Healing A Broken Heart

For thousands of years people have been trying to figure out how to do that, heal a broken heart.  The majority of the cases people manage to move on with time and often it involves meeting someone new. 
But there are those few who never heal.  No matter what happens, how much time passes, or who enters their life, it doesn’t ever heal.  I think I can understand that but I’m just an old lady who has been around for a while and I have suffered a broken heart once or twice.  Actually twice.
I was fortunate enough to meet someone who put mine back together.  The flip side of that is that if something happened to him, I don’t know if I would be healed from that one, but this isn’t about me.
This is about those who have gone for years and years with this pain haunting them.  Yes, it haunts you.  You go along thinking you’re doing better and then you see something, hear something, maybe smell a certain fragrance and you are right back where you started.  The pain is just as new and raw as it was in the beginning.  I know with me when I was going through this once it was a stupid book.  It suddenly hit a button in me shortly into it and I threw the damn thing across the room.  You have to understand how much books have been respected by me all my life to understand why my mother and daughter thought I had completely lost it.  I did for a moment.  To this day I haven’t finished that book and never will.
This isn’t a pain that you can put a band-aid on and they certainly make no cream or ointment to dull the pain.  Yeah, some people crawl into a bottle maybe or try to swallow something to ease the ache, but when the self-medication wears off the pain is back in full force.  Some people will keep repeating this process until they destroy the rest of themselves.  Others will learn that this really doesn’t help and will learn to bear it as they move through life.  These are the truly brave ones.  They manage to function day to day but for some reason they usually have a gentler soul.   They are the ones who know when to reach out to another person when needed.  They will listen as the other person pours out their pain saying nothing, they just listen.  They know from past experience that there is nothing to say.  There are no magic words that going to help the person who is just starting down that path.  This gentle soul will hope and or pray that the person they are there for will be luckier than they were and ultimately heal.  Again, most do.
So, the next time a friend, a relative, especially a son or daughter, remember that there is nothing you can say that will make it better.  If they are someone close to you emotionally, hold them in your arms and let them cry.  They will do a lot of that, or at least most do.  I’m not a crier myself.
Do remind the person they are loved, if not by the person who hurt them at least by you.  You telling them won’t help their pain but it might help them to find the strength to move past it.
Am I an expert in this?  We all are.  If even one of you who reads this can say you’ve never known that kind of hurt then you’ve never been in love, you’re in love for the first time and up till now things have been going great, or you’re one of the lucky ones who got it right the first time.  There’s not many of the last anymore.