Let Sadness Happen

Several months ago, your father started to become sick. Both he and you wondered what was wrong with him. He went to the doctor, but the doctor could find no problem. As time went on, things got worse. You took your father back to the doctor, and the doctor ran some tests. In the following months, more symptoms developed and more tests were run, but the doctors never seemed to have a good enough answer. They would come up with diagnoses… And then, sometimes, they would just say that your father had a bad cold, and that he was depressed.

You were of course scared and frustrated. Meanwhile, you had to try to keep up with your classes. You asked friends to take notes for you when you had to go and help your dad. You studied halfway through the nights. You started having anxiety attacks, but of course, you didn’t tell anyone. Eventually you dropped a class. You drank so much coffee you got a cavity from the sweetener. The caffeine got you through finals…though you still bombed a test. Finally, you could go home and help your father, who had deteriorated drastically.

Your dad was starting to have trouble getting dressed. He was in a lot of pain. Eventually the doctors prescribed synthetic marijuana (still with no solid diagnosis). And then it happened. Your father ended up in the emergency room, and was finally diagnosed with lung cancer. It had spread to his bones. He had a few weeks left to live.

It seems like a bit of an extreme scenario, I know. And yet, some of us have faced or will face extreme scenarios. Or perhaps our situations will never be this sort of technicolor suffering, but they are their own throbbing sort of pain. The really important question that we have to ask is, “What happens next?” Where will the story go now?

At this point, the person who is suffering is facing crisis mode. It’s very common to analyze a crisis situation in someone else’s life using a model such as the five stages of grief. Such a model would tell you that when a person faces a crisis of some sort of grief or loss, they are going to go through stages of anger, denial, bargaining, depression and (if they make it this far), acceptance.

Another perspective is that, in our crises, we can abandon ship. The more extreme the crisis, the more appealing it sounds to just find relief in not existing at all. Will we choose to end our lives? Will we choose some other form of escape (like drugs or alcohol)?

I propose that one of the best things we can do in a crisis is a step that is not found in the “Five Stages of Grieving”, and is actually often not given a true voice in tendencies that lean toward escapism. I propose that maybe we should allow ourselves to be sad. Yes, one step not mentioned among the “five steps” is simply mourning. It is fine and even good to deeply grieve our losses, as long as we do that in a proper way.

Sometimes good things can happen when a person mourns on their own. And sometimes mourning benefits from happening in community. It can be good to look beyond yourself, and find others who will grieve with you. (If you think about it, society has such a pattern built into it, as is exemplified when we do such things as hold funeral services.) It can be our instinct to turn away from those who love us when we are hurting, but sometimes having even just a little contact with them and letting them be sad with us – even by just giving us a hug – is a precious thing.

Proper grief on its own can be so helpful in a crisis. Yet, if that’s all of the “good stuff” about facing something difficult in your life, that’s pretty disappointing, isn’t it? Thankfully, there are better things coming. After a while, a proper season of grieving tends to taper. We don’t stop being sad, but we start to remember what happiness is. And there’s something better still. In my own crisis, I found that there was not only happiness waiting on the other side, but there was also something much more important: joy. Happiness is the sort of feeling that can come and go based on what’s happening around you. Joy is learning how to soar with the eagles, even when the updraft under your wings is coming from a cold front.

Perhaps for the moment we could compare joy to true comfort and peace. Where do these things come from? I found them in a promise: “Weeping may last for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” It was my God Who said that, and I have found it to be true.

The thing I lost was my music. I believe only a musician can fully understand what such a loss means. When I would play the piano, I could express what was inside of me. When I performed on the stage, I felt alive in a way I have never experienced since injuries ended my ability to play the piano. But when God comforted me, I realized that I will have that music again in heaven. Meanwhile, he has comforted my heart so that I can have joy right now, to live in this moment. That joy has opened my eyes to the life that I do have, and to the love that my God has for this world around me that he has made.