Aseret's Journal

"When we are drawn into the brotherhood or sisterhood of loss,
tenderness seems to be our natural state. We are so vulnerable.
Everything brushes against the raw wound of our grief, reminding us
of what we have lost, triggering memories - a tilt of the head, a
laugh, a way of walking, a touch, a particular conversation. These
images are like beads strung together on the necklace of loss.
Tenderly, we turn them again and again. We cannot bear them. We
cannot let them go.

Then, gradually, bit by bit, the binding thread of grief somehow
transmutes, reconstitutes itself as a thread of treasured memories -
a tilt of the head, a laugh, a way of walking, a touch, a particular
conversation as gifts from the life we shared with the one we have
lost, gifts that can never be taken away."
(Martha Whitmore Hickman)