Integration (Mending the Heart)

The third cycle of grief is where the good news of your healing journey finally begins to outweigh the bad news and feelings of your experience of loss, grief and bereavement prior to this point, during that eternity of time when it felt like it’d take forever for you to arrive here.

Here are the marker stones of this final cycle of grief, ‘Integration (Mending the Heart):

• The decline of your grief

• The waves of their intensity getting farther apart

• The start of social and emotional reentry into your life

Your grief hasn’t gone away, but its edges have begun to soften with the knowledge that it’s become a part of your past experience in life. You’ll still have times of intensely missing your loved one, usually associated with those anniversary dates of death and memory centered on important events of the life you had shared with them.

It’s even likely you’ll feel the odd touch of guilt about the fact that you’re moving forward in your life despite the hellish experience you’ve just endured - but this too will pass as your understanding and healing advances.

This is a good time to sit back and review the marker stones of your loss, grief and bereavement along the huge distance you’ve traveled in your healing journey. It’s in the looking back at this point that you’ll clearly see and appreciate how important it was to understand the marker stones of your journey as you struggled your way along it.

Now is when you’ll begin to find that you’re having a lot more good days than bad ones, and are able to look back and remember things about the one you’ve lost with a sense of comfort in your heart. At this point, finding meaningful ways to include and make your lost loved one an important part of your new life is a vitally important thing for you to do. You’ll want to be able to talk about them naturally and comfortably now, in ways that show you remember and honor them for who they were to you.

Making significantly new and important choices designed to enhance your quality of life is another important aspect of this time of reevaluation and reintegration into your newly healing life. It’s also a time to acknowledge the personal growth that’s evolved inside you as a result of having survived – and continuing to survive – the loss you’ve suffered.

At this third and final step of the grief cycles which have led you on your healing journey, the most important and valuable accomplishment you can and should achieve is to reinvest your new energy of life back into those relationships and pursuits of life that have value and meaning to you.

This site, these posts, and the book available on my website are examples of such a reintegration into life after the loss of my daughter, and of the marker stones of the healing journey I traveled to arrive here.

I’m grateful I came to understand their significance – as you will be too on your own journey to find healing from loss, grief and bereavement.

With Love and Understanding

Ken Matthies

HeartSpun Posts from the Crucible of Experience