[Tariki]

I was just browsing through a few of the threads in the Garden, and happened upon this one. Just from my own personal experience I'd just like to say that its important to feel the grief - and the loss - involved with the death of a loved one. When my own father died, apart from one brief moment, I never shed a tear. There was mum to care about...........she was slowly sliding into alzheimers. It was easy to shovel over the emotional pain with the excuse that I was caring for mum. Anyway, I believe that it was partly this repressed grief that bought me the two years of severe depression that followed a few years later - reality will have its due.

As this is a poetry forum, here are a few lines from Rainer Maria Rilke that seem appropriate.........

How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
seasons of us, our winter-
enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape,
where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.