Imagination can help you cope with grief

Imagination is a curious thing. It's not quite the same as memory. There is more fantasy in imagination and a little self-trickery.

In the first year after my husband Baheej's death, I sometimes comforted myself by imagining he was just on one his summer research trips, and would be coming home soon. Of course I knew the truth, I'm not talking about delusions, just a game. It worked … a little, but not really, maybe for a few fleeting minutes.

My husband was a sociologist and that occupation justified a lot of globe trotting during summer break from his university teaching. I was used to him being gone for stretches of time. He was also used to my long business trips because I was often "on the road," for two or three weeks at a time. I wonder now how we ran a household in those years, but we did.

I still imagine that one day Baheej will just walk through the door after one of his morning writing sessions at the local Starbucks. And I hope someday he will appear to me, whether in spirit or imagination.

Imagination can lead you to cook some of your loved one's favorite foods, thinking about how delighted they would be to eat them, but instead serving it to dear friends. I have a friend who, once in a while, makes a favorite Polish dish of noodles and sour kraut (with lots of butter) that her husband loved. I often cook Baheej's favorite dishes and hope he knows I'm doing it.

Imagination could lead you to travel to a place you always hoped to visit with your loved one or to return to some favorite spot to relive happy times.

These things, big and small, take imagination and a little bravery.

People, including me, sometimes talk to their lost loved ones and imagine they can hear. Maybe they can.

Baheej was also a writer and had a great creative imagination. He left two completed but unpublished manuscripts that I vowed to get published after he died. One, "The Sidewalk Cafe," was done and mostly edited. He even had designed the cover and written the front matter. So I finished the editing the best I could, and it was published, but not as truly finished as he would have done. But I went ahead anyway and am glad it's in print. The next novel, he called "Rita," is still in handwritten manuscript form. We shall see …

So the point is, while still staying grounded in the "real world," let your imagination help you cope with long-term grief. It's another way you can help yourself manage this journey.

• Susan Anderson-Khleif of Sleepy Hollow has a Ph.D. in family sociology from Harvard, taught at Wellesley College, and is a retired Motorola executive. Contact her at sakhleif@comcast.net or see her blog longtermgrief.tumblr.com.