Brittany Rebecca Helton

“I don’t believe you’re dead. How can you be deak if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I’ll have to speak to in a different way, but you are not dead to me. And never will be. Sometimes when I get tired of talking to myself I talk to you.”

– Alice Walker

‘Sometimes the veil between the living and the dead seems think, and lighter than air.’

“The main impact is just the loss, the incredible loss. The expectations just were gone. The old age that I expected is different. It just never occurred to me that she would not be in the next rocker…At the Catholic school that I went to, the motto was hic et noc, Latin for “here and now.” What they meant was you do what is necessary – here and now.”

– Cokie Roberts

‘This is the only day I have for sure. May I use it well.”

‘I am organically connected to all of my life. I am not alone!’

‘The images of my loved one will return in their own time.’

“Take rest. The field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.”

– Ovid

‘I will care for myself in honor of my life and all who have shared that life with me.’

“But I am no more I,
Nor is my house now my house.”

 – Federico Garcia Lorca

‘In attending to the mysteries of life and death, I will listen for a chuckle in the darkness.’

‘I will look upon this day as a gift, not to be squandered.’

‘This cloud of darkness is understandable, given what I have been through. But it will pass.’

“I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming…This all sounds very strenous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I fell happy – deep down. All is well.”

– Katherine Mansfield

‘Through this experience I will find in myself new strength and wisdom – perhaps, even, new joy.’