The Biggest Factor to Heal Grief

What is the single biggest component of finding healing within grief, besides expressing it?

Embracing the new.

Inviting what’s next into our lives.

Believing we can love and laugh again.

Today is the first day of spring. I hadn’t noticed until I received a life-changing phone text this afternoon, and then I realized the irony.

A real estate agent sent me a text about my parents’ home:

“Just sent full price offer in.”

The house where both my parents died, the house I’ve spent eight years cleaning out, has been listed for sale only four days.

It’s a mobile home enclosed by conventional roof and walls, and it sits on a beautiful treed 13-acre lot. The floors sag. The ceiling sag. The cellar fills with water.

We’ve disclosed all this. We nearly sold it at Christmas at a rock-bottom price that I wasn’t completely satisfied with, and I asked God to stop the sale if it wasn’t fair. The investor never followed through, and then I prayed harder for a family to get it.

For the house to get a second life with a second family, to tell a second love story.

The real estate guy phoned.

“I’m quite attached to this house, as you can imagine,” I told him. “I just want to know, will a family be moving into it, or is your client an investor?”

“A family,” he said. “They plan on living there a long, long time.”

The family sent a beautiful message to us a few hours later. They’ve apparently fallen in love, as I did long ago. This place meant so much to my parents, and it has meant so much to my grief journey. At this house, I got to know myself, my parents and God better.

I haven’t wanted to embrace the new, at least as it concerns the house. I’ve said if I had a million dollars, I would keep the place, fix it up and hold onto the house forever. But as my grief evolved, as God brought new opportunities into my life, and as my husband nudged me, I began to stretch toward a new path. A new way of life.

As we stretch toward new directions, we build on hope. We find new reasons to live and to celebrate. We don’t forget or ignore the past. I’ll never let go of my parents, and I’ve found so many wonderful keepsakes and collected so many wonderful memories. We use memories to build a different life, a new beginning, a new us.

I don’t have to have a strangle hold on the past. Nor must I discard it as useless to my present. There’s a future ahead with room for all of it, the old and the new together in one wonderful place of healing. I’ll be forever healing, but today is another milestone. Today is spring.

What new thing is whispering your name? What’s ahead that you can anchor your plans to? 

 

Copyright © 2018 by Toni Lepeska. All rights reserved. www.tonilepeska.com