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Quote by Mary Potter Kenyon

“Can you remember another time when your chest felt like this?” My fingers splayed across my aching chest as I carefully pondered her question. Then I nodded vigorously as I remembered. Tears streamed down my cheeks unchecked as I whispered hoarsely, “Yes, I do remember.After my husband died, it hurt like this. My chest felt full and heavy, and I thought then, Oh, this is what it feels like to have your heart break.”

Quote by Mary Potter Kenyon

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Refined by Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace

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Mary Potter Kenyon

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“We would also have to say goodbye to the joy of watching this next generation soak up the massive quantities of love their grandmother would have given them, and seeing them learn that there was someone in the world who loved them as much as their parents did: a grandmother who was delighted by all their quirks and who thought they were the most amazing creatures on earth. It was an idealized view of the future-but it was the one I carried in my head, and I don't think it was far off from the one my brother and sister and father and mother had. I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.”

“Golden bars make no less a prison than a coffin on a hill. And in caged reformation, one wanders aimless still. The rafters now a recollection of sacred suppression. How the morning dawn strikes mourning confession. Now Death yields a harvest of the living masses. We walk toward its path no earthly power surpasses.”

“In the kitchen, her family nibbled Helen’s lemon squares. Melanie urged brownies on the nurses. “Take these,” she told Lorraine. “We can’t eat them all, but Helen won’t stop baking.” “Sweetheart,” Lorraine said, “everybody mourns in her own way.” Helen mourned her sister deeply. She arrived each day with shopping bags. Her cake was tender with sliced apples, but her almond cookies crumbled at the touch. Her pecan bars were awful, sticky-sweet and hard enough to break your teeth. They remained untouched in the dining room, because Helen never threw good food away.”

“Don’t you believe that Jacob can be healed?” some persisted, pressuring Elizabeth to believe—just believe—and Jacob would be healed. The underlying message was that Elizabeth’s faith was not strong enough to save her son. I remembered then the same kind of statements David and I had heard when he was undergoing cancer treatment, when several well-intentioned people informed David that all he had to do to rid his body of cancer was to believe he was healed. I’d resented the implications then, and I resented them for my daughter now. People die. Good people like David die too young, and innocent little children die, and the strongest faith in the world cannot keep anyone on this earth forever. If only the same Christians professing their faith in healing could clearly see the flip side of that faith, that earth was not where we ultimately belonged. If Jacob died, he would be going Home.”

“I accepted all this counsel politely, with a glassy smile and a glaring sense of unreality. Many adults seemed to interpret this numbness as a positive sign; I remember particularly Mr. Beeman (an overly clipped Brit in a dumb tweed motoring cap, whom despite his solicitude I had come to hate, irrationally, as an agent of my mother’s death) complimenting me on my maturity and informing me that I seemed to be “coping awfully well.” And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”

“I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginning what couldn't happen. What couldn't happen didn't. The enterprise is abandoned. But half our life is dreams, delirium, everything that underlies that feeds that keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi- sanity, we allow others to see. The half of me that feeds the rest is in mourning. Mourns. Each time we must mourn, we fear this is the final mourning, this time mourning never will lift.”