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...
by Benjamin Allen | Apr 13, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery, reintegration after loss
They were more like “panic ambushes”. Fear would come out of nowhere and seize me. The strongest seizures were when we first started the journey of loss when Bryan was months away from death and ten years later during the months leading up to Matt’s death. There were...
by Benjamin Allen | Apr 12, 2014 | reflections on grief, reflections on grief recovery, reintegration after loss
I know that place where night fades into day and day gives way to night. I have rested in the relief that another day is finished and dreaded the moment the sun steals my night. I stopped the day death took them, but the day didn’t stop. The day pulled me into night,...
