Paul Coleman - Finding Peace When Your Heart Is In Pieces: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Other Side of Grief, Loss, and Pain

Avon, Massachusetts

For Claire

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.

HELEN KELLER

The early January blizzard had blasted us through the night. The next morning the sidewalks lay buried under nearly two feet of snow. As the below-zero wind-chill stung us, my mother and siblings followed single file in a solemn procession through the cemetery to lay my beloved Dad to rest. The nearby headstones barely peeked out above the windblown drifts. The priest shivered uncontrollably. The wind moaned like a cello. In a flash it was over. We then trudged our way back to our cars, my mom dazed and forlorn, back to a family home that never felt quite the same after Dad died.

Nighttime approached, the streetlights blinked on, and I stepped outside to shovel. The air was still, the neighborhood serene. A lone string of starstwinkling like a leftover strand of Christmas tree lightshovered high above us and eons away in the otherwise pitch-black sky. The cold air took my breath away. Road crews had pushed a four-foot-high mountain of heavy packed snow in front of our driveway, so I now began the exhausting task of reducing the mountain to a molehill. My brother soon showed up to help. An hour later, with a second wind, we walked up the nearby hill and began shoveling our neighbors driveway.

At first I assumed we were simply being neighborly. But soon I realized our deeper motivation: we needed to work the shovel to symbolically bury our Dad. It seemed the right and honorable thing to do, to wield our shovels, strain our backs, and exhaust our bodies. Just as the pain of childbirth is the price paid to bring life into this worldpain born of lovewe suffer pain as we send loved ones off from this world into the next. In between birth and death are the roads we travel on this sometimes painful, sometimes glorious, but always remarkable journey we call life.

Enduring a painful loss is one of the most difficult challenges we all face in life. At its core, a loss creates a void, a hole in your life that must be faced. Losses come in all shapes and sizesthe death of a loved one, a permanent injury, a debilitating illness, a relationship breakup, unemployment. As you begin to live your life with this void, you likely experience myriad feelings, among them sadness, anger, hopelessness, and fear. The overwhelming pain of a loss disrupts your everyday life and can even make you question your place on earth. This pain can seem endless, and you might feel that youll never know inner peace again. But no matter what happens in your outer world, inner peace is possible. When a significant event turns your world upside down, you will embark on a transformational journey. This journey is unavoidable and part of the human condition. In your life you will meet with triumphs but also, undoubtedly, with great trials after which you will never be quite the same. And the journey never ends, not really, for you must always evolve. You will learn much about yourselfcome face to face with your strengths, your weaknesses, and facets of yourself you barely knew existed. You will arrive at pathways along the roadchoicepointsthat will lead you to either inner peace or pain. Which paths will you choose? How fully will your life evolve? My hope is that, when faced with lifes inevitable losses, burdens, injustices, and mysteries, you will accept with courage what cant be changed as you accept with determination and grit what must be changed. My hope is that you will embrace all of what life has to offerthe good and the badin such a way that the losses in life dont break your spirit, your trust, your faithor your heart.

You will discover the deeper peace that can be found along your journeyno matter how much you doubt such peace is possible. There are many useful books that help you to cope with or learn to live with loss. This book is different. It reveals how fear keeps your pain alive and that a special bridge exists that, when crossed over, allows you to experience inner peace even when your loss is profound. You will encounter that bridge along your personal journey. It is one of the Four Paths of Transformation that will enlighten, inspire, and guide you along your journey. But those paths have their counterparts that, if traveled, will leave you stranded with fear. Which pathways you choose will determine whether or not you find inner peace. This book aims to raise your level of awareness as to who you really are and what your life is really all about. As such, it will speak of things you need to hear when the things you want to hear arent always forthcoming. I hope it will help you to experience these deeper truths: that a peaceful heart is possible even with profound loss; that your life still has purpose and meaning; and goodbyes are not forever.

Is it true that everything happens for a reason? It can be comforting for some to believe that a greater purpose exists for why a loss had to be endured. But for others, no underlying purpose could ever justify such a profound loss. If you connect all the dots in your life, you may discover that certain early experiences foreshadowed both the challenges you now face and how you will respond to them. And years from now when you look back upon your hardships, you may view them from a wiser perspective, seeing the sweet as well as the bitter. It is often only in retrospect, if ever, that we understand the significance of some events and why they unfolded the way they did. As you embark on your journey, you will not be able to see how and where it will all end or what the underlying purposes might be, what we might call the mysteries of life. There will always be a bend in the road you cannot see past. Always. But dont make hasty judgments. What looks like a dead end may instead be a place of hope and healing. Things are not always as they appear.

You are not alone. We will take this journey together. We will walk step by step and this book will light the way. Come take the first step with me.

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

MARTIN BUBER

As Tuesday morning dawned, Jenny woke early, pulled on her favorite shorts and the new T-shirt she had bought the day before, and laced up her running shoes to take a brisk walk. Later she would take the train north to Dutchess County to resume her nursing classes. Smiling, she thought to herself that she had never seen the sky so clear or so blue. But when she strolled by the World Trade Center, she heard a noise very different from the usual city soundsa deafening roar. Looking up, she saw that a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Centers Twin Towers. She and other stunned onlookers watched as debris began falling, seriously injuring many below. Jennys instincts took over. Without thinking of her own safety, the second-year nursing student immediately ran to help. She volunteered to assist the professional medics who quickly arrived at the scene, offering encouragement, kind words, and simple first-aid to the wounded while relaying information to the medics.