The Healing Journey

June 22, 2023

“We always tell ourselves that the people we love will be around forever, until one day, they aren’t anymore.”
– Kirsten Robinson

After Greg’s mother died, life seemed to fall apart. Not his, but the entire family’s because she wasn’t there to hold everything together. There were no more Sunday afternoon dinners at her house, where the kids and grandkids gathered. They weren’t always peaceful, they were often raucous, but it was family, and families can be messy.

When the matriarch or the patriarch of a family passes away, a lot is lost. Traditions that held everybody together so long suddenly vanish overnight. Instead of gathering at “Mom and Dad’s” on Christmas Eve for the dinner of seven fishes, everyone goes their separate ways, and try as they might to keep it together, they can’t.

The divisions that existed between sisters and brothers get even worse and seem irreconcilable because there’s no mother or father to remind everyone, “Hey, we’re family, and family counts for a lot…so put your petty differences aside and put the greater good of everyone first.”

Psychologist Mary Pipher, author of “The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families,” had this to say: “I know how destructive families can be, how stifling and riddled with pain. But I also know that this is not the whole, or even the most interesting part of the story….We need our families, but we don’t always behave well in them. We love and hate them, yearn for them deep in our bones and feel so disgusted with them that we want to spit. Families are sad and happy, complicated and simple, and full of victories and failures. Families remind me of what folk musician Greg Brown wrote about life, that sometimes it seems as if we should be grateful for every breath and other times it’s a miracle that we don’t all drink ourselves to death.”

We need our families. The death of a loved one should show us how much we need our families. And the death of a loved one should remind us that no matter what the cost, we have to preserve our families.

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The loss of a loved one will leave a hole in our families that we should work together to heal.