Hope

~ Hopelessly Devoted To You ~ Olivia Newton John

Now and then we get a little glimpse of hope in one experience or another. This through. We may be in deep grief anywhere from a few weeks to many months. We are never quite sure how long grief is going to last. We must remember that no two people are the same, nor are any two grief situations identical.

It would be wrong for us to leave the impression that a person is less than human, if he does not express his feelings overtly. Some people just do not express emotion and do not need to. Within themselves they probably struggle with many of these stages, but somehow temperamentally they are able to handle these problems very well by themselves. They do not need for any one "meddling" in their lives by trying to help them through their grief. We soon learn, if we try to force ourselves upon someone like this, that it is better to let him work out his problem for himself and call on us if and when he needs us.

The great majority of us, however, need to express our emotions. We need the warm attention and encouragement of those about us. As we are the recipients of such attention, it makes it easier for us to sense that our present attitude of shutting out all new opportunities for meaningful living is unrealistic. We find that other experiences in life can be meaningful again.

The opposite of this is seen in the rich old widow who has acted strangely ever since her musician husband died twenty years ago. She has kept his music studio just as he left it when he died. She has locked the keyboard of his piano and has allowed no one ever to enter the room. Each day she stands for a long time in the doorway with her memories. She has consistently refused to re-enter life again. She is known by all as "that eccentric old lady." Knowing what we do now about the grief process, it appears that at the time of her husband's death she was not helped to wrestle her way through to a new way of life. Apparently, she had few or no friends who were willing to stay by her side during those difficult days, and as a result she had no one to encourage her to do her grieving in the normal way. She felt that her only friend was her deceased husband, and she had to remain loyal to him. That was why she locked the keyboard of the piano. She wanted no one else ever to play that piano again, lest she would be disloyal to the memory of the only person whose friendship she could trust.

The melody that the loved one played upon the piano of your life will never be played quite that way again, but we must not close the keyboard and allow the instrument to gather dust. We must seek out other artists of the spirit, new friends who gradually will help us to find the road to life again, who will walk that road with us.

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~ Lyn ~