“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©
From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storyteller
The journey of your healing from loss, grief and bereavement will continue for you through a lifetime of learning – and from my own experience of having gone through it I’ve come to understand that as a good thing – not something negative to drive me to further despair.
The process of healing from grief is designed to be a gradual one for us as human beings because we’re not physically, mentally or emotionally equipped to be able to deal with all of it at once – suffering a grievous loss one day and magically cured from its effects the very next day, month, or even year.
As painful as going through this process is there’s a greater good at work for us in the length of time it takes. Just as you had to go through an escalating series of learning grades in school, college or university to achieve graduation, so it is with the process of healing from loss, grief and bereavement.
You recall how you used to come home from school each day and your parents would often ask “What did you learn today?” It’s the same thing with your healing process; only the question itself changes to ask “What’s helping you heal today?”
Just as your daily learning in school helped you to become more knowledgeable about and capable within the world you live in, so goes the daily learning about the process of healing from your loss, grief and bereavement in order to help you become more knowledgeable about and capable within the reality of the changed world you now live in.
Both processes achieve the same end – that of educating you to the things you need to know in order to progress through the path of learning you are on – and both bring you into a higher state of being (or healing) because of the daily knowledge gleaned from going through it.
There’s little question that going through the school of healing from loss, grief and bereavement is the toughest school on earth – yet the truth is that virtually everyone at some point in life will be faced with the necessity for enrolling in its learning.
Allow yourself to accept this simple truth and actively seek that daily knowledge about the process of healing from your loss, grief and bereavement – in whatever way and by whatever means bring you to it.
Then you too will be able to ask and answer the question of “What’s helping you heal today?”
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.