Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief by Martha Whitmore Hickman

I found this book while on tour in Spokane, Washington.
Martha's daughter died suddenly at 16 after falling from a horse while on a family vacation in Colorado.

Here is the entry for January 22~

It is over shaky ground--this journey between the relationship we had when the person was alive and the relationship we come to have with the dead. We don't know what to expect, don't even know what we're looking for. Are we fooling ourselves, conjuring up the possibility that we can have a relationship with someone who's died?
 Perhaps it is a little like a first-time parent who, anxious that something may go wrong, has to keep going back and checking on the baby. Is the baby all right? Still breathing? Still peacefully sleeping?
 After a while the parent becomes more confident. The baby really is there, and safe, but as with other miracles, this miracle of birth takes getting used to. Perhaps in like manner comes the slowly dawning confidence that in the mystery of living, it is possible to have an ongoing relationship with the dead.

I will open my heart in trust that, in ways I do not now understand, my loved one will continue to be present in my life.


by Martha Whitmore Hickman