IMG_5499I offer this poem as it brought words to an understanding of what I needed from those around me with a recent loss I’ve encountered. It was the loss of someone whose love reminds me of the beauty, tenderness, and inspiration of the monarch butterfly. Perfectly, he took me strolling through a field of milkweeds on one of our first dates. I love you always. Thank you to Jan Falls, a dear friend and fellow therapist, who gifted me with this poem one morning last week – a morning when the loss struck me; when the abrupt truth of it met my disbelief and there were no words of condolences that felt right for anyone to speak other than to say “I don’t know what to say”.

BLESSING FOR THE BROKENHEARTED by Jan Richardson from “The Cure for Sorrow: a Book of Blessings for Times of Grief”


Let us agree for now that we will not say the breaking makes us stronger or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love.

Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound,                                           when every day our waking opens it anew.

Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery of how                                   a heart so broken can go on beating, as if it were made for precisely this —

as if it knows the only cure for love is more of it,

as if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still,

as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing                                                                      we cannot begin to fathom but will save us nonetheless.