Coping Mechanisms

When someone we know dies, especially someone who’s too young, someone for whom there was so much more time implicitly PROMISED, it’s especially hard to reconcile in OUR minds, the survivors, the ones left to remember and carry on somehow.

In order to help keep us going, we need help. Crutches, like for helping to walk with a broken leg. Coping mechanisms, strategies, homilies, words of wisdom to help ease the pain and lead us to the understanding and peace we crave.

There are so many, spoken by so many wise women and men who have lived through loss. I love what Oprah says: “When you lose a loved one, you gain an angel whose name you know.”

And here’s one I absolutely love and that has deeply spoken to my soul, by Henry Van Dyke, called A Parable of Immortality:

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.
She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch until at last she hangs
like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says,
” There she goes! ”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight . . . that is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of destination.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment
when someone at my side says,
” There she goes! ”
there are other eyes watching her coming . . .
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout . . .

” Here she comes! ”

An original post by Sarah Auerswald.