The Via Aurea

@donnaashworthwords

"I can’t stop the grief poetry flowing, it helps… this is a small excerpt from a new poem ‘keep me.’ Feel free to use it if it resonates. For Jan and her beautiful family x Donna ❤️"

My take on Love That Continues

*A Reflection on Donna Ashworth's "Keep My Laugh"*

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This poem is achingly beautiful - it reads like a love letter written from the other side of goodbye, whether that's death, distance, or the end of a relationship. Yet there's definite hope woven through every line. We're temporary tenants here on earth, and even when our loved ones move on (for whatever reason), we're invited to hold onto the good memories instead of clinging to grief.

There's something so tender about the specificity of these instructions. "String it on the stairs like fairy lights" - what a perfect image for how laughter can illuminate the ordinary moments of daily life. The idea of running fingers through them while climbing to bed transforms a simple nightly routine into a ritual of remembrance. "Keep my hugs in jars" has that childlike quality of trying to preserve the impossible - the physical sensation of being held and loved. The instruction to "take the lid off when you're cold" suggests that love can be stored and accessed when we need it most, that affection doesn't have to disappear just because the person does.

But the final stanza hits differently - "Keep the things you loved in me and wear them like a crown." This isn't about clinging to memory but about embodying the best parts of someone, making them visible in how you move through the world. It's about inheritance rather than just remembrance. There's something so wise about choosing to hold onto the good memories rather than clinging to grief. It's the difference between honoring someone's presence in your life and getting stuck in the pain of their absence.

"Share me with the world, that's how I'll always stay around" - this is the opposite of hoarding grief. It's about letting love be contagious, letting the qualities that made someone special ripple outward through others. God has a plan for every path, including goodbyes. That takes such faith to believe, especially in the thick of loss, but there's real comfort in trusting that even the endings serve a purpose, that nothing is wasted in God's economy.

The poem's instructions feel almost like a spiritual discipline - actively choosing joy over sorrow, presence over absence, sharing over hoarding. It's grief transformed into ministry, love made eternal through how it changes us and flows through us to others. Donna Ashworth has created something that manages to be both a goodbye and a promise of presence, making death and other goodbyes feel less like failures and more like transitions - painful ones, but part of a larger story where love really doesn't end, it just changes form.

Love outlasts its original form. It continues - warm as a hug in a jar, bright as laughter strung like fairy lights - whenever we choose remembrance over retreat, and sharing over silence.