Sharing the Grief Journey

Posted on March 27, 2017 by thebows99krug

Another insight into Patricia and why we were so well matched. Being an only child and being the middle child of seven results in our sharing a lot of characteristics. It is also why I’m having trouble coping with being alone. Pat and I actually cultivated being alone – going to gatherings was out of character for us. Pat was introverted and I was always a loner. We both were very satisfied with our own company and each other’s company. Don’t get Pat wrong, she loved her siblings but did not need to be in their company very much. She was content to know that her immediate family members were all within reach somewhere, linked to her by genetic threads. In fact she was not just introverted, in her own words, she was “ also reserved/private, and shy – three different things. The triple whammy. But I’m not a misanthrope, or not yet.”
Okay it is not helping me now that those closest to me are even smaller than was Pat’s circle. But unlike Pat, I don’t think it a sin to dislike gatherings and groups.
Pat wrote: “ …I suspect I am simply not that interested in real people (as opposed to fictional ones) although I have the greatest good will towards them. This is probably something close to a sin. I also see it in church, where Eric likes forming social connections, while I would rather just go there to worship.”
Again Pat knows me better than I know myself. She’s right I enjoy the people at Church but after the service not the chatting before the service nor the Peace during the service. Now I find comfort from those I have gotten to know at Holy Saviour Waterloo as well as from the BCP services.
It is probably a good thing Pat died before me. Though she was the stronger, she would have had a harder time with grief than I. Her fear of pain – believe me grief is PAIN – her hate of networking and her introversion would be a problem for her grief journey. She was just too private. Unfortunately for her the grief journey needs her to reach out to family and friends and to truly communicate with them.
I am so glad Pat shared her family with me and they welcomed me into the family. They are a big help now – especial Deanna who like me has lost a spouse. She is helping a lot with my grief journey. And Pat herself being near me, in my soul, communing with me and sharing the Peace that passes all understanding that comes from being in the arms of Christ are a big help. Pat I love you forever.

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Three more poems by Patricia Bow.

Posted on March 27, 2017 by thebows99krug

Pat kept notebooks in which she wrote writing ideas; story ideas, characters, poems, etc. When she had used one she carefully crossed out the notes she had used. In her 1978 – 1986, notes (some still unused) I found three more poems. Not sure of when they were written.

Untitled (Little prince, I can’t believe…) (1981?)

Little prince, I can’t believe
you came by chance,
genetic happenstance,
the first come – first served mating dance
of egg and sperm.

Your mind that reaches out and grips
your earth-deep, star-far imagining
could have belonged to nowhere else.
You could not have been different.
There is nothing accidental about you.

Untitled (There once was a man …) (1985?)

There once was a man
who said God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If He finds that this tree
continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.

Dear sir: your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
will continue to be.
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.

Untitled (These weathered walls…) (1986?)

These weathered walls,
silvery and porous as old bones,
still lie unburied.

Between the cracks
their dry voices cry
of being forsaken.

My fore-fathers left them to die
And so I stay,
and join the vigil,
listening for the sound
of iron-shod wheels.

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C. S. Lewis seems to speaking directly to me in Pat’s own words.

Posted on March 25, 2017 by thebows99krug

Wow this is remarkable! In “Quiet Love” I quote Pat’s thoughts on our marriage as “sort of communicating bubbles” and how she thought our type of marriage, two touching circles,  “is the best”. Reading C. S. Lewis “A Grief Observed” I discover this passage: “Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, super-cosmic, eternal somethings. Those somethings could be pictured as spheres or globes. Where the plane of Nature cuts through them – that is, in earthly life – they appear as two circles (circles are slices of spheres). Two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me ‘she goes on’. But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature.

I  want to assure Lewis, though I expect he already knows, that the one point where those two eternal spheres touch as earthly circles became one in marriage and continue to touch forever. That is why we still feels our spouses’s presence after she is gone. I want to shout out to him, NO all that is not gone; the former things have NOT passed away. Love is stronger than Death. It is not about ‘family reunions on the further shore’. Yes we know it couldn’t be like that.  We do see our loved ones again; this sure belief rests on two pillars of Christian belief. One is the blessed hope that we will see Jesus again (Titus 2:13). The other is the assurance that our present bodies will be raised from the dead, immortal (1 Cor. 15:12-57). Together, these pillars provide a basis for believing we will recognize our loved ones in heaven. After all, if we can recognize the Lord Jesus, possessing the perfectly restored and glorified bodies to do so, it follows that we will recognize other believers, including our loved ones.

Pat wrote:  “Eric had his own brainstorm recently, also concerned with freedom of the will. His view is that we are like ships on the ocean. We can’t control the external circumstances of our lives – the currents, the storms, the calms and winds. But we can make use of our sails and rudders to control the way we meet these circumstances, and we can plot our course as well as possible.”  C. S. Lewis uses the same metaphor of our lives being ships on a sea,. He describes marriage as one ship. “One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends. How can I assume a harbour?  A lee shore, more likely, a black night, a deafening gale, breakers ahead – and any lights shown from land probably being waved by wreckers. Such was H’s landfall. Such was my mother’s. I say their landfalls; not their arrivals.”

C. S. Lewis is the most influential apologist for the Anglican church of the twentieth century. It is very comforting to find Pat and I have used the same words and ideas as he. It shows we may just  be on the right track in our journey to God and us.

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Am I dying?

Posted on March 23, 2017 by thebows99krug

I woke up this morning thinking I am dying; odd as physically I feel fine. No aches and pains or lumps in the legs or migraines like Pat. While I am eagerly and impatiently waiting to see Pat again, I have no intention of joining her by my own hand. Look suicide is out of the question. There are absolutely no grounds for believing that death by that route would reunite me with her. Why should it? By suicide, I might be digging an eternally unbridgeable chasm between me and her. Disobedience is not the way to get nearer to the obedient. This thought, that I could lose her forever, brings absolute terror to my spirit. Besides there is no painless, absolutely sure, way to kill oneself. The prospect of trying, not succeeding and spending my last days an immobile invalid also terrorises me.
Part of this feeling that I am dying comes from Pat’s three predictions of our death before 2020 in her dairies for the years 2000, 2010 and 2014. She was absolutely accurate in predicting her own death even if the diagnosis on the anniversary of our first date came as a surprise and great shock. She never thought of her six siblings, she would be the first to die. She also thought the Smiths died from heart problems or strokes not cancer. Well the pancreatic cancer caused blood clots, which in turn cause the strokes which killed her.
The biggest cause of my premonition that I am dying comes from a pattern I see forming . Her diagnosis on the anniversary of our first date parallels the beginning of our earthly journey together; that diagnosis was the beginning of our heavenly journey united though I’m here on earth and she is in heaven. The palliative care period is like our intense dating up to when she went home for the Christmas holiday, only this time she went home to God. Then there is the loving moments of my feeling her kiss me the day after she died, like when she came back from Ottawa after New Year 1969. On my birthday in 1969, we were together; this year I felt her with me and discovered this on her computer: “Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.” ― Rabindranath Tagore Then around the anniversary of our engagement this year, February 14th, I felt “Something has changed! I am now aware of my wife, Patricia’s presence touching me. Started last night and grew stronger at Mass that morning. She was there with me, her presence and her spiritual strength comforting and supporting me. That is the thing:- in 1969 June 21, we were married and began our marriage. It these events are indeed paralleling 1968/69 doesn’t this mean I join Pat in heaven on June 21, 2017?
Wait there is more, Pat began Advent by being the fifth reader at Holy Saviour’s Advent Lessons and Carols service on the first Sunday of Advent. Pat died on the day after the Feast of the Epiphany (the 12th day of Christmas), so on the first day of Epiphany. I am expecting this Easter Sunday to be something really special. I expect some sort of revelation about our place in heaven and about joining Pat in heaven to spend all eternity with God. But if it doesn’t come I won’t be unhappy because it will come in time. I’ll die when it is my time to die.

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ACQUAINTED WITH GRIEF

Posted on March 20, 2017 by thebows99krug

There is a question that keeps coming up on all the Grief boards I read: “does my loved one in heaven feel grief and sorrow for her earthly losses?” There doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory answer; especially as Christ, in Isaiah 52:3, is described as: “A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” The question is important to me as well. It has been very comforting to me to believe I spared Pat the pain I felt and still feel occasionally, by not departing first (as if I had any choice).

Pat obviously felt the pain when she learned she was dying. She wrote on Wednesday November 16, 2016:

I hate the fact that I am making several loved people unhappy.

The other thing I hate is the prospect of pain. I am terrified. I am a complete coward when it comes to pain.

I am told things can be done to control pain, but I’m not sure I believe it.

So much I will lose. The beauty of the Earth; of the skies, of colours. I see it all turning and turning to darkness.

So much loss, such pain.

Please God, please, please, please.

Did Pat carry this into heaven?

When did this feeling of loss, pain and sorrow go away for both Christ and Pat; was it immediately upon leaving the earthly body or does it stay, since Pat being one with me feels what I am feeling and we believe Christ to understand pain and sorrow?

There are three places in the Bible where it is promised God will wipe away the tears. Isaiah 25:8 (KJV) “He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken it.”; Revelation 7:17 (KJV) “For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” and Revelation 21:4 (KJV) “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

The question becomes when does this happen and for Pat does it wipe away only her own pain and not the pain she feels from being one with me? I don’t have an answer, but, I feel Pat is at PEACE now and we remain one! Both Christ and Pat are comforting me.

3 Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; 4 Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. 5 For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ. 2 Corinthians 1:3-5 (KJV)

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This One Holy Trinity is our true and eternal home.
Posted on March 15, 2017 by thebows99krug
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I have mentioned before that when I awake from a nap I can often see Pat typing messages to me on something that looks like Facebook. It usually goes by fast and I have trouble reading it. This time it was different. I was waking up at 3 pm – the number three is important. Pat was complementing me on Quiet Love … eyes to see and words to tell the truths that are most true. She typed that our marriage and love was like a community of three. At the centre of US was an eternal divine community of perfect love. The Bible says that God is love, but the only way God can be love is for God to be a community of divine persons. Love does not exist in a monad. God is that eternal community of love and so was our marriage. Each person of the Trinity is irreducibly and uniquely itself, distinct in three persons, and yet is perfectly united in being, love, and purpose. It is a true community of perfect love. It is like what I drew as the circles that took James in on page 93 of Quiet Love

In John’s gospel, before his death Jesus prays to his Father, “23 I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.” John 17:23 King James Version (KJV)

Jesus makes the astounding claim that the triune God’s ultimate purpose is to include us in this eternal trinitarian dance of love. The Father sends the Son to be one of us. By faith and baptism we are included in his relationship with the Father. By the gift of the Holy Spirit, we cry, “Abba, Father!” We are in the Son, and the Son is in the Father, and we come to share in this eternal community of love through the Holy Spirit.

St. Augustine, also confirms this: “Now when I, who am asking about this, love anything, there are three things present: I myself, what I love, and love itself. For I cannot love love unless I love a lover; for there is no love where nothing is loved. So there are three things: the lover, the loved and the love.”

Her waking me up to this truth is proof to me that we never separated and Pat and I are one soul. Pat is indeed in heaven preparing a place for us. We are well on our way to becoming GOD AND US.

thebows99krug's avatarEric C. Bow

There is a question that keeps coming up on all the Grief boards I read: “does my loved one in heaven feel grief and sorrow for her earthly losses?”  There doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory answer; especially as Christ, in Isaiah 52:3, is described as:  “A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”  The question is important to me as well. It has been very comforting to me to believe I spared Pat the pain I felt and still feel occasionally,  by not departing first (as if I had any choice).

Pat obviously felt the pain when she learned she was dying.  She wrote on Wednesday November 16, 2016:

I hate the fact that I am making several loved people unhappy.

The other thing I hate is the prospect of pain. I am terrified. I am a complete coward when it comes to pain.

I am told things can…

View original post 360 more words

Posted in Family, Grief, Religion, Religion - Anglican | Leave a comment

ACQUAINTED WITH GRIEF

Posted on March 20, 2017 by thebows99krug

There is a question that keeps coming up on all the Grief boards I read: “does my loved one in heaven feel grief and sorrow for her earthly losses?”  There doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory answer; especially as Christ, in Isaiah 52:3, is described as:  “A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”  The question is important to me as well. It has been very comforting to me to believe I spared Pat the pain I felt and still feel occasionally,  by not departing first (as if I had any choice).

Pat obviously felt the pain when she learned she was dying.  She wrote on Wednesday November 16, 2016:

I hate the fact that I am making several loved people unhappy.

The other thing I hate is the prospect of pain. I am terrified. I am a complete coward when it comes to pain.

I am told things can be done to control pain, but I’m not sure I believe it.

So much I will lose. The beauty of the Earth; of the skies, of colours. I see it all turning and turning to darkness.

So much loss, such pain.

Please God, please, please, please.

Did Pat carry this into heaven?

When did this feeling of loss, pain and sorrow go away for both Christ and Pat; was it immediately upon leaving the earthly body or does it stay,  since Pat being one with me feels what I am feeling and we believe Christ to understand pain and sorrow?

There are three places in the Bible where it is promised God will wipe away the tears. Isaiah 25:8 (KJV) “He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken it.”; Revelation 7:17 (KJV) “For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” and Revelation 21:4 (KJV) “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

The question becomes when does this happen and for Pat does it wipe away only her own pain and not the pain she feels from being one with me? I don’t have an answer, but, I feel Pat is at PEACE now and we remain one!  Both Christ and Pat are comforting me.

3 Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; 4 Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. 5 For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ.  2 Corinthians 1:3-5  (KJV)

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This One Holy Trinity is our true and eternal home.

Posted on March 15, 2017 by thebows99krug

I have mentioned before that when I awake from a nap I can often see Pat typing messages to me on something that looks like Facebook. It usually goes by fast and I have trouble reading it. This time it was different. I was waking up at 3 pm – the number three is important. Pat was complementing me on Quiet Love … eyes to see and words to tell the truths that are most true.  She typed that our marriage and love was like a community of three. At the centre of US was an eternal divine community of perfect love. The Bible says that God is love, but the only way God can be love is for God to be a community of divine persons. Love does not exist in a monad. God is that eternal community of love and so was our marriage. Each person of the Trinity is irreducibly and uniquely itself, distinct in three persons, and yet is  perfectly united in being, love, and purpose. It is a true community of perfect love. It is like what I drew as the circles that took James in on page 93 of Quiet Love

In John’s gospel, before his death Jesus prays to his Father, “23 I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.” John 17:23 King James Version (KJV)

Jesus makes the astounding claim that the triune God’s ultimate purpose is to include us in this eternal trinitarian dance of love. The Father sends the Son to be one of us. By faith and baptism we are included in his relationship with the Father. By the gift of the Holy Spirit, we cry, “Abba, Father!” We are in the Son, and the Son is in the Father, and we come to share in this eternal community of love through the Holy Spirit.

St. Augustine, also confirms this:  “Now when I, who am asking about this, love anything, there are three things present: I myself, what I love, and love itself. For I cannot love love unless I love a lover; for there is no love where nothing is loved. So there are three things: the lover, the loved and the love.”

Her waking me up to this truth is proof to me that we never separated and Pat and I are one soul. Pat is indeed in heaven preparing a place for us. We are well on our way to becoming GOD AND US.

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Know thyself and thou shalt know God.

Posted on March 13, 2017 by thebows99krug

“A precious point of conscious, blissful, light energy, the soul…
This is you
Imagine a tiny point located where thoughts come from.
That point thinks, remembers and decides.
This point is you.
The point where every emotion is born…
This is you.
A spiritual being interacting through the body…
This is you.”    —  Brahma Kumaris

This is the you that allows your loved ones to identify you after you die and begin your journey in Heaven. It is why the Apostles were able to recognize Jesus when he appeared to them in his resurrection  body. It is the home of your soul – it is your soul!

Marriage make two souls one; as Pat’s poem, “The world is Round,” says:

“…we two are one:

Our story will be endless,

like the journey of the sun.”

Our marriage – our one soul in two bodies –  grew ever stronger as our love got further into our earthly journey.  As Pat’s “12th Anniversary Poem” said we grew evermore intertwined…

“yet beneath the grass and stone

intertwined their roots have grown’

so intimately webbed together,

neither one can tell his own.

So with us: which flatly proves

futility of arguments

On which is which, and whose is whose.”

When we are told to “know thyself”  or “”gnothi seauton” we are being told to know and commune with our Soul. Plato equated gnothi seauton with wisdom itself. Pat certainly knew herself and me intimately. We are taught, and I believe, the body is God’s house; in knowing yourself you know God. For Pat, one journey is over and another has begun. She is with Christ in Heaven and with me here on earth. So I am touching Christ through her.

What does it mean to be truly in love? In a nutshell, our quiet, sharing love was a spiritual union of souls: two individuals united before God but still separate, different individuals.  It is still two individuals united as one but now Pat  is truly with God preparing a place for me in Heaven. Pat has a celestial body  in Heaven; I have not yet left my earthly body.  Already I can,  through a glass dimly, see what Pat is seeing in Heaven but only what she allows me to see. Love is giving each other the freedom to do their own thing and giving them time alone to know themselves. She is doing that now from heaven and I am trying not to call upon her for her comfort and peace, too much in my sorrow.

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I believe and pray for such dreams as this! God and Pat speak in dreams.

Posted on March 7, 2017 by thebows99krug

I’d like such a dream. Please God make it so.

thebows99krug's avatarEric C. Bow

From A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken chapter X “The Oxford-Vision Dream“

It was morning. I had come back to Oxford two years after Davy’s death and found digs, a ground-floor room with its own door opening onto a large garden with paths angling across it. I was just dressing to go out to an early lecture at the Schools. Morning sunlight was slanting in the windows. I heard a small sound and turned: it was Davy. I was fully aware that she was dead and, instantly and overwhelmingly, aware that something miraculous was happening. I was, I told myself, full awake.

“Davy!” I cried.

She smiled broadly. I felt a pure joy as I took a step towards her, but I also felt a little tentative, hesitant.

“It’s all right, dearling,” she said, and held out her arms. I went into them, and we hugged each other and…

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I believe and pray for such dreams as this! God and Pat speak in dreams.

Posted on March 7, 2017 by thebows99krug

From A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken chapter X “The Oxford-Vision Dream“

It was morning. I had come back to Oxford two years after Davy’s death and found digs, a ground-floor room with its own door opening onto a large garden with paths angling across it. I was just dressing to go out to an early lecture at the Schools. Morning sunlight was slanting in the windows. I heard a small sound and turned: it was Davy. I was fully aware that she was dead and, instantly and overwhelmingly, aware that something miraculous was happening. I was, I told myself, full awake.

“Davy!” I cried.

She smiled broadly. I felt a pure joy as I took a step towards her, but I also felt a little tentative, hesitant.

“It’s all right, dearling,” she said, and held out her arms. I went into them, and we hugged each other and kissed —  the kiss was heaven. But even in joy, I was conscious, with  a sort of amazement, that she was warm and solid. Weren’t ghosts supposed to be . . . But I could feel her shoulder blades under my hands. I stood back and looked at her. She looked just as she had always done, even to the slight dark circles under her eyes. I felt an immense gratitude to her, and to God for letting her come. There was, also just a hint of shyness, tentativeness — not knowing quite what the rules were, so to speak, for this sort of thing. I, standing back, looked at her face, her clothes, all in a second or two.

“Davy, Davy~” I said.

“Oh, my dear!” she said. Then she added, “I can’t stay long.”

We went over and sat on the edge of the bed with our arms around each other, and I said something about being grateful for ever that she was there at all. Then I couldn’t resist asking her how she, in heaven, could have dark shadows under her eyes.

She grinned, knowing me, and the said seriously, “I can’t tell you that. I can’t tell you much at all.”

I grinned back at her. “That’s reasonable,” I said. Then, after a little silence, I said, “can you tell me one thing, dearling? Are you  — well, with me sometimes? I’ve sometimes thought you might be.”

“Yes, I am,” she said. ” know all your doings.”

“Thank God!” I said. Then I said, very casually, “And my letters to you –have you, um, read them? Over my shoulder, maybe?”

And then our eyes met in that look of perfect understanding — that look of knowing — that I had missed more than any other thing. After that, we just sat there on the edge of the bed, holding each other, cheek to cheek. There was more said, and there was laughter. And I was pervaded with bliss. I don’t recall her exact words, but she gave me to understand that she had wanted this meeting as much as I could have done; and I remember thinking that God had allowed it because He loved her.

Finally, she said that she must go, and I accepted her going peacefully. She left by the door, and I leaned in the doorway, watching her go across the garden and through the alleyway. Then she was gone.

I turned back into the room, thinking, “How I’ve been blessed!” It was, of course, to late for the lecture. I would, I thought, go up to the High and get some breakfast. I put on my tie and jacket, thinking very happily about this wonder that had happened. Then –there she was again. But  with a difference. She stood there, merely smiling a little; and now, I realised, I could see though her. Then, even as I watched, she lifted her hand in a little wave and faded and was gone.

I murmured to myself, making a distinction that i don’t now fully understand; “this was an apparition and the other was a vision. Derr Davy! she came back again just to show me that she is really with me.” I smiled at the corner where she had been and perhaps still mwas. Then I went out.

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