Stories of the Grieving Process After a Child Dies - “Out of the Mouths of Babes”
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“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©
From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storyteller
My granddaughter turned ten years old the other day, and it was as I was calling her to wish her happy birthday that I realized she was already twice as old as the day her mother died. On my granddaughter’s scale of years she has lived another whole lifetime over the past five years.
Anyone who has experienced the pain of a loved one’s loss can identify with the concept of a whole lifetime having passed since that death occurred. It’s for certain that my granddaughter can.
There’s no question the bite of her loss still grips her in talking about her momma as evidenced by the little catch in her voice as she speaks about her. Yet it’s the loving clarity of heart, mind and memory with which this little girl talks about it that gives pause to my own years of hurt since her mother’s loss.
I discovered in this birthday call that the vision and memories of her momma still live and burn just as brightly in her heart as they did that entire lifetime ago for her.
Despite an ete
al pain of loss that still lives within me, I find a wonderfully healing and comforted feeling in my own heart because of these still living visions of a child, and believe there’s a profoundly simple yet powerful lesson about grief to be found in it.
I’ve come to realize that it’s this goodness of vision and memory about our lost loved ones, which we take out and carry with us from our own seemingly endless lifetime of loss, that holds a key to the future of our ultimate healing.
Sometimes it’s the little things – as exemplified in this instance by the words of a ten year old girl – which bring us to new points of gratitude in understanding that it’s this goodness of vision and memories that binds up the wounds of our grief – and gives us hope for the lifetime yet to be lived.
Words spoken out of the mouths of babes can help us find healing from loss, grief and bereavement too.
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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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