Forest of Sorrow

There are so many ways to describe grief.

So many ways individual hearts walk this path.

For many of us there’s a sense of being locked in time, stuck in space, unable to leave the moment one received the news or the few days before and after.

It’s maddening that the earth still turns, the sun still rises and people go on with life when in so many ways our world is frozen in place.

Elizabeth Gilbert describes deep grief as a “coordinate on the map of time” and a “forest of sorrow”.

I like that.

Child loss is a place no parent wants to go. I found myself in territory so unfamiliar there was no way to get my bearings.

Left alone, I faltered, would have stayed lost, was doomed to walk in circles trying to find my way out.

I desperately needed a guide.

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Thankfully some parents, further along in this awful journey, created safe spaces for broken hearts to gather and to share.

I am oh, so grateful to them for that!

Not everyone who finds the way to hope and light chooses to come back for those still wandering in the forest of sorrow.

But some do.

They retrace painful steps carrying a torch and say, “Come with me. I can show you the way to hope.”