by Benjamin Allen | Apr 17, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery, reintegration after loss
It is natural to want to be loved and to love. The yearning for connection is an integral part of life. The yearning to know, to love and to connect to another does not end at death, but where it once went, it could no longer go. I had nowhere to lay my heart within...
by Benjamin Allen | Apr 16, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery, reintegration after loss
Is it wrong to just want one more day? My Afterloss took me on a quest into the dynamic of continuity and closure. I needed to find a way to come to peace with what was left unsaid, undone, unfinished. And I needed to find a new way of relating to what continued. I do...
by Benjamin Allen | Apr 16, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery, reintegration after loss
Gathering and scattering. Loss has left me gathering what is left as life scatters the rest. We gather by hospital beds and car wrecks. We gather for funerals. We gather in homes to mourn, but come morning we scatter back into our singularity. What brings us together...
by Benjamin Allen | Apr 15, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery, reintegration after loss
What are my reference points that tether me to time? I recently had a birthday. In the early days of my loss I would do the rose ceremony on Lydia, Matt and Bryan’s birthdays and the anniversaries of their deaths. It was an honoring of their births; that they walked...
by Benjamin Allen | Apr 14, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery, reintegration after loss
When Matt was three, his little brother was close to death. After work I would take him to the park. On the way home one day he said to me out of the blue, “When I die, Mickey is going to come get me and we’re going to dance on the clouds.” Life comes to us, death...
by Benjamin Allen | Apr 14, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery, reintegration after loss
In whom, in what, can a safe haven be found? When there is nothing left to hold on to, who will hold me? When Lydia died, Matt was at his grandparent’s home waiting for the news. After they took her body from our home and before I went to tell Matt his mother was...
