Brave and Important

I mentioned in the last entry that one of the things I've been doing to help me through my own grief is reading books and blogs of others who are also struggling with the difficult work of grief.

Here's a link to a blog that I started reading about the time my nephew was born last spring; in fact, I got the idea for making the video of photos from my sister's pregnancy and from the birth of my nephew from this site.  The story of the family that's detailed in the blog is sad but so touching and inspiring:

                                 Chasing Rainbows

I started reading the "Darcy Claire" part first - but it will make more sense if you click on each of the children's names across the top of the home page in order from left to right (that's their birth order), Gavin then Brian then Darcy Claire. When you get to the Darcy Claire part, have some tissues ready and be sure to watch the video (the link is at the bottom of the entry when you click on her name).

When you've read that, find the Blog Archive list on the right-hand side and click on "2013" and then "April" - that's what was happening in real-time just after I started following the blog, and it's very dramatic.  Start reading at the entry from April 2013 entitled "A Piece of Pop" and follow it from there - you won't believe what happens as the story continues to unfold.  

Be sure to read the entry called "Without Ever Uttering A Word;" it's touching beyond description.  It makes me think of the many kids I've gotten to know through my job as an occupational therapist who aren't able to communicate verbally and who've made such an impression on me through the years.  And be sure to read the one entitled "The End;" it's potentially the most powerful blog entry I've ever read.

Some of the things that have struck me in particular as I've read the entries (and from watching the Darcy video) are how touching it is how Kate (the mom) never seems to mind having her picture taken, even in the midst of tragedy, how she repeatedly says she feels "privileged" even in the midst of what must have felt like excruciatingly hard waiting, and how she seems to need to do something to try to help herself through her grief, even as the tragedy unfolds. Some of the stuff she writes about how hard it is to function at all in a state of grief reminds me of how I felt like I was that first year after my dad went on ahead, struggling just to get supper on the table or to pay a bill or help my kids with homework.  I admire Kate's writing because, while she's hopeful and that fact shines through almost everything she writes, she doesn't sugarcoat some of the ugly of grief, and I think that's brave and important.

What I Have Come To Believe - Part 2: A Quest For Patterns and Control

The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances. ~Martha Washington

Before my dad got sick, I felt lucky.  I felt happy.  And, like anyone else, I expected that my luck and my happiness would go on and on.  For the record, I still feel lucky, largely in part to the perspective imparted to me by my dad during the first 42 years of my life, and I feel happy overall, despite the bruise of grief and sadness and loss I have felt in my heart since my dad went on ahead.  I don't still think that happiness - or anything else, for that matter - is guaranteed, though, and I have to say that's been a really shitty realization.  Unlike most things about which I think that knowledge is power, this kind of knowledge sucks; it's weakness, doubt, and fear, all rolled up into one.    

I like control.  And on that note, to prove my point, I will even admit - and to all my old slumber party friends - you're welcome; you know it made things much more interesting all those years ago - I pushed the thing around on the Ouija board (I looked it up; it's called a planchette) so it would spell words to form a message. 

But now I know that there is no real control in life and that no one is immune to tragedy.  I guess that's part of growing up, to realize that, but I just feel like I wasn't grown up enough to have to deal with it yet - not that I ever would have been "ready."

Sometimes I try to make myself feel better by trying to make sense of things with the notion that everything happens for a reason, but in reality it's a product that I just can't buy anymore.  I think it's easy to say that things happen for a reason in retrospect, once we've had the time to find what often turns out to be a needle in a haystack; finding some good even in a very bad situation is our way of trying to survive emotionally, like putting a band-aid on a skinned knee with the intent of making some of the pain go away and hoping that the wound will heal with as little scarring as possible.  

When something bad happens to us, we want to know: who or what is to blame?  It seems like there should always be someone or something that caused it, as I've said before, some cause-and-effect relationship to everything that happens in life. But, what if, as often happens, there ends up being nobody and nothing to blame?  What if there is no explanation for what happened?  That's really something that seems impossible to reconcile in the aftermath of tragedy.

Personally, I don't believe my dad was "chosen" to have brain cancer - what kind of reward would that be??  I think that, like the majority of other tragedies and diseases out there that befall other innocent people, it just happened, and my family got through it the best we could figure out how to, based on our skill sets and our perspectives, both of which (especially the latter) we had in large part due to my dad.

I think it's human nature to try to organize things - not necessarily physical things, but intangibles and events in our minds, in an attempt to make sense of them and to find a pattern of some sort, which can be a source of comfort and give one a feeling of control, of being able to predict what's coming next.  One way that we attempt to do that is with the use of platitudes like "Live life to the fullest" or "Live each day as if it were your last."  

For the record, I hate the expression "Live life to the fullest." It angers me because I find it senseless: what does that even mean?  What are our other options - living to the quarter (quarterest?) or to the half (halfest?)??  If I sleep late every weekend or don't work my ass off to get that next promotion at work, am I not living life to the fullest?  And about living as if there were no tomorrow - does that mean I don't have to pay my electric bill or my taxes or watch my weight or weed my flower beds?

Another common way that we try to establish a pattern or even just attempt to ease our minds a little when something bad happens is by looking for things within a bad situation that we can label as Silver Linings.  Lately, I've been wondering if maybe the whole Silver Lining concept isn't just a crock, though.  I wonder if there is any research out there that shows that humans are genetically programmed to look for that in every situation.  I wonder if Silver Linings are just over-optimism or fluff, especially when I stop to consider the fact that in pretty much any given calamity, the people involved would be far better off not having had to endure the situation and not being left with whatever is being touted as a Silver Lining than they are with the tragic event and the Silver Lining.  Is using a "it could always be worse" type of Viewfinder to examine difficult situations just a way of using the tragedies of others as reflections of our own "luck" or as a way of ranking which rung we are on on the Ladder of Good Fortune? Is this obviously skewed logic necessary to survive?  Sometimes, for me at least, it's hard to get past the opposite of at least.

Here's a story about a man with brain cancer who says he feels lucky to have been not just able to finish but to win a marathon after having pushed his young daughter in a stroller the whole way:

BRAIN CANCER PATIENT WINS GUSHER MARATHON

To be honest, when I first read this article, I thought, "It's so unfair that this guy got to keep running after his diagnosis when my dad didn't; he's so lucky to have been able to keep doing what he obviously loves for at least long enough to accomplish this feat!"  But then I thought: Is he lucky?  Is it fortunate for him that at least he got to do one big thing on his bucket list?  I guess so - if he thinks it is.  But technically it would be luckier if he didn't have terminal cancer - and I'm sure that he would trade that marathon win for a clean bill of health in a split second.

Sometimes, what it comes down to is in the face of disaster is not how you got there or how you got through it but what you can pull out if the experience. What you choose to decipher and to take away from what you went through.  The perspective that you allow yourself to be given, so to speak. 

As I learned from Dad long before he got sick, it isn't what happens, it's what one's attitude about and one's reaction to what happens that  we can control.

"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than the facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, the circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company ... a church ... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past ... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convince that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you ... we are in charge of our attitudes."  ~Charles R. Swindoll

At Least

I know a lot of people who are competitive, but I think in some way I am the most competitive of all of them (ha ha, did you catch that???).

Early-onset competitiveness: that's me on the left, totally out-doing my toddler sister and my granddad at pull-ups.

That's why I've never been much of a fan of "at-leasts."  

I think it all started when I was about five years old.  I remember standing in my driveway one day, eating one of those red, white, and blue Bomb Pop popsicles, and being so sad when the last part of it dropped off the stick and fell onto the driveway.  My mom, who'd seen the whole thing happen, said, "Oh, well, at least you got to eat most of it!"  

But I didn't just want most of it, of course; I wanted ALL of it (especially the blue part at the bottom, which I still consider to be the best part!).  And thus began my distaste for the term "at least." 

Growing up, I remember hearing that term used pretty often, way too often for my taste, by both adults and by my peers.   I cringed inside when I heard other people say things like, "At least you tried!" and "At least we got some of what we wanted."  Every time I heard that phrase, I knew I should probably buy into that type of thinking; I realized that it was an expression of optimism and gratitude, but I saw it as settling. 

That has changed, though, since my dad got sick.  I guess going through the experience of caring for him during those ten weeks and then trying to cope with his death over the past couple of years has changed my view on at-leasts; these days I'm actually a pretty big fan of the term.  I hear it from the lips of others who loved him too - and from those who have also who've suffered through a similar experience, and I know we are in a club of sorts whose members know the true meaning of that phrase.  I've never liked consolation prizes, but I guess that's just another example of how tragedy and hardship hammer out perspective.  

I came across an idea shared by a fellow griever yesterday that made me think about my changed feelings for at-least type of concepts.  She said she would rather have had the person she'd lost and had to have suffered through living without him than never to have had that person in her life at all.  How profound.  

Happiness - Pursuit and Perspective

I remember the first time I had a running injury that affected not just my running but also bothered me in when I wasn't running.  I remember lying in bed at night with my foot throbbing and thinking about how I hadn't appreciated being injury-free before I'd gotten hurt.  In time, the foot got better and the pain went away; I went back to running and back to not taking much notice about how lucky I was to be pain free.

That's kind of how it works when someone you love is seriously ill.  Except that in many cases, I would venture to guess, that perspective sticks ...  

... because seeing a loved one suffer physically and emotionally and going through all the things that grave illness entails changes a person, not just for during that time period but forever.

Since my dad's diagnosis and his subsequent death ten weeks later, I've begun to view happiness as the absence of sadness -  and goodness in life as the absence of, well, badness.  

People talk a lot about the pursuit of happiness, the quest for the Holy Grail, thinking they will be happy if ... if they win the lottery, if they get a promotion, if they lose weight, if this or that happens.  I've been guilty of such myself in the past.  

But that was Before. Before Cancer.  Before Loss.  Before I knew.

And so here's another perspective for people who are perpetually in search of something more: conducting such a vigorous search for happiness or peace or satisfaction or whatever it is they are looking for eventually becomes a self-defeating quest; the crusade itself is a constant source of stress and anxiety that is likely interfering with the attainment of that very objective.  Instead of always looking for something more, something "better," it might be helpful if they take a few steps back and consider how lucky they are to have their everyday lives, to be in the midst of the usual stress and chaos, rather than the alternative, which I guess is either being completely alone with nothing or no one to care about - or trying to cope with such extraordinary problems that going back to those everyday things becomes the goal with happiness as the reward.

In the thick of the usual day in-day out struggles, it's so easy to get caught up in thinking that life is tough, that things aren't great, that there is something better out there that you wish you had.  But when adversity comes along, especially when it affects your health or that of your loved ones and especially when it is life threatening, you realize that you just want to go back to having things the way they were.  Your perspective becomes that you didn't need anything more, because life was already good.

I think that's what tragedy gives away, or at least that's one thing that we can choose to take away from tragedy.  Once we've been through it, we have that special realization, that insider's knowledge that things could always be worse, because we are all too aware that, because adversity can be lurking just around the corner, we need to appreciate the calm, the ordinary, and the mundane, and that happiness is not something that we need to pursue - it's something we need to recognize in what we are already fortunate enough to have.