Without Goodbye: A Spiritual Journey Transcending Grief

By Fleur Hols

After the sudden death of her husband, the author discovered the understanding that widows tend to receive; The Western world is not at all prepared to deal with something as certain as death.

Our culture only prepares for life. Death and grief, on the other hand are completely ignored. No one has taught us how to treat a person who has suffered an important loss. Many well-intentioned but hurtful things are said this way, this is not because people dont care about your pain, but because most of them do not know how to behave around grief.

When you first lose your spouse, you have no idea of what to expect either. Your whole life has turned around, sometimes without warning. Most likely, no one explained what you were about to encounter.
This book tries to show you what to expect after the death of a spouse. It also pretends to be a reminder that grief doesnt need to involve negativity.

But most of all, the author hopes her book will help you transform the thoughts that are keeping you anchored in the past. Why re-inventing yourself is so important.

She hopes this book will give some much needed understanding to the widowed as well as to their family and friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524664886

Fleur Hols

Fleur Hols was born and raised in the Netherlands, but she has lived in Barcelona, Spain, for most of her adult life. She is the proud mother of two beautiful daughters and grandmother of two little boys. She started writing as a healing therapy after the sudden death of her husband. While grieving him, she realised that grief could become a spiritual journey, one that leads to the awareness that everything in life is designed to help people grow; nothing is random. She believes that it’s entirely up to each person to convert the overwhelming despair he or she might feel insight into acceptance instead of bitterness. That is why she became an advocate for positive widowhood. She defends that there is no time limit in grief and she works as a certified grief coach towards a better understanding and integration of death and the bereaved in modern society.

Book preview

© 2016 Fleur Hols. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/09/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6486-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6487-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6488-6 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

1. Invisible tears

2. A world without him

3. Not Wanting to Be Different

4. I Did Not Get to See Him Again

5. The Secret Energy of Grief

6. He No Longer Belonged to Us

7. The Awareness

8. The Sorrow Moves with You

9. Who Am I?

10. A Peace Offering

11. His Gift to Me

12. His Last Day

13. Remembering

14. Catching up with Reality

15. Just Observing

16. Born Too Early

17. Losing Lucidity

18. When Death Arrives Unexpectedly

19. Giving Words to Sorrow

20. A House for Sale

21. About Angels and Telepathy

22. Trying So Hard

23. Our Expectations of Death

24. Some Years Later

About the Author

Ernest Becker in 1973 earned a Pulitzer Prize for his seminal work, The Denial of Death, which hypothesized that humans had a dualistic nature, both physical and symbolic, that enabled us to transcend the dilemma of mortality and seek a life of higher meaning and grand significance. Oh, that we would!

The reality of life for most people in Western societies is to not think about death, as if in not visualizing, verbalizing or envisioning the end of life, somehow we can forestall the occurrence. It is this conscious avoidance of a natural progression of life that creates the issues so perfectly detailed in this book.

Fleur Hols has grabbed the essential fear that all of us when confronting our own mortality or those whom we love. She expertly helps to show that death is not an end and grief not a transitory emotion. Death is merely the transfer onto another plane of existence and a continuance of our material lives had until that moment. Matter is indestructible and energy exists in forms in other ways; thus our bodies and thoughts retain life, and contact with us in spirit, that we need heightened self-exploration to discover.

Without Goodbye is truly an emotional journey she has experienced in coping with the grief from the death of her husband, but it is also, and should be, a road map for the rest of us in preparation for the inevitable losses of loved ones and ourselves. It is a handbook to guide us to that higher plane that Becker believed we could all attain.

- Virgil H. Simons, MPA

- Founder & President

- The Prostate Net (Patient Advocacy)

- Widower of 2 years

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To my grandson Alejandro.

His birth brought us so much love and joy.

A reminder of the ongoing chain of life and death.

"Ask and it will be given to you;

Seek and you will find;

Knock and the door will be opened to you."

(Matthew 7: 7)

{1}

INVISIBLE TEARS

WHEN AUTUMN ARRIVES four years after José’s passing, I have gotten used to missing him. Much to my surprise, it is not getting any easier. Time does not heal!

The pain has not gone, but I have become used to it.

I have learned how to live with the constant reminder of not being whole. Sadness is still luring me, avidly on the lookout for a response. But as tempting as it is to feel sorry for oneself, this turns out to be the hardest and longest way to recovery. And although I find myself going down that road every now and then, I try my very best not to indulge in it for too long!

But let me to take you back in time, to that first night after his death, when I found myself lying in our bed, alone and awake, horrified but unable to cry. It didn’t seem real. He was still so present that I could smell his scent and even hear the soothing sound of his breathing.

I was completely unable to comprehend what had happened only hours before. It was just too overwhelming and had left me numb. I couldn’t think,; I could only be.

When it started to dawn and the first daylight entered my room, I was taken by surprise.

I was astonished and utterly amazed that this was possible.

How on earth could the sun rise on a day that he would not awaken? Was it not aware that the world had ended, that nothing would ever be the same again?

José was not coming back.

He had left our house at five in the afternoon for a workout with his personal trainer on a beautiful, but extremely hot, Monday in August, never to return.

He died from a massive heart attack at the gym, only minutes after finishing his exercises, at the age of fifty-three.

Not overweight and seemingly in great shape, he attended the gym at least two times a week and was usually assisted by a personal trainer during his workouts.

In spite of his efforts to eat healthily and exercise, he had not been able to stop smoking yet.

He started smoking cigarettes at a young age but had switched to smoking cigars after the unexpected death of his own father, who had also