Good Grief

Several weeks ago, right as schools started back, there was a picture of a mom circulating through all the major news channels. She was fully dressed, floating in an inner tube in her pool, holding a cocktail, and wearing a vibrant smile across her face. Behind her were her three children, dressed with backpacks on, giving her the stink eye. This mom was celebrating her first day (in 11 years) of having no children at home; her youngest was finally heading off to school with the older two. It was impossible to see the picture and not feel the reverberation of her joy buzz.On the total opposite side of the spectrum, one of my closest friends lost her mom that same week. There wasn’t any warning or expectation that her time was coming so soon - but it came, nonetheless, and is wreaking havoc on my friend’s tender, loving, sun-shining heart. Imagine a bird without wings or music without sound…that’s the only way I know how to describe the all encompassing, debilitating, nearly breathless state of how she is experiencing the missing of her mom. The reverberation of her grief is as palpable as the inner-tube floating mom’s joy.In thinking about the extreme differences between these two realities, I’m reminded of a poem by Khalil Gibran called “On Joy and Sorrow”. If you aren’t familiar with it, I hope you’ll take a moment to read it:http://www.katsandogz.com/onjoy.html (copy and paste the link into your browser)If you do know it, you understand its message about the importance of polarities and paradox; that we can’t know joy without having known sorrow, and vice versa. They are two sides of the same coin. The mom in the inner tube, no doubt, feels as jubilant as she does because she has spent countless hours in the trenches with time being anything but her own. Similarly, though the inverse, the enormity of my friend’s sadness comes from a lifetime of being loved so well by her mom. The pictures of these women’s lives look different in this moment, but, in reality, there’s no difference at all. It’s just that one is riding high and the other is riding low…the yin and yang of life. I don’t imagine that either one would trade the experience that brought them to this moment so that they could have less joy or less sorrow.Think about your life, your triumphs and your heartbreaks. They’re not mutually exclusive. Careful of trying to minimize sorrow to have more joy and of keeping joy at bay to have less sorrow. I don’t know of anyone for whom that tactic has actually worked…except to keep them from experiencing life as it was meant to be lived.