This excerpt is from Jim Miller’s book Winter Grief, Summer Grace, which helps you visualize the experience of grief as through the seasons of the year: fall, winter, spring, and finally summer.

Spring leads ever so naturally, ever so comfortably, into summer.
New shades of green appear.
Leaves grow full and varied,
     plants reach upward and outward,
          fields blanket themselves in bold displays of color.
The sun stays longer than before.
Mornings begin brighter,
     afternoons turn warmer,
          and evenings beckon in a way they have not in a long while.
There is a sense of renewed vitality.
What happens around you in nature
     can also happen within you in your grieving.
Something begins to take root and hold.
Something grows stronger and surer.
Something quickens with life.
But this “something” is not just something--it is someone.
It is you.
This new life that blossoms within you grows out of all that you have undergone,
     all that you have done.
This summertime of your grief does not just arrive on its own;
     you invite it to come.
You summon it by making your way through all your painful feelings,
     so that you can welcome what lies on the far side of those feelings—
          the possibility of thanksgiving and joy and hope.
You encourage this experience of summer
     as you face your fears and your doubts, the silence and the aloneness.
Because then you can greet what else takes shape within you:
     your fortitude and your faith, inner strength and outer awareness.
But this new life of yours also has another source, and a larger one.
For while you invited this change, you did not by yourself create it.
While you nurtured it, you cannot take full responsibility for this new birth within you.
There is a sense in which it comes to you as a gift.
It is a grace.
The experience of summer grace flows directly out of the experience of winter grief.
It presents itself in paradoxes.
However hard it is for you to let go,
     once you have done so, something unexpected happens: you grasp.
You’re likely to grasp a depth of feeling for what others must go through.
You’re likely to increase your wisdom about what it is that life offers, and how it offers it.
You’re likely to increase your appreciation for all you’ve been given.
However painful it is for you to accept death on its own terms,
     once you have done that, something else happens: you can become more alive.
You can be even more ready to treasure this miracle called life on earth.
You can be more prepared for the possibility of your own experiences of rebirth.
You can be more open to consider your own death,
     for you will have come to realize all that death cannot do,
          as well as what it can.
You will know that within every single ending there lies a beginning.

     This writing comes from the book Winter Grief, Summer Grace by James E. Miller, which also contains many pages of insightful quotations and numerous full-page, full-color photographs from nature.

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