Holidays and Healing: “Unable are the Loved to die…”
“Unable are the Loved to die, for Love is Immortality…” ~~ Emily Dickinson
When you write a Christmas book about loss and grief and recovery…and love, you’re walking a tricky path full of obsticals and blind paths and possible pitfalls you can’t see coming.
It’s kind of like navigating the holidays while you’re missing loved ones or dealing with the emptiness that’s left behind when someone who should still be here is gone from your life for good. Except that the holidays are all about hope and healing and believing in a better tomorrow, regardless of what’s troubling you today, so I guess that’s why I tackled such deep and personal subject matter and characters in my first ever holiday story.
It’s too easy to focus on only the loss of someone.
It’s too easy to ignore it entirely.
What’s harder is remembering and loving and wanting them here still, once they’re gone, and believing that what’s best about them is still with us.
It can be nearly impossible this time of year to feel hopeful that a lost love’s future in our lives is still possible. But it is. And if we give ourselves a chance to believe that, what a bright and ever-expanding future that can become.
The loved ones we’ve lost, no matter how painful their passing, are immortal. They’re forever part of who they’re helping us to become.
We honor them by remembering and hoping during the holidays and beyond, even when some memories may at first be too painful to process. If we keep lost loved ones with us, if we keep them close, they will continue to change us into who we were destined to become the moment they entered our lives.
We honor ourselves by seeing abundance and the chance to do better and more and to do more for others, the same as lost loves have done for us.
Honor and love and remember this holiday season, the same as my characters do in my emotional and sometimes sad but deeply hopeful stories.
Embrace the immortality of healing, I believe Emily Dickinson is saying in this quote and in all the snippets of poetry I borrowed for Christmas on Mimosa Lane.
A timeless message, just in time for this holiday.
Related Emily Dickinson Articles:
Forever is composed of nows
To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need
It’s good we are dreaming
Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door
Hope is the thing with feathers…
Related holiday posts:
If this were your last Christmas, what would it be?
Past, Futre and Present Christmas
Holiday Hangover
Holiday Memories
Hope for the Holidays
The BEST Holiday Memories are Made From the Darnedest Things
Holiday Traditions, Symbols and Themes
