Stories of the Grieving Process After a Child Dies - “Keeping the Vision Alive in your Heart and Mind”
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“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©
From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storyteller
What are you doing to keep the vision alive in your own heart and mind of the loved one you lost? Finding a way to do so is a vitally important part of dealing with your loss, grief and bereavement because it helps lead you deeper into your healing.
Whatever way you choose to help you do this, know that its constant presence around you will serve to keep that connection vital and glowing in your heart and offer a healing reassurance to your wounded soul.
For example, sitting on the phone table behind me in my office is the portrait taken of my daughter and me shortly after she arrived back in my life at the age of 19. Even though she’s gone I feel as though she remains, always watching my back (there for me) and encouraging the writing I do in her memory.
The proud and shining smile stretching almost ear to ear on my own daddy’s face is marvelously counterpointed by the soft and glowing smile of utter love and belonging etched upon my daughter’s; as we lean on each other in the joy and profound contentment of having reconnected our lives in the light of that love.
Although completely unplanned for in the context of the photo, the near identical rings on our fingers speak constantly to me of the total bond of loving commitment we shared as father and daughter – a bond which was not only proven in life but one which has also carried over for me beyond her death.
Although seeing this photo carries a powerful poignancy of regret that we can no longer share the warmth of our human touch, it brings me enormous peace and a healing calm of heart that we had the opportunity to do so in the first place.
I feel blessed to be able to keep my daughter’s vision alive in both heart and mind in this way, and am healed more each day from the wound of her loss by the beauty of its presence.
What are you doing to keep your vision alive – and find a deeper healing?
Article author
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.
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