Grateful for Grief
I seem to cry a lot lately.
Oftentimes it’s a mere trickle of tears as I look at a Facebook memory of someone who is no longer here.
But sometimes it evolves into convulsive sobs. Thankfully, it hasn’t happened in public, unless you count in the car as public. I recall being stopped at an intersection and the song “Cruel Summer” came on my playlist.
“It’s a cruel, cruel summer…..leaving me here on my own, it’s a cruel, cruel summer…..now you’re gone.”
I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to stop. It was a cruel summer indeed. Two unexpected and shocking losses in the span of three months.
First, Jet. Two weeks from the day I took him to the vet for what I thought was a muscle sprain, the home euthanasia vet was putting him down. He was full of cancer.
Stunned, I withdrew into my grief. I couldn’t talk about it, not even with my dear friend Anne, who was only one of a few people with whom I had shared his situation in real time. A few days after he was gone, she left me a voicemail and, in her Anne way, said, “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I need to hear from you.”
Only a few weeks prior, I had been the one comforting her, as she grieved the loss of her nephew-in-law. It was the only time I had ever known her to cry. She was one of the strongest people I knew, and I cherished her steady presence and joyful outlook on life. When I was finally able to talk, she was there for me.
Less than two months later, she too was, suddenly and shockingly, gone.
I know empirically that grief and loss are not unique to me and my life. When Jet was struggling, I texted a friend whose dog had undergone a splenectomy, to try to understand if maybe this was what was going on with Jet. During our text exchange he shared with me that his wife was discontinuing cancer treatment and entering hospice. I was immediately and overwhelmingly ashamed to have bothered him with my dog questions.
“Family is family,” he replied. His capacity for kindness, even while deep in his own tragedy, reduced me to tears.
True enough. Also true is that nobody escapes grief and loss. It may be the one thing that every single one of us has in common.
Understanding this, the Stoics take absorbing grief and loss to an even higher level:
Amor Fati: love of fate.
LOVE of fate? I have been pretty good over the last couple of years at accepting what comes my way. After all, that’s what the Serenity Prayer tells us to do. But LOVE what comes my way? No matter how much pain I feel? That seems a bit out of my range.
It also seems counterculture to love tragedy and pain.
But there are different ways to try to practice this concept. Marcus Aurelius wrote about how adversity can be treated like a prescription:
“In the case of the doctor, prescribed means something ordered to help aid someone’s healing. But in the case of nature, it means that what happens to each of us is ordered to help aid our destiny.”
Using the prescription analogy helps. I am grateful for the PT exercises, painful as they are, because they are designed specifically to help strengthen my injured knee and speed up its recovery.
So, how can I be grateful for the pain of 2019? How were these events prescribed especially for me?
I have concluded that these losses have pushed me to share my grief with others, while actively leaning into theirs. It has not been easy, as I think my default tendency has previously been to want to isolate. But now I work to be vulnerable with people, instead of hiding behind a wall of denial and faux self confidence. This makes my relationships better, stronger, and more authentic. After spending the first fifty years of my life hardly able to cry at all, I now can cry....even in front of people.
It actually feels good. Cathartic. I think Anne would approve.