Fr Jim Cogley
If we hold on to someone too tightly in life we call it control, and it has the effect of pushing them away from us. Jealousy is an expression of this and it has been described as a monster that devours the object of its desire. For some reason when someone close to us dies we fail to see that our holding on, beyond an appropriate mourning period, is also a form of control. One man was shocked to realize that the holding on he thought was an expression of love for his wife was inadvertently a form of control. What holding on does to us is that it keeps us locked in the past. It makes our lives a misery in the present and it robs us of hope for the future. The greatest expression of our love for a loved one who has died is not by holding on out of morbid grief, but by releasing and letting them go. From the accounts of those who have experienced clinical death it would appear that morbid grief and holding on to loved ones can impede their progress on the other side. It certainly prevents us from moving forward.