The Joy Side of Grief

Apparently there is an essential joy in sadness. I feel like I had a I better grasp on this months ago. While Dad was in the hospital dying, it didn’t take me long to figure out that as much as we were losing him, we were all becoming closer as a family. We spent a week and a half dedicated to being by his side. Regardless of how often he opened his eyes or moved, we had someone with him at all times. We were joined by something greater than the legal labels of family. We all felt a calling to stay close by and knew that he sensed us as easily as we could see him. I spent days on end holding his hand or arm, making sure to touch him as we talked, kissing him on the forehead. And all this with a man I had remembered touching maybe 3 times in the past 10 years, most memorably during our father-daughter dance 3 months ago.

It was during this time in the hospital that I was so certain that there could be enough space for hope in a situation where devastation was certain. And now I feel I am waiting in this limbo between grief and joy: mostly grief, waiting on joy.

After my father had passed, my amazingly compassionate and supportive boss, sent me a poem in the mail: “Love Sorrow” by Mary Oliver. And with it, a note as a reminder that joy and grief are different sides of the same coin. It is only with great joy that we experience deep grief. We carry joy with us every day and with it, we also carry sorrow.

The poem itself drew a metaphor that sorrow is a child and must be loved, attended to and nurtured for being exactly as she is. It explained that the more sorrow is attended to, no matter how difficult a child she may be, she will grow up one day too and not require so much hand holding.

I thanked my boss in person for reminding me to feel the grief. Then, she told me, “Yes, but, don’t indulge in grief.” In my moment of feeling like I was seriously over-indulging, all I could think was: “Then, where the heck is this joy?”

It didn’t come that day. The joy still doesn’t come every day, but it comes more and more each day. Today I found enough energy to put some effort behind the workouts I have been “attending” at best. And today, I felt a little more colorful.

On the days joy shows up, it seems that the joy side of grief is in the gratitude. For every pain in life, it reveals that there has been joy. With every loss, there is sadness because we had been happy to have that which inevitably was destined to be impermanent. And for the joyful experiences that we had that culminated in the loss, there is ultimately space for gratitude.

It’s not anything new what I am writing about. It’s all been said before in various forms by well known authors such as Eckhart Tolle, spiritual leaders like the Dalai Lama, and I’ve recently read it from a “skeptical” man: Dan Harris. I’ve also heard it from yoga teachers, friends, and now most recently my boss.

It’s sometimes heard in this form: “When life gives you lemons…” So cheesy, right? But, it’s cheesy because it’s overused. And it’s overused because it is true. With every setback, there’s space for resiliency and something new. People who are more resilient and more willing to think flexibly, will be more positive and happy and fulfilled in life than those that sit with the lemons and pout.

When it’s heard scientifically, it’s Newton’s third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. With a physics view, this means for example, that as much as my car is pushing down on the earth, the earth is opposing my push with equal force. Applied to grief, it would mean, for every tear of sorrow, every ounce of depression, every ho-hum moment, every time I have to pause and really think about how to answer, “How are you?”, every day I have to stay in bed past noon staring up at the ceiling, every time I put the same outfit on because it is just too hard to figure out what else to wear, then there is an equal an opposite memory I have of the love I felt when Dad parked the car and paid the parking fee at the airport so he could wait for me inside when I would fly home, the comfort of warm bagels Dad would bring home every Sunday I was visiting, the bliss of sitting on a sailboat with Dad and tossing our sandwich crust to the seagulls, and the pure love as Dad put my hand into my husband’s on our wedding day and said to us, “You two are the luckiest people in the world.”

Each loss is an opportunity to re-examine our interconnectedness and it forces us to see that all energy on Earth has space to exist across time and space. With each loss we detach a layer of identity: daughter, sister, husband, friend, co-worker and we are forced to see that we are much less than we thought we were and so much more at the same time. It’s our human nature to attach to labels. But as the labels leave us, we are forced to see how basic and common we really are and what beauty there is in that. Although each person we lose is gone from our sight, we are still connected. Energy is neither created nor destroyed.

I may sound optimistic , but this does not mean I expect to be completely joyful one day. I respect that where there is sadness there is joy but where there is joy there is sadness. Even as I read over some of the joyful memories I just wrote, tears of immense heartache don’t even have time to build up behind my eyes before they start cascading down my face.

This will not be my last loss, and if you have not had one, you will. It is a certainty that we cannot change. Each time I will have to re-learn how to go through the world, how to live as this new person who is no longer attached to the label that loving my lost person brought me. But maybe with each loss, we get closer and closer to the purity of it all. Until that time, my grief continues to gain joy, and my joy is overflowing with grief.