THE STAGES OF GRIEF HEALING Article Series
“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©
From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storyteller
If you’re reading this article I’ve got good reason to believe parts of you are still flaming with the pain of your own loss. It’s my sincere hope this series of 10 articles will help in giving you a real sense of the possibilities that lie beyond those fires of hurt.
I understand your pain because I feel it too. We have a connection because of it.
Even with the huge amount of excellently written material on the subject of grief out there, I’ve found myself thinking for weeks about what to write next about the subject. And I still haven’t been able to come up with a coherent plan based on any of that wonderful material.
You can identify with those kinds of inabilities during grieving, I’m sure.
So I’m just going to open my heart and allow the words to flow like a river from it, because I know how much you need to hear from someone else who’s been there and managed to come through this experience.
I remember how often I found myself wishing for this kind of simple connection between two hurting people during those early years – but I never did find it, and fought my battles alone at the time. I learned the value of connections so late, I’ve often thought.
It doesn’t have to be that way for you!
The simple truth is this – you of all people know what grief is doing to you and to your life – especially if you’re still feeling all alone in the experience! I know this about you because I remember well what feeling alone did to me in those early years of the experience of losing my daughter.
Talk about feeling adrift…no direction… let alone a compass to guide me anywhere…
So how can you find a direction, a destination, and a safe harbor to anchor your aching soul in?
For your own sake, do something I never was able to at first – establish connections with other broken-hearted parents, or siblings, or friends and relatives or groups – anyone else who’s just as affected by their own experience of grief as you are.
Talk to them and let them talk to you. Open yourself up to sharing your pain and accepting the pain of others like you. You’ll discover an amazing thing if you do, and it’s this…
In giving voice to your hurt you’ll not only find yourself beginning to truly understand the hurt of others like you – you’ll begin to understand your own – and through the tears and the pain of it will come a soft and healing presence which begins to bring comfort and strength back into your shattered soul.
You’ll begin to see your direction more clearly and realize you have a destination after all – that there really is a safe harbor and solid land beyond it for your wobbly spirit to stand up on once again.
This place of “talking about it” IS that safe harbor!
It’s a place where you can drop the anchor and chains which are wrapped around your heart and constricting your life, and begin to give yourself the freedom of expression you desperately need to have right now.
You need to be able to talk about it - and where better than in the safe harbor of connections that understand you because they’ve been there too?
Connections. It’s all about making connections.
It’s all about finding the strength to open your mouth in the presence of others like you – of baring your heart and pouring out the huge buckets of grief that are clogging your life as you once knew it – and beginning to discover your own path to healing in the process.
And there really IS healing to be found there, believe me! And you know better than anyone else how much you need to find healing for yourself, don’t you?
Is this simply homespun advice? Sure it is. But it’s advice spun from the wreckage of grief in my own life in the aftermath of a daughter’s death. How much more real or helpful can it get than that?
And speaking of forming connections…I still need them too.
So I’m going to open myself up again in the same way I’ve recommended for you today. If you want to form another connection I’m willing to hear and feel your pain with you, because I understand the good that will come from it for both of us.
You can write it all out in whatever form you need to and send it to me at mkmatthies@gmail.com - I’ll read it and write back to you and we’ll both grow stronger for the experience of sharing it.
This is what these kinds of connections are all about.
(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/ )
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.