A New Year

A New Year.

Another year without those we love beside us.

How can this be? How is it that time has the audacity to move on in spite of our sorrow?

No new memories created. Frozen in time. They live in our hearts, and in our minds, forever the same. Our memories a placeholder. Those last moments, days, months, years relived, recycled, so that we remain connected to what was as we venture forward one moment, one step, one day at a time. Trying to wrap our minds around the insufferable truth that what was can never be again, all while doing the unimaginable, living. Pain. Anguish. Heartache. Indescribable heaviness.

And yet, we are here.

We are here.

We are here to find ways to live meaningfully. With all of our love, our memories, our wishes, and even our unanswered prayers still miraculously beating within our broken hearts, we live. Every heartbeat. Every breath. We live for them. For ourselves. For our memories. For what remains. For what is yet to be.

We are here to be their light. To shine on their behalf, in their memory and in their honor. We are here to tell their story. To speak their name. To emulate the qualities we loved most. We are here to love, to laugh, to remember well. To carry on.

We are here to live. May 2020 be a year of healing, of remembering, of living life consciously forward. With strength, courage and love in our hearts may we find our way through the darkness of grief and into the light of living intentionally.

About the Author

I graduated from the SSA Master of Arts program at the University of Chicago and have been working as part of a private practice for over a decade. My areas of focus include working with individuals and families on grief, loss, bereavement, and difficult life transitions resulting from illness, marital conflict, divorce, and other complicated, fractured relationships. My focus as a cognitive behavioral therapist is to empower individuals to take meaningful and purposeful action to create desired change in their lives. I teach clients about the power of choice, wise minded thinking, and productive communication strategies as stepping stones to healing and transformation.

https://transformativegrief.com/