“This little light of mine…I’m gonna let it shine…” So go the words of a Sunday school song of ancient memory as I sit down to write today’s blog post – and in them I’m finding a source of solace and strength as I continue walking my healing path more than five years after a daughter’s loss.

It seems to take forever for light to show up again in your life after the death of a child – or after the death of anyone else in your life that you loved with all your heart. The loss is just so huge and the darkness of death so complete at the time that the concept of light becomes an alien subject for your mind to comprehend.

Yet the truth is that the light of your existence remains, forever shining bright beyond the darkness of your grief, and eventually revealing itself to you again as you begin the journey of healing that allows you to once again see and value its brilliance – and its vital importance to the completeness of healing that awaits your open and aching heart.

You’ve probably seen this sort of example a thousand times before in your life and never had cause to think twice about it on any of those occasions.

Returning home yesterday from a visit to a nearby community I passed through a section of road being rebuilt and widened. The signs in advance of this area from either direction warn you of it saying “Road Construction Next ___ Kilometers”, with the empty blank of the number of kilometers to be traveled filled in by hand with a black felt marker pen.

It struck me how well these signs equate to the individual journey of grief itself.

An excerpt taken from page 133 of my book entitled I Know You’re Hurting available for purchase at http://www.kenmatthies.com

“I think it’s probably about this time too (October - three months after her death) that I finally work up enough guts to start pulling the boxes of Leila’s personal effects that she’d left behind out of their storage places around the house and out in the shed. I carry them all into our office downstairs and stack them close to my desk.

I can’t even open them yet. It’s just too hard to think about what I’ll find inside that I know will rip me wide open and leave me bleeding all over the floor. They stay that way all winter. And for the next summer I’m gone too. I still can’t bear facing it, so all I do is look at them all the time.

An excerpt taken from page 137 of my book entitled I Know You’re Hurting available for purchase at http://www.kenmatthies.com

“Somewhere along the line after writing her obituary I eventually get to sliding into disbelief again that this is all real. That’s probably what starts me jumping off the deep end inside again too; and world once more spirals into a rotten kind of personal madness you can’t talk about with human sounding words just yet.

It’s no wonder relationships and families fracture and get scattered into billions of useless shards when something like this happens.

Here you are, living amongst the shattered pieces of your own endless puzzle palace, vainly looking for the pieces that will throw a temporary patch on the most extreme pain of the moment; and of course none of them fit or lock together, so the patch doesn’t work and that particular wound keeps oozing away more of the fluids of your life.

An excerpt taken from page 140 of my book entitled I Know You’re Hurting available for purchase at http://www.kenmatthies.com

“It seems on further examination that I’ve been living a double, or maybe it’s been a triple life during this past endless pain-scape of months.

In the first one of them – the deeply hidden, darkly private and personal one you never ever under any circumstances of life or death show anyone – I’m going through all the great stuff I’ve just described on the preceding pages! You know, rough twisty trails, cute snakes and leaking life fluids. Not the prettiest of pictures, or places.

In the second one, I’m a real regular guy by the name of Ken that everyone knows and loves (yeah, sure!), just plugging along in what appears to be a normal everyday life pattern, otherwise known as Living the Façade or Hiding Behind the Mask!

It seems I only began writing articles for this Keyboard Culture Blog on the topic of ‘Healing Stages of Grief’ a short while ago – and yet time has already flown a total of 30 of them into the cyberspace of your journey to find healing from loss, grief and bereavement.

I truly appreciate all of you who have been coming to this site to read them, and thank you for doing so. I understand how intensely private your personal journey to find healing is, yet it’s also important for me to know if the articles I’m posting are helping you to find your healing – so today I have a very simple request to make to all of you reading these posts.

What are you doing to keep the vision alive in your own heart and mind of the loved one you lost? Finding a way to do so is a vitally important part of dealing with your loss, grief and bereavement because it helps lead you deeper into your healing.

Whatever way you choose to help you do this, know that its constant presence around you will serve to keep that connection vital and glowing in your heart, and offer a healing reassurance to your wounded soul.

For example, sitting on the phone table behind me in my office is the portrait taken of my daughter and I shortly after she arrived back in my life at the age of 19. Even though she’s gone I feel as though she remains, always watching my back (there for me) and encouraging the writing I do in her memory.