Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief

by Martha W Hickman

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

There is no better companion when dealing with grief than this daily check-in designed to help you push through the feelings that accompany loss. If you or someone you know is struggling, this is the solution.

The classic guide for dealing with grief and loss. Daily reflections to find solace in our own lives, and comfort in the connection of sharing these meditations with countless others.

After the focus on planning and outpouring of love from family and friends in the immediate aftermath following the loss of a loved one, we are left to enter a new version of our lives where someone important is missing.

For days, months, years, the pain of the loss can crash in all at once. It is tempting to push that wave of grief back and soldier on with our new lives, but the loss will never lose its controlling power if we don’t find the courage and love to face it. Meditating on the loss, along with the rush of love that comes with it, gives us a chance to rejoice in the life that was shared, and to look forward in which memories of our loved ones continue to bless us.

The short, poignant meditations given here follow the course of the year, but it is not a necessity to follow them chronologically. They will strengthen, inspire, and give comfort for as long as they are needed.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780380773381
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/01/1994
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	3,867
Product dimensions:	4.02(w) x 5.96(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Martha W. Hickman was the author of more than twenty books, including The Growing Season, Fullness of Time, I Will Not Leave You Desolate, and Such Good People, and the children’s books When Andy’s Father Went to Prison, And God Created Squash, and Eeps Creeps, It’s My Room.

A native of Massachusetts and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Mount Holyoke, she lived in the South for many years. To her writing she brought the additional perspective of being a wife, mother, grandmother, and sometime editor and teacher. Her work continues to serve as an invaluable source of inspiration well after her passing.

 

Read an Excerpt

Healing After LossJanuary 1

I put down these memorandums of my affections
In honor of tenderness,
in honor of all of those who have been
Conscripted into the brotherhood
Of loss . . .

— Edward Hirsch

When we are drawn into the brotherhood or sisterhood of loss, tenderness seems to be our natural state. We are so vulnerable. Everything brushes against the raw wound of our grief, reminding us of what we have lost, triggering memories — a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of walking, a touch, a particular conversation. These images are like beads strung together on the necklace of loss. Tenderly, we turn them again and again. We cannot bear them. We cannot let them go.

Then, gradually, bit by bit, the binding thread of grief somehow transmutes, reconstitutes itself as a thread of treasured memories — a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of walking, a touch, a particular conversation as gifts from the life we shared with the one we have lost, gifts that can never be taken away.Healing After Loss. Copyright (c) by Martha Hickman . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.