There is nothing more dangerous than hope, you know, and nothing more kind either. It can make you hold on to your last few breaths. It can make you forget the pain you are enduring. It can also make the physical ache of grief - the feeling of a fist around your heart - a little dull as time goes on. Hope, quite simply, heals.
It is found in strange places - that infinite moment that hangs inside a child's smile before it bursts into a cackle of laughter; in the state of dreamlike stupor when you're awake and aware of your surroundings, but not quite in your body because you can feel that you are where you really want to be (maybe next to a loved one who is no longer with you, in the home of your childhood, in a place of contentment); in an old anthology of poems in which someone long ago circled a line that causes a soft bell to chime in your heart and you feel a weight lifting, evaporating, disappearing; in the shallow breaths that ebb and flow as you repeat a phrase of comfort learned in another world over and over and over...
...Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ilayhi Raaji'oon
Truly, to God we belong and truly, to Him we shall return. [Noble Quran 2:156]