“You come to love the thing you wish never happened.”
Stephen Colbert
I heard this in an interview with Anderson Cooper on grief. Stephen Colbert, who lost his father and brother in a plane crash when he was a child, had some difficulty explaining when Anderson choked up, and asked “ You really believe that?”
But I knew instantly what he meant. Anyone who has suffered an early loss, a life-changing loss, a life-shaping loss will understand. You build a world around it, because of it, in reaction to it. But it is the centerpiece, the core of all that happens afterward, and you know that you must embrace it as essential to who you are. This is not the traditional meaning of “love” as we know it, and Stephen was quick to say you always wish the event had not occurred.
But his statement reflected a much larger truth about healthy grieving. You do not stay in the resistance forever. You do not ponder, and resurface and regurgitate your sadness as the title of your story. You must move past that stage to love your own life, to live it fully and with gratitude. “If you love your life, you have to love it all.” he said, trying to explain.
But this part is difficult to explain to those who equate grief with sadness, and sadness with loyalty, and loyalty with loving. If I love, I must always be sad, to be loyal to the memory of what was, and what I lost. That circle never lets you free.
It never lets you breathe into the blessings of grief: the profound appreciation of relationship and connection that only loss teaches; the honor of carrying the essence of a beloved’s spirit into the world we get to live in, enriching the world, keeping the spirit alive, and expanding its reach. Finally, the gift of self-reflection that invites us to be better than we were because this person loved us, and had to leave.
It can take a long time to get there, and it cannot happen before we have bathed in the sadness and acknowledged every truth about what we have lost. Not before we have created an altar on which to welcome that sadness when it reappears and we choose to honor its truths. But then it is time.
Time to find the path to what every child knows.
To what a child barely 8 years old, 4 years past her mother’s death, told me when we were giggling on a couch and my face betrayed ambivalence.
“ It’s Ok, Mary Beth, it’s Ok.”
“Mama wants us to be happy. I know it in my heart.”
Omigosh. My father's death when I was not quite seven. I've known that things may have changed a lot when I was a teen, but he is forever my daddy who held me on his lap while he read the paper, a respite from my mother's strict and overbearing discipline. And she grieved the loss of him for 30 years, daily. I lost my mother when I lost my father. I felt duty bound to be sad because she was. Whenever I grieved any loss--a boyfriend, a pet, a good friend--for 30+ years myself, I was immersed in it and in the depths of despair. Then a spiritual counselor said to me at one point, "This is your mother's grief." And she was right. I was loving my mother by honoring her grief and participating in it over and over. This is not to say I do not grieve anymore. I do. But within the poignancy I do find the life, the acute feeling of being alive because I care so very deeply. It makes life luminous.
Brilliant, Mary. I could so relate to every word you wrote, and thank you for writing this illuminating piece.