I am sorry for your suffering. However, I am understanding life’s message to be “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” If you have recently lost a dear one, you are allowed to grieve. But could you not also celebrate the joy they brought you?
We will all die (if we were ever born). Our bodies will someday be returning to the molecules and atoms that were kind enough to come together for a while making the all-important US. Isn’t it being miraculous that we were ever here at all? And isn’t part of our sadness either the knowledge of our own mortality or the sense that, “Wow! Look how great they were, and even they didn’t escape this fate I fear.” You see? We often turn their lives and deaths into our story. So here’s the part where suffering is optional. We can choose our story. We can choose to believe the myth that our lives can never again contain joy without them. Or, we can – like those heroic parents who have lost a beloved child to disease – choose to live for them. To make each day worthy of the dear one we still hold in our hearts; to choose to work to defeat drunk driving, or find a cure for cancer or M.S. or birth defects. And in the meantime you can sit up here with me and the most gentle music of Carole King. We’ll “climb way up to the top of the stairs, and all our cares just drift (Gospel back-up eases in) out into Space. On the roof it’s peaceful as can be, and darling,…”
Posted at: 09:54 PM
