Knowledge is power! For those of us who are trying to muddle our way through child loss it seems that understanding what is happening to us emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually and taking action to help ourselves through, moves us out of the victim mode of the situation and into the take charge mode again of our lives, and this is our point of power !
How many times have I heard grieving parents echo what I myself have said since losing my son and that is, ” I am tired of the lemons I’ve been given and ready to turn them into lemonade and get back into life again!” When I finally reached this point of my own grief recovery after my son Josh’s murdered remains had been found after 2 years of being missing, I needed to know how others who had made it through this terrible loss had done it.
I read every self help book I could get my hands on, I read everything I could find on the internet, I talked to many who had lost their own children before me, then I finally stumbled upon a Grief Coaching method for moving beyond hurt and loss that involves a series of steps one of which is moving beyond yourself. It combines the best of who you were before losing a child, the who you are after losing a child, and the need we have to heal. It takes you beyond yourself into the world of compassion like you never have been before. To utilize all you have endured, all you have learned, all you have sacrificed to help other parents like yourself who find themselves lost and in terrific pain.
In getting to this step in grief recovery many parents I have met now help facilitate support groups such as SIDS, head organizations such as Suicide Awareness, speak at schools about the danger of drugs, some are involved in politics as in MADD etc. I choose to become a Certified Grief Recovery Coach working specifically with parents, I speak, do workshops and write. There is a poem that helped to give me direction towards my point of power again when I was feeling lost after losing my son:
It is by Will Allen Dromgoole and called “The Bridge Builder”
An old man, going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast, and deep, and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned, when safe on the other side,
And built a bridge to span the tide.
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim, near,
“You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again must pass this way;
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build you the bridge at the eventide?”
The builder lifted his old gray head:
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today
A youth, whose feet must pass this way.”
“This chasm, that has been naught to me,
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him.”
May this help you along on your own grief recovery journey…
Peace & Light,
Stella Wichman
Certified From Heartbreak to Happiness Coach
www.parentsgriefrecovery.com
“Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself?”
Thomas Jefferson
Walking Through Illusion, by Betsy Otter Thompson, is a thought provoking book based on the energy of love and the freedom each of us has to express that love. Much of the book is devoted to her thoughts around the physics of action/reaction, and she has chosen to explain those thoughts in the context of biblical stories through a question and answer with Jesus. In each chapter, she chooses a different biblical character and the lessons they learned from Jesus’ perspective. At chapter’s end, she has included several questions to ponder, and what this lesson meant to her.
