps to define our life, to give it some framework and the urge to and be what we can because an end to life as we know it will come And then what? None of us knows But we can take some clues from what we know of the rest of creation The clues lead us to hope, as the stories of dying persons whose faces become suffused with joy and wonder Not all dying persons have such an experience We don’t need a hundred percent validation, any more than we need to add up all the columns of figures in the world to know that two plus two equals four—every time When facing the unknown, hope is as reasonable as despair MAY 24 The moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude…that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is also, and at the same time, granted us…that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly —ISAK DINESEN All the lost hopes, all the lost plans for the future when a loved one dies…how are we to accept these losses? In Dinesen’s story “Babette’s Feast” General Lowenhielm returns to the scene of a brief and unconsummated love and makes the astonishing statement that the years of deprivation are redeemed by the grace of this moment Can we expect such a moment of grace? What might it be? Perhaps in some solitary moment we sense the almost palpable presence of our loved one in the room, participating with us in some of the ventures of our life Perhaps on some family occasion when we would have expected only yearning grief, we have in addition to the sadness a sense of the loved one taking it in, smiling, blessing the occasion Or perhaps we experience a surge of confident hope that we shall, on some other plane, be together again In the midst of absence, a presence is made known ... perhaps all of our life—as when a parent has died It is going to take us a long time to adapt to that loss It won’t happen smoothly, either, in some sort of gradual uphill climb out of the valley of... lost hopes, all the lost plans for the future when a loved one dies…how are we to accept these losses? In Dinesen’s story “Babette’s Feast” General Lowenhielm returns to the scene of a brief