The Uselessness of Adages

On August 24, 1988, I had a quick but serious conversation with my brother. I had just started to make dinner — French toast and bacon — when he came to my house. He raised his eyebrows at my choice of dinner, but he didn’t complain. It was one of his favorites and I was 8 1/2 months pregnant. Nonetheless, he was upset and came to me to talk things out just like we had always done as children and teenagers. I told him the age old adage of “this too will pass” and set a plate for him at my table. Neither of us had any idea that French toast and bacon would be the last meal we enjoyed together.

My brother went off to work and my husband and I went to bed. Simple life activities. At 5 in the morning our phone rang. My husband answered it for two reasons. One — I was 8 1/2 months pregnant with a very large baby. Two — no good news comes at 5 in the morning. It was my father telling us that my brother had been shot while working his job as a gas attendant. We needed to get to the hospital.

You know the next part. He didn’t make it. That night I watch the joy of life fly from my mother’s eyes. It was the night she began her long and painful descent into dementia. I watched my father bawl like the newborn I would soon deliver. I watched my youthful looking grandmother age 30 years before my eyes. I felt contractions.

No one in my family has ever actually recovered from that night. Well, I suppose the baby did. He was born a month and a half later — big, sweet, happy, and perfect. He carries his uncle’s name as part of his own. He was also raised by people shadowed by grief, so he was unaffected either.

It’s been 34 years since that night. It has been moments since that night.

Time heals all wounds. This too will pass. God never gives us more than we can handle. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

I call bullshit on all of these insipid sayings. Time turns wounds into untrustworthy scars. Scars which can grow hard and calloused. Scars which flare into unspeakable pain with no warning. Grief never passes. It goes through its steps, but the loss stays with you forever. God? Seriously? Obviously, he/she does give us more than we can handle. Often. Daily. If he/she didn’t, there would be no need for therapists. If something happens that is traumatic that it can kill us, it will leave a scar. In which case, reread the first counterargument in this paragraph.

My mother passed thirty years later. My father, fifteen. My grandmother, in between the two of them. I can assure anyone reading this, the weight of their passing did not kill me nor does it make me stronger. Their deaths simply added to the shadow weight in my soul.

What that weight has done, however, is make me more compassionate. I no longer look at the world with rose colored glasses, but rather, I try to see it for what it is. Sugar coating something rarely makes it more palatable. I have worked hard to transform my grief into something good. I am grateful for sunrise, for thunderstorms, for flowers, for darkness. I am grateful for French toast and bacon. I am grateful for the kind people in this world who go out of their way to help others. I strive to be one of those people.

I strive, also, to live in the moment. I understand on a cellular level that this, right here, this moment, could very well be my last. Truly, I do those who are gone no honor if I become lost in a tangled web of grief when I could use that grief as a stairway to kindness.