Let it be the Light You Give

You guessed it, I am still finishing our 5 Stages of Grief Journal. I have less than ten pages left in the entire book. I read these words and they made me realize time is a gift…

Grief is the agony of an instant, indulgence in grief is the blunder of a life.

-Benjamin Disraeli 1881

Anyone who has suffered a loss or major life change knows that grief takes time. It is a horrible experience and yet all of us will experience it at one time or another in our lives. This quote reminds us that there is nothing wrong in grieving, until it becomes the blunder that consumes our life. There is a time when our own grieving subsides, becomes less, and even fades into the background. It may never be fully gone, just not so prominent. We will then use our own experience with grief to help someone else…

And then I got that text message, the one letting me know a dear friend’s father had a stroke and was moving into hospice. I knew, I knew exactly how she and her family were feeling. I started praying and returned to this journal to find words to help her through what we are moving past. The uncertainty, yet the certainty. The roller coaster ride, the sadness, the perplexities of life and bringing a life to an end. All that comes with such a drastic change and only being able to sit there and hold that cherished person’s hand while life fades away.

My lesson, we do not always know why we do what we do. Sure it may have started for our own benefit. Maybe it was our way of dealing with whatever “that thing” was that overtook our life for a while. And we lived out those days, are on the other side and now it is our turn to help someone else get from beginning to end. We do not know when we are experiencing things in our life how they will come to comfort and heal someone in the future.

Let your lesson be that whatever it is you are going through right now, once you are on the other side, give back. Let your experience and lessons learned help someone else navigate in their own life that same experience. Mentor, coach, be a friend, lend a listening ear, give a hug, walk with them and let them know they will get through it. Someone did that for you, now it is time to pay it forward. It may be tough, living through it, instead of making it a blunder you stumble over let it be a the light you then give to someone else in the future.