How has loss served as a catalyst for transformation in your life or in the lives of those you love? How do you navigate the seasons of grief in your life? What do you find most helpful?

Spring is my favorite time of year. I’m comforted by the longer, warmer days watching delicate spring flowers slowly opening their colorful blossoms, necks craning towards the sun in hope of brighter days. As the season changes from winter’s darkness, I, too, am experiencing the subtle resurrection from dusk into dawn. And this year, I’ve felt its power more deeply than ever.

A few days ago, I awakened at 4:00 AM from a powerful dream, so potent, that for the rest of the night, sleep was elusive. In the dream, I was enjoying time with my cousins at our family reunion. I looked up and saw my mother walking through the door of the hotel lobby where we were gathered at the bar. She looked as she did in her mid-sixties, the age I am now. Dressed in her hallmark turquoise cashmere sweater, sporting pleated black pants, stylish pumps, and adorned in her finest jewelry, not a hair was out of place. I was startled yet thrilled to see her.

Running from across the room with outstretched arms, I draped her shoulders in a warm hug, tears streaming down my face. “Mama, I’ve missed you so much,” I told her, squeezing her tightly, remembering how much I had longed for her embrace.

She hugged me back but seemed puzzled that I was being so dramatic. “Well hello, honey,” she said, “It hasn’t been that long since I’ve seen you. Why are you crying?”

I realized in that moment that Mama was not aware that she had died six years ago, or that it was the last time I had seen her.

And then it dawned on me, just as it had when my wife Julie and I attended Easter services at the little church in our town that Mama loved so much as our way of honoring her on her favorite day of the year. I didn’t cry during the service, which was a marker of something new. When I awakened from the dream a few days later, I realized I had crossed a threshold. I had moved forward from the grief that had been my shadow for so long.

I was now the age that Mama was when she appeared in my dream, and I had become a different person since her death. I had learned to live in peace with my grief when it demanded my attention, but I was no longer its captive. Now the memories of her brought smiles to my face far more often than they brought tears. I still loved her, missed her, and at times, longed for her physical presence, but I had learned to live my life without her. The sting of her loss no longer cut so deep.

Just like the spring flowers I see blossoming each morning on our walks with our dog Gracie, I enter this spring season with hope and promise, and also with the understanding that those we’ve loved and lost can still come back to hug us when we need them in our dreams. I now trust that they will greet us as we crane our necks, seeking an inkling of their presence in the warm spring sky. And I have faith that as human beings, we are capable of transforming and resurrecting ourselves into something new and beautiful through the power of the love we share with our beloveds, even when we exist in a different space and time.