But Love… Love is Immortal  Don Hackett TCF, Tauton MA              …As bereaved parents it can be happy for us or not, depending upon our own state of mind and our particular juncture on the read of healing.             Many of us will resent the lengthening of time between our child’s life and our own present.  Others may welcome the increasing distance in the hope that time itself will be a balm to pain.             Yet all of us perceive, beyond all the hype and expectations, that new years and seasons are merely calendar events.  Whatever problems we have had in the past will follow us into the present.  There is no inner demarcation with hurting behind and joy ahead.             Each of us has the same opportunities now as we had before.  We can permit time to simply pass, or we can work to mold its passage into constructive growth.              In the death of our children, we have discovered with certainty that we lack the means to control the most cherished elements of our lives.  But we also know that within each of us is the potential to rise above the debilitating anguish we have experienced.             Time continues to move forward and most of us have been too damaged to even play the games of … resolutions or dance the rites of spring.  We are beyond the futility of such exercises.  But let us each confront this moment and time with an inward commitment to recovery, to living the hours, which comprise our existence with all the fullness and love of which we are capable.             Hurting will ultimately lessen.  Pain will slowly become more bearable.  Fears and guilt will gradually pass away.  But love, that inner dance o the heart which leaps to our child’s name or the memory of an especially close experience that bears not only the mantle of endless joy, will not pass away.  All else, fame and fortune, distress and dismay, wealth and power, even ourselves, will at the last be done.             But love … love is immortal.             … may the immortality of love grow secure and healthy again within each of us.   St. Louis Chapter Newsletter July/August/90