Stories of the Grieving Process After a Child Dies - “Road Construction Next ___ Kilometers”
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“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©
From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storytellerr
You’ve probably seen this sort of example a thousand times before in your life and never had cause to think twice about it on any of those occasions.
Returning home one day from a visit to a nearby community I passed through a section of road being rebuilt and widened. The signs in advance of this area from either direction warn you of it saying “Road Construction Next ___ Kilometers”, with the empty blank of the number of kilometers to be traveled filled in by hand with a black felt marker pen.
It struck me how well these signs equate to the individual journey of grief itself.
In a way of speaking it could be said that everyone experiencing the grief of a loved one’s loss is suddenly thrown into a “construction zone” on their personal road of life – with everything about their formerly clear life highway ripped up, torn to pieces and seriously in need of reconstruction before the way ahead can ever again resemble smooth.
Suddenly you’re faced with ‘putting up the signs’ for this personal reconstruction zone of your life, and attempting to figure out what number to write in the blank space for the distance to be traveled through it. It seems at first to be an impossible task to comprehend a number to write down there – would one million miles be enough to start, you wonder? It certainly seems it’ll take that long is what your battered feelings tell you.
While seeming an impossible choice initially, the simple truth of this example is that the number you write down will change dramatically over time based upon your previous experiences of coping with crisis, and your own need and desire to understand and come to terms with the reality of its effects upon your life.
It’s for certain that the new road constructed will forever serve as a reminder of the loss, grief and bereavement you endured, and of the distance traveled to experience the healing of its journey.
Know that a day will come when you’ll gladly greet the sign which says “Construction Ends – Resume Speed”.
It’s a sign that speaks of your genuine healing.
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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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