Alice Taylor - And Time Stood Still

For those who brought love and joy to my life

and to you now walking the memory road.

N othing prepares us for the ferocity of grief. The death of those we love disturbs our deepest roots and catapults us bruised, broken and unprepared on to the path of grief. Time seems to stand still. Even the word death strikes a chill in the mind. Mostly we ignore it and avoid using it, like people walking backwards towards a cliff edge. But no matter what we call it, when a loved one goes over that edge we are whipped around and made to look death straight in the face. Then the hurting encompasses us like a shroud; pain takes hold and clings us to that black space.

Someone who was part of your world is gone and has taken a chunk of you with them. As well as taking your loved one, death has also taken part of you. A beloved limb has been amputated and you are left with a raw, bleeding wound. Grief is physical as well as mental. You cannot eat and you cannot sleep. Your energy has evaporated and your coping skills have shrunk. Small decisions have turned into major challenges and your threshold of tolerance had disintegrated.

You feel alone on this journey and nothing prepares you for its devastation. You walk around looking normal, but inside you are bleeding. The world has shrunk into a painful path and you seem to go round and round in circles. You are in a prison of desolation without walls.

The bewildering thing is that your loved one is still part of your everyday thinking and their presence is still all around you. Impossible as it seems, you are living in two worlds the before and the after. These two worlds are not welded together, so your thinking is split and the ground beneath your feet is a deep chasm.

Reason and grief have no relationship. Grief is raw emotion; reason does not come into it. When someone you love dies, deep dormant feelings escape out of a previously unquarried reservoir a roaring tide is let loose and it breaks down all barriers and sweeps on, creating mental chaos.

Waking up in the morning is the toughest part of the day. For one second before realisation dawns, the nightmare is not there. But then reality crashes in. There is no getting away from it: another day to get through!

You look around at people who have survived terrible trauma and wonder: How can they keep going? When I asked this of a friend, she replied sadly: Theres no choice. If people didnt recover from grief the world would come to a standstill. But in grief your world is at a standstill.

It is a time when prayer should help; but that may not be so. Your loved one has gone across the great divide where all your prayers have gone. Heaven is silent now and God may have become the God of no explanations.

In times of heartache I often turn to nature. In the dark of night when a fierce storm rages, the deep roots of a tree hold it in the earth, and similarly when we are battling through the storm of death and grief the human spirit can find within itself the power of amazing endurance. As we struggle on, tiny stepping-stones appear. They are created by kindness, nature and our own inner creative resources, and by a source above and beyond our human understanding.

Tears will help to soften the frozen lump of grief that has parked itself where your heart was and eventually a tiny bud of peace may tentatively begin to flower and fragile shoots of hope come and go. Time moves again, slowly at first. An Eastern sage said: Hope is like a road in the country where there wasnt ever a road but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.