~daily message from Healing After Loss by Martha Whitmore Hickman

People in mourning have to come to grips with death before they can
live again.  Mourning can go on for years and years.  It doesn't end
after a year; that's a false fantasy.  It usually ends when people
realize that they can live again.  That they can concentrate their
energies or their lives as a whole, and not on their hurt, and guilt,
and pain.

~Elisabeth Kubler Ross

No one is asking us to forget, to turn away from all that we loved
and cherished in the one we have lost.  We couldn't do that even if
we wanted to.

The task before us - and it can take a very long time - is to
incorporate this grief and loss into the rest of our lives, so that
it doesn't continue to dominate our lives.  It's no longer the first
thing we think of when we wake up in the morning, or the last thing
we relinquish before we sleep.

A child said to his mother, in regard to the outpouring of kindnesses
after his father's death, "There are so many good things.  There's
just one bad thing."

The "bad thing" will always be there, but when it begins to take its
place among the good things life offers, we're on our way.