The Nature of Joy
The neurological building blocks for our joys and sorrows are one and the same. This is the story and science of how we experience extremes of joy and sorrow, sometimes simultaneously.
The young boy handed me a cup of coffee, thick with cream and sugar, which is not the way I drink my coffee, but it was perfect with the square of slightly sweet cake in my other hand. The light brown liquid echoed the warmth of his expression. He smiled the way only kids can, open, pure, and free of any intent other than welcome and the novelty of this stranger in his village.
We had hiked to the village after a truck dropped us off at the rainforest. Our Fijian guide would stop along the path to explain the plant life around us. He cut a thick vine with a machete, held it up and showed us how to drink the pure water that drained out. He pointed to the edible fruits and useful plants along our route. We were far enough away from anything familiar and modern that, for a moment, I could imagine this island just as it was centuries ago. I could imagine needing to survive on water-filled vines and exotic fruits and bathing in the waterfall we hiked alongside.
We ended our hike in the village at the top of the mountain, greeted by children playing and laughing. We carefully placed our shoes outside the opening of the chief’s bure, a woven grass hut, and seated ourselves in a circle inside the tiny dwelling. Our group leader, Jean-Michel Cousteau, presented the chief with gifts and a donation to the village. The leader acknowledged the tokens of respect, proffering a half coconut shell of kava. Jean-Michel clapped once to recognize the offer, drank deeply of the murky grog, then handed the bowl back, clapping again. The half-shell made its way around the circle, with clapping, drinking, and more clapping while sharing words of mutual respect until our tongues became too numb and brains too relaxed from the spicy, earthy, and mildly narcotic root swirled with water. The yanqona ceremony continued until the ceremonial tanoa was as empty as our sedated brains.
This experience was the stuff of my dreams as a child watching The Undersea Adventures of Jacques Cousteau. If you perked up the tinfoil-wrapped ends of the rabbit ears just so; you could discern the grainy, black and white images of Cousteau team divers gliding along the bottom of the ocean and trekking through uninhabited jungles. I had no idea that nearly twenty years in the future I would be an eco-tourist with some of that crew, including Cousteau’s son, exploring the reefs and villages of Fiji.
Later, we gathered in the village for my more familiar ceremonial drink, coffee, and a concert as the late afternoon light skimmed across the handwoven grass mats where we were seated. The children stood in front of us. Behind them, the mountains gave way to the lush green valley and the deep electric blue water of the Pacific. When the children began singing, their voices were as pure and warm as their smiles of greeting. I have no idea what the words were to the hymns they sang, but as I listened, the sun sank toward the horizon and wrapped us all in golden light. Above us, the first stars of night sky appeared, and the beautiful chorus lifted to meet the heavens halfway.
There are but a few moments in life that are so incredible, so beyond what you thought your life would be. Moments of absolute joy. Incredible joy.
Joy, I should not be having. Half a world away, the person I loved more than anyone else was in a head injury rehab hospital, and we were not sure if or when he’d ever come home. We were not sure who this gaunt and scarred version of my Dad would become as his brain healed.
Humans can experience more than one emotion at once, says Leon F. Seltzer, PhD., in his article in Psychology Today, even when the feelings are as bipolar as joy and sorrow. He compares our experience to viewing an optical illusion; look at the situation in one direction, and you feel one emotion. Squint a bit into the negative space, and there is the inverse. Our confusion, he writes, and even our procrastination comes from the moments when we are stuck amid contrasting emotions. The exception is anger, which temporarily blocks other emotions.
Seltzer asserts, however, that we can’t feel opposite emotions at once, “It’s a situation in which both feelings constitute your emotional reality but can’t be felt, or experienced, to the same degree simultaneously,” he writes. We shift, instead, toward the pull of whichever is stronger at the moment.
I didn’t experience the illusion Seltzer asserts. As I stood on a mountain in the South Pacific, with a galaxy of stars above, my emotions filled the expanse, the highest high and lowest low, joy and sorrow, together. I felt the full measure of my existence.
In the morning, we began the long trip home, a sort of nested box of transport from truck to tiny plane that barely lifted off a runway before the earth gives way to the ocean, to a larger island, a larger runway, a larger airport, larger plane. Eventually, this ended back on the Midwestern ground, where I grew up.
I’d made a similar journey home from the South Pacific a year before. My father’s accident happened just as I was walking through the San Francisco terminal in a haze of jet lag. I felt a shove, dropping my camera bag. But when I looked around, there was no one near me. The jolt had come from within, leaving me with a sense of something missing and voice in my head that said, call home now. I couldn’t reach anyone there until one a.m. “We don’t know if he will make it through the night,” said my stepmom, exhausted and in shock.
My planned overnight visit in San Francisco became a frantic re-packing and continuation of days without sleep, fueled only by terrible coffee and worse airport food, on a race to try and get home by any route I could. I had left for a month of travel in the South Pacific without saying goodbye. And now, I was running a gauntlet of flight patterns to say a farewell before my father’s departure.
The windchill was seven-below when I stepped out the doors of Kansas City International Airport. My best friend was waiting for me with the car running, a jacket I needed, and a massive hug that I needed more. He drove straight to the hospital, dropping me at the door so I could hurry to the ICU.
My father lay on a bed surrounded by a sea of blinking monitors. His face was bruised and swollen, ear stitched back together with the pieces not quite fitting, the result of his head slamming into the window of his small Toyota pickup. He was not wearing a seatbelt when he turned left in front of a moving van. There was not enough margin, only error, and impact.
Outwardly, my dad looked like he said the wrong thing to the wrong guy in a midtown bar. But his worst injury was hidden. On impact, the brain, bobbing in its sea of fluid, slams against the insides of the skull. When the paramedics pulled him from his truck, he was not breathing. They didn’t know how long his brain went without oxygen before they brought him back. A double brain injury. Like any other body part, the brain begins to swell after trauma. Except that brains are encapsulated in a hard shell with no room to expand.
Diuretic and anti-inflammatory drugs flowed into his IV to control the swelling and prevent more damage. Miraculously, he was awake. All the adrenaline of the last 24 hours, locked in airplanes and airports, worrying if I would make it in time, helpless to arrive any sooner, drained from me, leaving me shaky and weak. I held his hand, “I love you, Dad.” He looked me in the eyes. “Hey … love you.” And then he slipped into a coma.
Until recently, research on emotions centered on the idea that each originated from a specific part of brain circuitry. Psychological scientist Christine Wilson-Mendenhall of Northeastern University and her colleagues tasked a group of subjects with envisioning different emotionally evocative scenarios while undergoing an MRI brain scan. The team observed a heightened response across all of the regions of the brain, not just the singular area previously associated with each emotion.
The scenarios the team presented were not just emotionally evocative; they were a complex, bittersweet mixture. Like life.
“You are running in a charity race, your first time covering this long of a distance. You see the finish line and remember your aunt’s lost battle with cancer. Covered in sweat and heart pumping, you pick up your pace. The cheerful chanting ahead instills an overwhelming sense of courage. You feel a beneficial sadness.”
Wilson-Mendenhall and the researchers found that our emotions are not biologically-segregated. All emotions, positive and negative, share the same neural building blocks. We build our joys and sorrows from the same material.
Sitting in the ICU waiting room felt a bit like being wrongfully convicted and awaiting trial under house arrest. Except the waiting room didn’t have the comfort of a shower and your own bed. This holding cell had nondescript couches, burnt coffee, old People magazines, and inescapably loud daytime TV that you couldn’t turn off because it was the only distraction for equally confined strangers. We waited there for the life or death sentence of my father.
The decision could happen at any moment. At first, we lived on edge, sitting perfectly still in the waiting room despite the frantic, restless churning inside.
Deep in an uninjured brain, the tiny amygdala hammers out an SOS signal to the command center of the hypothalamus, triggering a flood of adrenalin into our autonomic nervous system. Our heart pushes blood faster to the muscles, heart, and other vital organs. We breathe more rapidly, even the smallest of airways in our lungs open wider to pull in as much oxygen as possible, pushing our brains into a hyper-alert state. Our senses are heightened and intensified, which may explain the visceral response we ascribe to things like a hospital smell. We blame our emotions for this state of edginess, but our bodies are hard at work, creating its palpable experience.
The fight or flight response kept to a duller roar on the waiting room couch. Then, each of us would take our bedside shift. My tiny amygdala thumped adrenalin back to full twitch again as I cleared the threshold of my father’s ICU room. He was lying motionless, bruised, battered, and tethered to a mechanical placenta of a breathing tube, IV, stomach tube, monitors, and a catheter, tubes that all together moved air, fluids, and medicine in and wastes and infection out.
With everything inside me trying to flee, I fought to sit down and have a quiet chat with someone in a coma. The medical team encouraged us to keep up communication. Sometimes, the nurses said, the patient can hear you even if he can’t respond. Like an agnostic attempting prayer, my monologues began with, “I don’t know if you can hear me, but …”
There is only so much of sorrow’s intense internal burn and the thumping of adrenaline that the human body can withstand. In time, another process takes over for survival, if only for a short reprieve. Numbness.
Our ability to detach from a traumatic experience is as much a biological response for the brain as it is an emotional one. We experience difficulty remembering the traumatic event and an overall sense of detachment. Our brains use this temporary emergency shut off valve when we need it most. Emotional avoidance, however, is a rudimentary control. It turns down all of our emotions, not just the negative ones. It would be a much more useful gift if we could choose which to turn down. Or who.
In the beginning, we all stayed in the ICU waiting room, going home long enough for a shower and a couple of hours tossing and turning in bed. We rushed back when my dad stopped breathing, and the doctors put him on a ventilator. Then off. Then back on after a pulmonary embolism added yet another massive scar to his broken body, encircling his right side where they removed a third of his lung. Weeks passed. We began taking shifts between the ICU and testing life outside again, replacing one another as the sentry at his bedside to fend off the social worker with her clipboard. She showed up one day, uninvited, a month into our sentence in the ICU. A month comatose for my dad.
The clipboard had papers on it that she wanted us to sign. They granted “no-code” permission for the medical staff to not intervene the next time my dad stopped breathing. “The doctors say he won’t wake up,” she repeated. “If he does, he won’t ever speak or walk again.” She pushed the clipboard toward me.
“No,” I replied. “That’s a possibility. Dad’s not brain dead. The doctors say they don’t know. So how am I supposed to?” Or you? She persisted, approaching one family member at a time, dividing us. “Your stepmom is not married to your dad anymore. You can sign without her consent.”
I stopped hanging out in the waiting room between visits, opting instead to sit over bad coffee in the hospital cafeteria away from the clipboard-wielding menace. There wasn’t much hope to hold onto, but I didn’t need help letting more of it go. Or family conflict. Two more weeks went by.
“He’s been restless today, and wakeful,” the ICU nurse said to me as I headed to my dad’s room. Wakeful seemed like an odd choice of words. A wakeful coma. Helluva oxymoron there. I shut out these encouraging words because Hope had not been my friend. Hope asked me to feel. I was hanging out with Numbness now, and we were getting by just fine, thank you.
Hope slunk off further at the sight of the tangle of monitors and equipment clicking and humming away. I could never get used to the machines. Or the tubes, especially the two that sprouted from the burr holes they cut in Dad’s forehead. They trailed out a foot from his head with ball-like ends attached. The balls suctioned off excess brain fluid, acting as an overflow valve to prevent further injury when Dad’s brain swelled. They looked like antennae.
I sat down beside the bed, clutching a cup of the acidic liquid that was supposed to be coffee. Why is coffee so bad in the one place where you need it most? Hospitals should have the world’s best caffeine supply. My thoughts spiraled on minutiae, the emotional equivalent of hitting the snooze button to stay under a thick blanket on a cold winter Monday. I avoided staring at the antennae, looking just past my father’s head.
“Hi there. How are you doing today?” I said, casually. I was used to the one-sided conversations by now. Often, I rattled on making small talk. I am not good at small talk.
Once in a while, I tried for the deeper conversations, more like the ones we used to have. When we finished one another’s sentences. And sometimes, when we would lie on the driveway and look up a summer night sky, we didn’t need a word to say everything that mattered. If he slipped away, I would lose the only person who understood me.
There are different states of coma. There is even a scorecard, the Glasgow Coma Score, which tracks eye response, verbal response, and motor response from three to fifteen. There is no zero, one, or two. In movies, the unconscious person just lays there looking like they’ve had a shower and laid down for a peaceful nap, wearing makeup. In reality, people who are comatose can move, as he did, tossing in their sleep. Wakeful coma. But there isn’t an alarm clock that can wake them.
Today, my line of conversation settled on tough love. He’d given me enough of it over the years. “Look, I know it’s hard, but you really need to get better. I know this is …”
“This is bullshit,” came his raspy whisper, and one eye barely cracked open.
He was awake. It took me a few seconds to realize I didn’t imagine it. “Yeah,” I grinned, “it sure is.”
Our ability to feel positive emotions amid crisis builds resiliency, says Barbara Fredrickson, Ph.D., author of the book, Positivity. The less resilient we are, the more likely we are to focus on the negatives in a situation.
Overcoming negativity also means overcoming evolution. Our brains are hard-wired for survival and more attuned to be on the lookout for danger than pleasure. Frederickson notes that despite our tendencies, our reality is more likely to contain positive events than negative ones.
The key is to experience and be grateful for the positives. Frederickson’s research suggests that there is an ideal ratio, 3:1 positive-to-negative, that humans must experience to endure all the sorrows of our imperfect world. Our ability to experience joy is as essential to survive as our fight-or-flight instinct.
It was against the odds that my dad woke up. The neurologist predicted that he would not be able to speak much less use contextually appropriate profanity. We learned that moments like his awakening were glimpses of who he used to be. These glimpses and our shared memories were all that remained of the Dad I knew as a child. The hard part ahead would be learning who he would be now while we helped him regain as much independence as he could.
Dad’s first meal in almost two months was pureed tacos. Often the recovery path from a traumatic brain injury means relearning everything. That included swallowing and eating. Correct syntax for words. Control of bodily functions. Walking. Self-care. Some of these things he would never get back fully. There’s no way of knowing what “recovered” will look like with a head injury. Each path is different terrain, and you don’t know how long the trail goes or where it ends. You just try to keep moving forward.
Our roles switched. I fed my father. I was there for his first steps, watching as he was held upright in a cage-like device, like an adult size baby walker, while he pulled his feet along the floor. I was there when he would scream profanity, locked in a rage from the agitation caused by the healing process of his brain. I was also there for the awkward moments of changing him before he regained control of bodily functions. The first time was the hardest. From my crouch on the floor, I tried to make light of the situation, to take away some of the humiliation of having your child change your soiled pants. “Remember your story about when we were babies with stuffy noses?” I asked.
He remembered. “They didn’t make those sucker things,” he said, a spark back in his eyes. “So, I used my mouth. That’s love.” We laughed at this old story and agreed that his labor of love was way more selfless.
These long-term memories would be his clearest for the rest of his life. After the head injury, particularly with his frontal lobe damage, my father would struggle to create new memories. He would repeat himself until nudged gently forward, “Yes, that’s right, that’s what you just said,” I would say to help him fix the moment in his short-term memory. “Now, what do you say we get ready for lunch?”
Short-term memory was not the only sticking point. Dad also got fixated on the things he wanted. Things like asking for a cigarette when his first cup of coffee triggered a lifetime habit response — despite the fresh scar where the doctors removed a third of a lung. But the rage persisted for weeks, and it prevented him from making any progress with his therapy. We gave in. Maybe a step closer to normal requires a bad habit or two.
One good thing about his memory loss was that he could not recall the accident. It’s normal for many traumatic brain injury survivors not to remember the time leading up to, during, and just after the injury. The rest of us, without a brain injury, have our struggles with recalling trauma. Scientists refer to this as fading affect bias. Over time, humans tend to let go of their painful memories more easily than their joyful ones. I think this is less science than a gift of evolution. What species would want to live to an old age if that meant holding onto the full weight of the losses we accumulate in this world?
How we gather our memories is a bit like the first time we took our daughter — a grandchild that my father would never meet — to the ocean. She raced, pigtails flying, back and forth across the sand, picking up a random bit of shell as it caught her three-year-old attention. She put each new treasure in her little red pail. In her research review published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Elizabeth Kensinger explains that our brains also collect the bits and pieces of our history like shells on the beach. The more excited we are with each fragment, the more likely we are to keep it.
When we look back, we view this collection of moments more like a series of shorts than a narrative film. The clips capture both our negative and positive experiences, but we filmed the scenes differently. We relive our joyful moments with a wide-angle lens of positive feeling, the scene is slightly out of focus like a slow-motion, blurry sequence with gold lighting. With negative moments, such as one experiences during a car crash, the emotional intensity narrows our field of perception to a sharp closeup. A crash survivor, one who is not head-injured, may recount the exact sound of the shattering glass, or a feeling of being thrown, for example, but not the full sequence of events. We store negative memories in jagged shards of detail.
I collected these shards while my father recovered. We knew he would be able to come home one day, even if he would always need care. But not everyone at the rehab center would return home. Like sixteen-year-old Rachel. A drunk driver hit the car she was in head-on. She would never be able to communicate or walk again. Once Dad was ambulatory, he pushed her in her wheelchair to the sunny window every day and brushed her hair aside from her eyes so she could see. He checked on her all day and made jokes to try and get her to smile. Dad saw past her curled fingers, spastic movements, inability to talk, past the trauma. Perhaps because he, too, was injured. Rachel was a girl, just like his daughters. Dad had to relearn how to swallow, but he didn’t lose his ability as a loving father.
There were other kids there. A beautiful toddler with red curls who drowned then was resuscitated after minutes. He would look at me and smile, but his cerulean eyes were emptier than they should have been. The sharpest fragment was that of a teenage boy who was nearly recovered enough to go home, then had a violent seizure, re-injuring his brain. I watched the devastation of his parents and the lost hopes for their son’s homecoming — the awful starting over of recovery again — with little promise of progress this time.
I wondered just what I had done that I deserved to be whole. And why these children were broken instead of me. I felt anger at a higher power I could not understand, especially when people around me suggested that this was all part of a master plan or God’s will. “Things happen for a reason,” an acquaintance would say, knowingly. Oh yeah? What kind of reason is that?
Despite our pain, says Reverend Wendy Lyons Chrostek, a pastor at Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, God is always there to walk with us. Chrostek is currently co-teaching a class based on the book Joy Starts Here.
The church’s mission is to embrace non-religious and nominally religious people in a way that allows questioning and thinking to coexist with religion. There are nearly 20,000 members, which is perhaps a statement on where many of us are in our beliefs. I was not in a good place then, and when others suggested that the tragedy of these children was intentional, well, I couldn’t accept that view of God.
Bad things don’t happen because God causes them; they happen because the world is not a perfect place, says Chrosteck. God, however, stays with us during our sorrows, and, because He is with us, we can feel joy even then.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will grieve, but your grief will be turned into joy. 1 Thessalonians 4:13–14
The hard part of this approach to faith is that you have to let go of the idea that God is some kind of miracle vending machine. Put in enough prayers, and out pops the happy ending. This faith requires praying for the best, but finding joy in the story, no matter how it ends. It can take a few extra pages to find the joy in unanswered prayers.
A joyous homecoming was our plan. But going home too soon had consequences. After a few months of head injury rehab, my dad could walk and do some self-care. My stepmom decided that we should bring him home to visit on weekends, even though he was still struggling with uncontrolled agitation as his brain rewired itself. We did not know how much of this struggle would be permanent. To my father, that first visit home meant he was home. He did not retain any new short-term memory that this was just a visit. The realization that he was headed back to the rehab hospital hit at 65 mph on the return drive.
“I’ll kill myself!” he shouted. “I’m not going back. I’ll jump out of this car!” He unbuckled his seat belt and clawed at the door to unlock it. Seated behind him, I wrapped my arms around his seat and chest, holding him fast. He pulled at my arms, screaming and twisting as we now hurtled at 90 mph down the highway.
My stepmom sped, white-knuckled on the wheel with one hand, while miraculously, in the days before hands-free mobile, pressing the numbers to the hospital on her cell phone to warn the hospital we needed help and pressing the door lock button repeatedly. I held fast to my raging father, refastening each of my arms as he pried one loose. My elbows locked. My arm muscles trembled. My father lost 80 pounds of his mass while comatose, but he was in full rage and fight mode. I closed my eyes and willed strength into my aching limbs. Twenty minutes. Fifteen. Ten. Please hold, please keep hold. The car crunched to a halt on the gravel of the hospital driveway. Two male nurses with one syringe of Thorazine rushed across the drive toward us. I let my arms relax. My father hurled himself out of the car and into their grasp.
I tried to get out, but my knees buckled. I slid down the side of the car to rest until the adrenaline subsided.
Twenty minutes later, I found my dad in the break room drinking coffee and playing cards with The Shah. The Shah was in his early twenties and had dived headfirst into a post submerged below the water level of a lake. He was now quadriplegic with some impairment in his arms and no use of his legs. He wore a white towel on his head, held in place with a headband, hence his self-selected nickname. The head garb served two purposes; it helped him manage issues with thermoregulation, and it hid his scars. Dad and The Shah were laughing hysterically as my dad recounted stabbing a fork into another resident’s hand when he tried to take food from my dad’s plate. Who knows if the story was true or the product of my dad’s post-injury confabulation, but they were enjoying it immensely.
I was still shaking a bit as I poured myself a cup of coffee and joined them. “Deal me in, you two. And no cheating!” We all laughed, and I could feel the turmoil inside me unwind.
Until recently, psychology research focused on the negative aspect of trauma; how sorrow and stress leave us damaged. The study of positive psychology, a newer approach, identifies how we survive. Those who bounce back from negative experiences, explain Michele Tugade and Barbara Frederickson in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have positive traits in addition to mental toughness. The difference between having an “iron will” and true resilience is a lot like the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, they state. When iron is cast into an object, the ore is melted once and poured into a mold. As the iron cools, the impurities separate and form fractures in the metal. The result is hard but brittle and breakable. Wrought iron, however, is heated and continuously worked as it cools. It becomes malleable, flexible. The more wrought iron is hammered, the stronger it becomes.
It is our positive character strengths — kindness, ability to love, social intelligence, and our sense of humor — that make our iron will malleable and prevent us from breaking. And, like wrought iron, resilient individuals become stronger under life’s continuous blows.
Of all the positive emotions that make us like wrought iron, humor is essential. Laughter triggers a release of immunoglobin A and decreases stress hormones, notes Steven M. Sultanoff, Ph.D. in his journal article “Survival of the Witty-est; Creating Resilience through Humor” published in Therapeutic Humor. Humor, says Sultanoff, functions as both a physical and emotional immune system. While humans are capable of a complex mixture of emotions simultaneously, humor and anger both dominate. In a head-to-head battle of these superheroes of emotions, humor disarms anger. After trauma, it is our ability to laugh that helps us adapt our perspective to the harshness of reality. We find the joy despite the miracles that don’t materialize.
“Good morning!” My dad called to me from our dining room table. He was up before me and waiting, already drinking his coffee. He and I were always the morning people in the house. We both woke up happy more often than not.
Not every day was the best, though. On bad days, my father’s agitation peaked, requiring sedatives. He could not retain any sense of time. Clear memories of the past became tangled up in wild confabulations with the present. If he was safe to go out, there was always a bit of the unknown ahead. There are no filters post-head injury. Dad once told fabulous, detailed, and entirely false stories of naked pranks to a waitress in a diner. Loudly. She smiled and brought out a slice of his favorite coconut creme pie. We went there often, not because the dessert was above average, but because she understood. She had seen sorrows of her own. For the others, one day you quit explaining because you no longer care what they think. Dad lost his filter for what came out of his brain. I gained a filter for what I let in.
My dad was home after eighteen months of hospitals and rehab. It was a devastating choice; graduate Dad to assisted living and more therapy in the slimmest of hope that there would be more recovery; or accept that he would require in-home care for the rest of his life and all of the changes this meant for our lives, too. It was time to be home.
I don’t know if my dad would have chosen this life. He once said that if he were in a wheelchair, he’d roll himself to the top of a long flight of stairs. Yet, Dad survived confinement to a wheelchair, relearning how to walk, and a physical handicap that required a cane. He refused to use it, choosing to navigate the house by using the walls, door frames, and furniture to steady himself. When we went out to do his favorite things, watching movies and eating ice cream, I would have to be his human cane, holding him up as he limped painfully, one leg nearly four inches shorter than the other, into the ice cream parlor.
There was a lot of medication involved. On the good days, Dad would take his pills in an easy gulp and carry on. On the bad days, he would be agitated and refuse. There would be screaming and threats of self-harm. I learned to make Thorazine spaghetti sauce, being very careful not to mix up our plates at mealtime. He kept a water cup by the kitchen sink. On the days when the trip to the bathroom was too many painful, slow steps, he would pee in it and pour the pee down the sink. I never put my glass on that side of the counter, just in case I forgot which was which. He filled his days watching the reruns on TV and in his head. He read books he would not remember. On the best days, I would see glimpses of the man my father was. He listened to my tough day at work stories and reminded me, “You can do this. I know you can do anything you want.” For that moment, he was the parent again, the strong one. He never strayed from my corner.
But, was I his advocate in return? I wondered. I dreaded the day when, in these flashes of his former self, he would realize how fragile and limited he was now. Would he be angry with us? We made the best choice we could for him. Or was it just the best choice for us? This morning, I paused on the last stair and let myself be glad to have him here. To meet the spark in his hazel eyes that matched my own. He still had his mischievous grin. Even surrounded by all the scars, it lit up his face.
I grinned back. And joined him for a cup of coffee.
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, ‘Joy is greater than sorrow,’ and others say, ‘Nay, sorrow is the greater.’
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
– Kahlil Gibran
