Healing Hearts

My friend and coworker is learning first hand what it’s like to help heal a heart. Death, I’m afraid, touches us all at one point or another and how we deal with grief is unique to each of us. Psychologists like to classify grief in a group of stages.

SHOCK & DENIAL
PAIN & GUILT
ANGER & BARGAINING
DEPRESSION, REFLECTION, LONELINESS
THE UPWARD TURN
RECONSTRUCTION & WORKING THROUGH
ACCEPTANCE & HOPE

Many of us have heard of these stages, but if you haven’t been through it yourself, you can’t begin to imagine how difficult it can be.

I lost my mother-in-law a few years back to a rather unusual accident.

During the September 2004 flood in my town, we lived in a war zone of destruction. Neighbors’ roofs were lying in yard three houses away. The fence that once surrounded my home was swept away by the raging waters. This left the six-foot drop-off into the creek accessible to anyone not paying attention to where you were walking.

We, Kevin and I, received a phone call that horrific morning at 3:00 am. My nephew had driven by the house and noticed Mary Catherine’s car parked in the street, still running, lights still on and the door locked. He tried getting into her house but the doors to the house were locked. That’s when we got the call. Kevin called his brothers and they all met at the house looking for their mother. Luckily, or unluckily they found her. She had walked off the six-foot drop off at the rear of the house. She was conscience for the short term but dropped into a coma when she was taken to the hospital only waking up shortly stating she was ready to see her mother before passing away.

I can’t even begin to imagine the grief that rocked this family -- my daughter was completely knocked off her axis by the trauma. I loved Mary, but I wasn’t attached to her like my husband and daughter were. This was my first time, as an adult, dealing with grief on this scale. I was besides myself trying to help a five year old little girl come to terms with her grandmother dying. We made it through. It has taken 5 years for her to come to terms with that loss.

While I worked through this trying time with my daughter I tried to remember what it was like loosing my grandmother. I was close to the same age as my own daughter, but I didn’t have the kind of relationship with my grandmother that she had with hers. Mary was like her second mother -- I only saw my grandmother occasionally. Mary spent every second of her day with my daughter -- it was something she loved. Man she loved her grandchildren. My grandmother was suffering with cancer (something I wasn’t aware of at the time). I loved my grandmother, but I didn’t depend on her for a portion of my everyday happiness. My daughter was tightly bonded to her grandmother -- those two were like Frick and Frack -- one wasn’t far away from the other.

This one episode in my life showed me how little I had entrusted my happiness to someone else. While I watched, helpless to do anything about it, my daughter suffered because she was so amazingly close to someone else.

Her heart is healed now and she will go on to bond her happiness with others in her life. This is a good thing. Time does heal wounds -- just remember the stronger the bond the deeper the wound and the longer it takes to heal.