STAGES OF GRIEF HEALING Article Series

“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©

From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real-Life Storyteller

Welcome back to the seventh in a series of ten special articles of homespun real-life talk about your grieving process.

Today’s topic of ‘Feeling The Touch Of Their Spirit’ is the second of a three part series within these articles, which began with the previous article called ‘Talking To Your Lost Loved One’, and dealing with different aspects of reconnecting to your loved one.

Being able to feel the touch of your loved ones spirit can be a wonderful added blessing to you on your healing path!

It cannot be said enough times, that each of us are experiencing our loss and looking for recovery in ways unique to us alone.

This article too falls into this category, and will cause you to stretch your possibilities of belief. It’ll make you reach out in ways you may not have yet experienced, let alone considered before, but might be just what you’re looking for.

How is it possible to feel the touch of your loved ones spirit after they’re gone?

In answering this question, I can’t help but first go back in my own memory to all of those hours, days, weeks, months, and years when I didn’t feel the touch of my daughter’s spirit.

They were long and endless and filled with utter despair and the darkness of my own shadows.

You remember those times too, no doubt. You might even still be experiencing them in this moment.

But then my memories begin to contrast those dark times with the time since the Light of love and memories came back into my life, and began to change grief into grieving in a new and positively healing way.

And then I remember the touch of my daughter’s spirit beginning to happen, during those days as I began to write our story, all the times in the years that followed in completing it, and in the endless number of times since and between those events.

There’s even one incident of her spirit presence that preceded all of those, and remains etched in memory as the first major turning point I encountered during my days of outright grief.

For me the touch of my daughter’s spirit is that sense of intense closeness to her which envelops me during the times I’ve been writing about her, dealing with my feelings about her absence, or more recently - talking to her at any time I wish, as described in the previous article.

She has become a ‘presence’ to me – one I feel within me as warmth, awareness, and a reconnection, which goes light years beyond the obvious fact she no longer physically exists.

Those feelings bring me peace in a way I never was able to experience during my days of unrestrained grief.

In reading the last article about talking to your lost loved one, you’ll recall what was said about the possibilities of such a thing being able to happen for you. This is no different in that sense – the possibilities are just as real for you.

As I’ve discovered for myself, over and over in my days of grieving, coming to experience these beautiful events and moments in time, came about because I opened my heart to believing in their possibility – as can each of you reading this article.

As grievers, too many of us try to shut down our feelings because they just plain hurt too much to allow ourselves to dwell only on our pain. I know I did so for far too long. And I have little doubt in my mind that I missed earlier opportunities to reconnect with my daughter, both in voice and spirit, by doing so.

I’m in no way suggesting that just because you do reconnect, all of your pain and sorrow will magically disappear. Because the truth of your experience is this - you’ll never stop feeling a measure of hurt, or forget them, as long as you still breathe.

But you will heal sooner, and in a better way, if you’re able to open yourself to these kinds of possibilities earlier on in your own experience.

Feeling the touch of their spirit is an issue of your own heart, your own memory, and your own willingness to believe.

You can stretch yourself to believe in the touch of their spirit again and allow yourself to experience their closeness, and ‘presence’, inside your own heart once more.

When you do, know your life will change in another wonderful way to help you heal.

(If you haven’t already purchased it and want to learn the full story behind the truth of these articles, be sure to visit my website and download a copy of my book entitled “How to Survive the Death of a Child - A Father's Story of Healing Light” available on Amazon Kindle at www.kenmatthies.com/ )

Author's Bio: 

For almost forty years of his life Ken Matthies has been a writer and chronicler of life expressed in poetic form, following the family tradition laid down by his grandfather before him.

Faced with the dramatically life altering experience of his helicopter pilot daughter’s sudden death in 2002 he has grown to also become a literary author of true events based on his own life. Though grief opened his literary doors it is the Light of Love and Memories supplying the fuel of inspiration to write through them.

As a second-chance dad given the opportunity to verbally share his life stories with his newly rediscovered daughter it was she who told him that she believed him to be a ‘worthy man’ after having heard them, and who encouraged him that they should be shared in written form beyond her own life – not yet knowing as she said it that she was soon to leave him behind. As a bereaved father and writer learning how to live life again in the Light of his own Love and Memories of his daughter, he writes those stories now as a testament to her belief and faith in their value.

His full length book entitled "How to Survive the Death of a Child - A Father's Story of Healing Light" was the first of these stories which he wrote in the Light of those Love and Memories.

He lives in the solitude and grandeur of a tiny southern Yukon village with his Tlingit native wife Skoehoeteen and the successor to their venerable old Tahltan bear dog Clancy Underfoot, who now happily awaits them at the Rainbow Bridge in Doggy Heaven. She’s a new female puppy named Hlinukts Seew which means ‘Sweet Rain’ in the Tlingit language, a wonderful phonetic variation in memory of Clancy’s name who was also called C.U. for short. It’s a good place to tell those stories from.

You can read more of Ken's writings and find his Amazon Kindle book at www.kenmatthies.com.