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A Poetic Series - Grieving the Death of a Grown Child - "A Father's Hope"

Topic: Grief and LossBy Ken MatthiesPublished Recently added

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“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©

From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storyteller

Written a month and a half after my daughter died, the poem you'll read below was a last ditch effort to hang onto my spiritual faith before I descended in a deep spiral into the ‘despair marker stone’ of *Confrontation - Entering the Depths*, the second of grief’s cycles I endured which led me onward to my healing. (You can refer to my Marker Stones of the Grief Journey series of articles available on this site to learn more about your cycles of grief).
A Father’s Hope

A grieving dad? Yes, he’s all of thatr
For sure and for all of the time;
That he waits for the call that brings him Homer
To quote her these verses of rhyme.

Leila love, it’s hard down herer
To live with this huge empty place;
Buried deep within your dad’s aching heart,
And the tears that still stain his face.

He knows the Creator had a special needr
For someone with your flying skills;
It’s the only thing that gives him peace,
That you’re flying through Heavenly hills.

So as hard as it is to accept the factr
That you’re not here to laugh with and love,
Your dad sends these words to his lovely girlr
Who’s gone on to the Kingdom above.

And it’s only right that he pens these words,
As time and ete
ity waits;
For the happy moment that’s coming one dayr
When he smiles from Ete
ity’s Gates.

It’s the hope; you see – the certainty clear –
That our spirits will touch one more time;
That heals the wounds of his broken heart,
As he waits for that moment sublime.

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About the Author

For almost forty years of his life Ken Matthies has been a writer and chronicler of life expressed in poetic form, following the family tradition laid down by his grandfather before him.

Faced with the dramatically life altering experience of his helicopter pilot daughter’s sudden death in 2002 he has grown to also become a literary author of true events based on his own life. Though grief opened his literary doors it is the Light of Love and Memories supplying the fuel of inspiration to write through them.

As a second-chance dad given the opportunity to verbally share his life stories with his newly rediscovered daughter it was she who told him that she believed him to be a ‘worthy man’ after having heard them, and who encouraged him that they should be shared in written form beyond her own life – not yet knowing as she said it that she was soon to leave him behind. As a bereaved father and writer learning how to live life again in the Light of his own Love and Memories of his daughter, he writes those stories now as a testament to her belief and faith in their value.

His full length book entitled "How to Survive the Death of a Child - A Father's Story of Healing Light" was the first of these stories which he wrote in the Light of those Love and Memories.

He lives in the solitude and grandeur of a tiny southern Yukon village with his Tlingit native wife Skoehoeteen and the successor to their venerable old Tahltan bear dog Clancy Underfoot, who now happily awaits them at the Rainbow Bridge in Doggy Heaven. She’s a new female puppy named Hlinukts Seew which means ‘Sweet Rain’ in the Tlingit language, a wonderful phonetic variation in memory of Clancy’s name who was also called C.U. for short. It’s a good place to tell those stories from.

You can read more of Ken's writings and find his Amazon Kindle book at www.kenmatthies.com.

A Poetic Series - Grieving the Death of a Grown Child - "A Father's Hope"

About the Author

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