Healing After Loss- Hays

07/20/2022

06/28/2022

It’s tempting to tell a grieving person to look to the future – to encourage them to have a happy life. What most people don’t understand is that your person is missing in the future, too. There’s no place their absence does not reach.⁣⁣
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In her poem "Burning the Old Year," Naomi Shihab Nye writes: "where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts…"⁣⁣
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I bet you can relate to that. No one can fully prepare for the something that was there and suddenly is not.⁣⁣
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Absence shouts from every angle, every corner of your life. There is nowhere it does not reach.⁣⁣
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For a long time after Matt drowned, I expected him to simply walk back in. Walk back in to the kitchen from the bedroom. Walk back in to the coffee shop after parking the car. Just – please. Walk back in. His absence in my life, our life, echoed off of everything.⁣⁣
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The echoes continue into a future we do not have. There is nowhere his absence does not reach.⁣
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And this is a thing many people outside your grief can't understand: that you haven't simply lost one person, at one point in time. You've lost their presence in every aspect of your life. Your future has changed as well as your “now.”⁣⁣
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As your grief unfolds, you'll find more and more places their absence shouts. I don’t mean that as a downer. The truth is, as we live forward, we carry their absence with us. The absence exists because love exists. The only thing time will do is shift the balance, allowing more love to take over that absence, filling in the empty place with its own weight.⁣⁣
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As you move through this week, this month, this year, my hope is that the love you feel equals the absence, that love takes up just as much space. May you feel your own love & the love of the one who has gone like outgoing and incoming tides.⁣⁣
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How has the absence of the one you love shown up in your present life? How has your future changed?⁣⁣

05/02/2022

Thank you Cindy for sharing this.

04/30/2022

Real love doesn’t die.

04/15/2022

I live for us both.

04/05/2022

It’s crazy

04/01/2022

Here's the truth about grief: loss gets integrated, not overcome.

However long it takes, your heart and your mind will carve out a new life amid this weirdly devastated landscape. Little by little, pain and love will find ways to coexist.

It won't feel wrong or bad to have survived. It will be, simply, a life of your own making: the most beautiful life it can be, given what is yours to live.

May all that Refuge In Grief has to offer, the book: It's OK That You're Not OK (https://www.refugeingrief.com/book/), the website (https://www.refugeingrief.com/), the courses (https://www.refugeingrief.com/30daywriting/), and this beautiful community of broken and empathetic hearts, help you find the thread of love that still exists, following it forward into a life that you didn't ask for, but is here nonetheless.

We're so sorry you have need of this space, and we're so glad you're here.