Healing grief

"Grief is ugly. The journey through it is excruciating. When people have worked through it, they will bear scars. But they will feel cleansed, unburdened and full of hope. For strange as it may seem, people who travel this jagged road are almost always enriched. They are more realistic, more compassionate, more profoundly human. In short, they are nearly always more beautiful than they ever could have been before traveling through grief."
-Judith Tate Learning to Live Again: The Journey Through Grief for the Widowed or Divorced

This is an excellent quote, that I feel really captures my journey for the last nine months. A journey I am still in the middle of. It expresses the pain and healing that I have experienced. A scar is a very accurate description. I will never look the same as I did before. The scar is a part of who I am. I will never forget the wound. It reminds me never to make the same mistake again. It reminds me of the pain that may seem so long ago. But the great thing about a scar is that while it may remind me of the pain, it doesn't still hurt.

Someday this divorce will be just a scar. It's no longer a gaping wound, bleeding and infected. But it's also not completely healed. Sometimes the initial scab opens back up. It still hurts. It still bleeds. It's still tender. But it's healing. The pain isn't as bad or constant. And it's getting better. And someday, it will just be a scar. A beautiful scar that makes me who I am.

I would never wish this experience on anyone. But I would never go back to who I was before. I have learned things about myself and about life that I probably would not have learned otherwise. I believe it has made me "more realistic, more compassionate, more profoundly human". And I will be a more beautiful person because of the scars.