Grieving Advice Tips - “Let Your Little Light Shine”
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“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©
From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storyteller
“This little light of mine…I’m gonna let it shine…” So go the words of a Sunday school song of ancient memory as I sit down to write this story – and in them I’m finding a source of solace and strength as I continue walking my healing path more than five years after a daughter’s loss.
It seems to take forever for light to show up again in your life after the death of a child – or after the death of anyone else in your life that you loved with all your heart. The loss is just so huge and the darkness of death so complete at the time that the concept of light becomes an alien subject for your mind to comprehend.
Yet the truth is that the light of your existence remains, forever shining bright beyond the darkness of your grief and eventually revealing itself to you again as you begin the journey of healing that allows you to once again see and value its brilliance – and its vital importance to the completeness of healing that awaits your open and aching heart.
As I’ve referred to in other stories written on the subject of grief, the light comes back into the reality of your life as you allow the sweetness of loving memories of your lost one to penetrate the pain which has blocked it. And as you do so – as you open your heart wider and wider to the beauty of memories which still live within you – the light grows in intensity and warmth to comfort your soul and ease the pain.
Somewhere within its growing brilliance you will discover another dimension of light; that which is referred to in this Sunday school song of old – the spiritual light of your personal spirit which carries its own healing powers – still inextricably linked to the spirit of the one you lost, but now suffused with a depth of acceptance of your loss and reconnection to your loved one’s spirit that you completely lacked before.
It’s as you “let your little light (of the spirit) shine” – reaching for those loving memories and that spiritual awareness of the healing light within your own spirit – that your grief becomes transformed, your understanding changes, and your healing progresses and grows in strength more each day for the rest of your life.
The light is within you.
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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.
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