It is through our losses that we can transform ourselves and find new meaning to life.

- from Healing Grief, by James Van Praagh

a superb book about love + grief

Grief is a sphere in that it can be turned a quarter turn or turned a millionth, it can be spun on any axis and by any degree and still its aspect is the same. Symmetry is nurtured by higher dimensions. This was my intellect in action and its attempts to salve. Nothing had yet healed to silver: I was raw. I was a child and I had lost my father. I lost him over and over again each morning, every long night. I lose him still. In every heartbeat, his absence and its isolating factors. And how do I remember him? On his last birthday as I stretched to kiss him on the cheek.

His love was fuel.

I am a blind woman recalling colour, I am the amputee who still believes that she can feel each shin. All that yearning! I was gutted: I longed for him to exist not only so that he could guide me, but so that I could love and be in turn loved by him. Forgetful wish. My father had always been that place to which I could return. I sought his voice in silence, chased his shadow through the dawn. Mourners depend on such implausibility for sustenance.

It was a case of separating smoke from air and air from smoke: circular endeavours designed only to lead me to myself. Anything to distract me from the truth. My intellect reconstructed him but the experience was lost and so I valiantly incorporated that loss into my reconstruction - again, so circular. When my fabled stepfather gripped my throat and smilingly tried to choke me, all I could think of as I kicked and struggled was my father. There is such sorrow in knowing that he will never see me as a woman. There is such sorrow in knowing that he will never again share my life. There is a world of sorrow in relinquishing such love. Grief is a sphere.

- from The Pure Weight of the Heart, by Antonella Gambotto

along the journey of grief

You can expect that: Your grief will take longer than most people think. Your grief will take more energy than you would have ever imagined.

Your grief will involve many changes and be continually developing. Your grief will show itself in all spheres of your life: psychological, social, physical, and spiritual. The intensity of your grief will depend on how you perceive the loss.

You will grieve for many things both symbolic and tangible, not just the death alone. You will grieve for what you have lost already and for what you have lost in the future as well.

Your grief will entail mourning, not only for the actual person that you have lost, but also for all of the hopes, dreams, and unfulfilled expectations that you held for and with that person, and for the needs that will go unmet because of their death. Your grief will involve a wide variety of feelings and reactions, not just those normally associated with grieving, such as depression and sadness.

The loss will resurrect old issues, feelings, and unresolved conflicts from the past.

- You will have some identity confusion as a result of this major loss and such feelings may be a new and puzzling experience for you;