by Benjamin Allen | Feb 23, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery
One of the great questions when someone enters the world of the Afterloss is “what happens to love?” I have found so many different answers to all the different ramifications to this question of what does love mean to me now and how can a life of great sorrow find a...
by Benjamin Allen | Feb 23, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery
There is a reason this page is called Healing in the Afterloss. But what is healing? Healing for me doesn’t mean the hurt goes away. Healing means the hurt changes. Instead of the hurt being in the shape of a broken heart, it is now in the shape of an open heart. In...
by Benjamin Allen | Feb 23, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery
What makes us yearn not to be forgotten and not to forget? Years before I had lost everything I was speaking to someone whose child had died. In the newspaper there was an account of a landslide in our community that took a house down a ravine. Gratefully, no one was...
by Benjamin Allen | Feb 16, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery
Memory plays such an important role in my healing loss. I needed to touch those memories in a real and tangible way. I would drive to special places that held those memories. I would visit them often to replay the preciousness of the place we spent a moment of...
by Benjamin Allen | Feb 16, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery
There is a difference between moving on and going on. So much of our culture is uncomfortable with pain, and the pain of loss is no different. There is an underlying sentiment in our society that if we ignore it, it doesn’t exist. Loss exists. Loss exists for a long...
by Benjamin Allen | Feb 16, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery
There are just some places only you can go. My experience with the parts of my path where I am utterly alone is that it can be a place of great healing and great pain, sometimes at the same time. There are other times when it can be solely the pure pain of vacuous...