I can already tell that I am going to have a lot of notes from this book. I have only made it to Chapter 3 and I have a pageful.
"When your parent dies you have lost your past. But when your child dies, you have lost your future."
-Dr. Elliot Luby
"Grief carries its own anesthesia. It gets you over a lot." -Ladybird Johnson
Section One: The Anatomy of a Crisis
Chapter Two:The Stages of Heartbreak
Stage 1: The Bombshell
Stage 2: Deliberate Activity
Stage 3: Hitting Rock Bottom
Virginia Woolf-we experience the death of someone we love not at the funeral, but when we come
suddenly upon an old pair of his shoes
anger, loneliness
belief that things are going to get worse, rather than better
Four Negative Themes:
-My life will never be the same
-I have let everybody down
-I will never be happy again
-My spouse does not understand me
Stage 4: The Awakening
"That which does not kill me makes me stronger." -Friedrich Nietzche
Indian words: duragraha, satyagraha
Duragraha is stubbornness. It implies that you must learn to live with your suffering.
Satyagraha means you enter fully into what life offers. Also means capturing joys that surround us.
More than anything, it means forgiving the injustice as well as any person who may have been responsible for it.
From writings of Khalil Gibran:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
"Julie's eyes filled with tears as she reread the words (above). 'I can't explain it,' she said. 'But for the first time since Jenny's death, I let go of my regrets. She will always be with me and I will always miss her. And I will always wonder what she would have been like. But she had her own life that I could not control.' Julie paused as if to measure the significance of every word. 'I had to let her go.'
In her own way and after twelve months of heartbreak, Julie Morrow released the hurt. She did it with difficulty and with pain that only a parent who has lost a child can comprehend. But by doing so she moved into the house of tomorrow."
Chapter Three: Characteristics of a Crisis
Difficult thought: "Heartbreaks have a redemptive quality that often goes unnoticed."
Six characteristics:
-a crisis hits suddenly, without warning
-it threatens security
-its resolution is unpredictable
-it presents dilemmas
-it erodes self-confidence (reminds us that life is fragile)
"But once you have been emotionally hurt, you look at life differently. You feel the pain of others. You understand that life can be terribly unfair. And you know life takes unexpected turns."
-a difficult experience helps us redefine our values
"Jean Paul Sartre states that you cannot understand "being" (life) until you comprehend "non-being" (death). For one when stares death squarely in the face, then one begins to comprehend the profound gifts of life. Non-being is nothingness; being is potential. Non-being implies blowing oneself away because it is impossible to live with our loss. Being implies that self-destruction is the ultimate insult, for we have snuffed out hope that is buried deep within our psyches."
"A crisis event explodes the illusions that often anchor our lives. (one example). When your teenager lies critically ill in some sanitized hospital, it makes little difference whether he or she has made the scholastic honor roll or has missed last night's curfew."
"In the midst of tragedy, we learn what is important, and that is the redemptive legacy of any crisis experience."
Chapter Four: How People Survive Adversity
Characteristic One: Almost without exception those who survive a tragedy give credit to one person who stood by them, supported them, and gave them a sense of hope
"Khalil Gibran once remarked that we can forget those with whom we have laughed, but we can never forget those with whom we have cried."
fear of abandonment
First gift of friendship is companionship and the second is a gift of hope
A friend has the power to break the gloom
Characteristic Two: Those who survive a tragedy understand the magnitude of that which they have lost
You need to acknowledge the enormity of that which has happened
Affirming what one has lost is an important part of the healing process
"One of the most important steps in recovering from any tragedy...is to understand that something profound has been taken from us."
"Unfortunately few who have lost something of value are able to move from sadness to happiness in a straight line. For most there are many detours, dead ends, and wrong turns. You have good days, not-so-good days, and just plain awful days."
"Human pain does not let go of its grip at one point in time. Rather, it works its way out of our consciousness over time. There is a season of sadness. A season of anger. A season of tranquility. A season of hope. But seasons do not follow one another in a lockstep manner. The winters and springs of one's life are all jumbled together in a puzzling array. One day we feel as if the dark clouds have lifted, but the next day they have returned. One moment we can smile, but a few hours later the tears emerge."
Characteristic Three: Those who survive a tragedy have learned to transcend their guilt
situational crises-guilt is usually riveted on a belief that we could have done something to prevent the crisis from happening
Behind guilt exists a stream of "if" statements
"When one door closes, another opens, but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not seethe one that has opened for us." -Alexander Graham Bell
Characteristic Four: If you want to survive a crisis, you need a reason to live
"If you live your life in the past, you will be overwhelmed with guilt. You will not only regret what has happened but will probably convince yourself that it is impossible to recover."
"Within the essence of our being there is,...,a real possibility that life can change for the better."
Section Two: Survival Strategies
"If your crisis is the death of a loved one, remind yourself of all the good times you had together. But remind yourself that your loved one would want the best for you and that would mean moving on with your life."
(The chapters in between covered professional help and family issues)
Chapter Nine: Affirming A Faith
-examine the meaning of faith
"All of us are spiritual beings. To be spiritual implies a belief in a power greater than ourselves. It means that life is sacred and has been given to us as a gift."
"If there is one redeeming legacy of a heartbreak, it is that we are given an opportunity to discover 'what is transcendent, what is life's meaning.'"
Faith has a powerful effect in helping people recover a sense of balance, tranquility and hope.
becoming a friend to the questions
"Far better, as Rainer Maria Rilke noted, to value the questions: 'I want to beg you as much as I can...to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves...Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer...take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and heed nothing.'"
One must act in this way even when life seems to contradict this. (that life has a purpose)
"I think that without God I probably would have a had a mental breakdown. For a long time I held my emotions in so tight that I wouldn't let myself feel anything so that I wouldn't get hurt again by loving someone that I might lose. And so I held back my love. But one day I was finally able to cry for my loss. I told God how angry I was. I questioned how He could have taken my son when I thought I had been a 'good' Christian. And you know, as I was venting my hostility toward God a strange thing happened. Somehow I just believed that God wouldn't get angry with me. I believed that God knew who I was and why I was so angry and accepted me for who I am. that belief-that I could be myself-was healing. And someday I just know that I will again see my child. (Mother of a twelve-year-old son who died of cancer.)"
If we hadn't laughed, we would have died.
Faith offered three gifts:
(1) Letting go of fear-moves us into a new dimension
"Pierre Teilhard de Chardin knew the truth inherent in this young man's experience (God found Him when He stopped looking for Him): 'Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love and then for the second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire.'"
(2) Rediscovery of enduring values-values we would not give up for anything in the world
Idea of approaching life with an empty cup
(3) Permits us to accept the outcomes of life's predicaments
"'It's simple,' she replied. 'I have learned to accept the outcome--whatever it may be.'"
"The teachings of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson are instructive. Erikson suggests that one of the determinants of happiness is whether or not we will trust life. "
"It is true that the Holocaust severely tested the faith of the Jewish people. But for the majority of the Jews the Holocaust did not destroy their faith. As Howard Burkle, author of God, Suffering and Belief, says, 'They continued to believe in God whether or not they could find good reasons for doing so.'"
"Saint Paul, who had a serious and some believe a life-threatening ailment, summarized many people's belief: 'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?...For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God.'"
"Others do not frame their affirmations in theological terms, yet their beliefs are equally powerful in dissipating the effect of life's misfortunes. A father who had lost a teenage son to cancer said: 'The turning point for me was the realization that it was better that Jeff lived seventeen good years than not to have lived at all. I started to reaffirm all the great times we had together. I stopped feeling that I had been cheated.'"
When you affirm that you can again trust life your healing begins in earnest.
"They took the bad with the good in life. They asked no favors. And when they prayed it was simply for strength to meet the troublesome news and for grace to accept whatever a day may bring."
What does it mean to "trust life?"
-Living in the present. Taking one day at a time.
-Pushing aside doubts that you can never again be happy.
-Relying on friends. Asking them for comfort.
-Telling others how you feel: Lonely. Fearful. Hopeful.
-Affirming that you are good. Your intentions are good. Your past has been good. Your future will be
good.
-Meditating. Asking for strength.
"One day Mickie Sherman had lunch with a professional acquaintance. He asked whether she was reacting excessively to the death of her daughter. Said Mickie: 'I acknowledged with, 'Perhaps.' He asked, 'Did she die with her spirit intact?' 'Yes,' I affirmed, 'Yes.' And then he put to me another question, his last: 'What more can we really ask of life?'"
(Chapter Ten was about suicide)
Chapter Eleven: Ordinary Heroes
"Perhaps the redemptive legacy of a tragedy is that in time we can again hope."
"When I use the word hope, I am referring to a clear understanding that life is at best a risk--an uncharted voyage in which we know little about jutting shorelines and drifting debris. But it is a voyage we want to take.
And so we purchase the ticket and set our sails into strange new worlds. And when the ill winds blow, we may wonder why we left the safety of the harbor. But even then we cannot resist looking into the teeth of the storm. Nor can we resist summoning the courage to protect all that is of value."
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