I finally completed responding to the many emails, letters and messages that I had received giving me support in my time of grief. Today, I finally got to the comments on my blog and responded to all of them too. One of them from Conrad, has prompted this post.
I quote Conrad – “I think that you are exactly right that you just have to go through the experience. I have a high school classmate who just lost his wife this past week. I am told by another classmate who has gone through this that the words people send from the outside are neither solutions nor even meaningful as words so much as they are indications you are there for the person.
Hopefully, that is what we are doing for you as you travel a journey that is totally personal.” Thank you Conrad.
Two quotes to round up the subject and I shall get on with posting on more pressing matters that are waiting for expression.
“For a long time it seemed to me that real life was about to begin, but there was always some obstacle in the way. Something had to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.” ~ Bette Howland
“…..the opportunities to act properly, the potentialities to fulfill a meaning, are affected by the irreversibility of our lives. But also the potentialities alone are so affected. For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble field of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.
From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past – the potentialities that they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized – and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.”
Viktor E Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning.
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