Grief and Gratitude
Last year on Thanksgiving, my family was gathered at my parents’ home in Portland. Their best friends of 30 years, Tom and Susan, were with us. This pair was my surrogate Aunt and Uncle throughout my childhood.
After everyone had settled in the living room for some wine and appetizers, my skinny blond 6-year-old nephew, a boy as much like Calvin from the cartoon strip as I’ve ever seen, sidled up to Susan’s chair and said quietly, “I made a cat out of clay with Auntie Chris and Daddy today.”
Susan’s very Swedish face opened with delight and just the right amount of mischief, her green eyes twinkling. “Did you really?” she whispered, moving her face just a couple inches closer to his.
I watched my nephew cringe with the pleasure of her attention, and remembered that feeling well. Susan used to do this for me, thirty years ago. She would walk into our house and her deep belly-laugh, her unruly strawberry blond waves, and her crinkly eyes that somehow seemed to share all my best secrets permeated the air. Her nickname for me was “My little magic poof.” She called me that the last time I saw her, too, this past Summer. The last time I would ever see her.
My nephew, in turn, leaned closer to Susan and lowered his voice. “Yeah,” he said. “I made three cats. And a rug, and four snakes.”
She whispered conspiratorially, “Would you let me see them?”
There was nothing he wanted to do more. Racing to the kitchen where he had stored his mini Sculpey creations, he carried the tray back as if it held jewels.
Susan looked at each jewel and marveled at it, saying all the right things— “This one has the most wonderful tail! Oh you made whiskers on this blue guy! Oh no, is that a poisonous snake?!”
After my nephew had gone to wash his hands for dinner, I said to Susan, “I remember feeling exactly that way around you when I was his age. How do you do it?”
She responded, with her characteristic twinkle, “I like to tell kids, however old you are, that’s how old I am on the inside.”
Susan passed away last week. As these things go, the immensity of her impact on the world became apparent after her death. She had taught in a high school, and people in the teaching profession can never really know the extent of their reach. Hers was far.
Since her death, memories of Susan have floated into my awareness, like a flake of seashell rising up from a deep murky ocean. Susan drinking a glass of white wine on my parents’ back deck while I showed off my non-existent hula hoop moves. My brother and I fighting over who got to tell Susan a family story. Being afraid Susan would love me less when I started getting bored of dollhouses and more interested in hair and clothes and kissing boys (she did not).
I don’t think I would have been able to recall these memories without the help of my grief. Through my bursts of tears, my telling God how unfair it is that Susan passed before her own elderly mother, and my lamenting that the world could have used a few more decades of her love and brightness, these joyful memories and feelings have emerged with crystal clarity.
As my grief has deepened over the past couple weeks since Susan’s passing, so has my gratitude.
And that’s the way of it, huh? Grief and gratitude live in each other’s shadow. As one grows tall, the other stretches out long. My family’s love for Susan has intensified our grief at her death, and conversely, our grief reminds us how much we are grateful for her life. Sometimes it feels like too much, this grief-gratitude see-saw… and yet the alternative is numbness and apathy, which is neither fitting nor honoring to Susan’s memory or my own feelings.
We Americans often try to shrink grief. We believe something is wrong with us for having emotions associated with grief— rage, waves of uncontrollable sadness, regret, longing, feeling utterly broken. We give ourselves a bit more permission to feel these things when there’s been a death, but for other losses— moving homes or cities, infertility, break-ups and divorce, missed experiences that we can never get back, saying goodbye to the baby to welcome the toddler, the toddler to welcome the child, the child for the adolescent, and the eternal goodbye to our children when they become adults… We don’t tend to cut ourselves a lot of slack to grieve these things.
Which means we never really give ourselves the chance to feel the true magnitude of our thankfulness.
Grief is water, washing away the gunk that makes our gratitude dull and opaque. Grief brightens our gratitude, gratitude likewise polishes our grief when grieving time comes. We grieve because we love, and our grief in turn helps us love more vibrantly and steadfastly. It is one of the most frustrating dialectics out there, this grief-gratitude pairing.
This Thanksgiving, you may feel more grief than gratitude. Maybe you fantasize about upturning the holiday table at the mere mention of thankfulness. Maybe loss is more real for you than presence. That’s okay. Grief is a necessary partner to gratitude.
Or maybe you are alone this weekend and your main goal for this Thursday is to just get through it. You might be suffering under the numbing weight of depression, unable to feel either sadness or gratefulness. That’s okay too. Feelings will come again, you will be able to participate in this blessing and curse of human emotions. (And, therapy can help with this, FYI).
Or maybe this Thanksgiving you are bursting with gratitude, spending time with your most beloveds, and there is only a quiet nagging sense that life is impermanent and the presence of these people is not guaranteed. Maybe your gratitude tempts you to cling, to control, to forget the reality of grieving and impermanence for a day. Maybe you keep trying to swat away the grief like a mosquito. That’s okay too. We almost never get a pure experience of Thankfulness without grief lurking in its shadow. Not if we’re aware, anyway.
This Thanksgiving, may you be kind to yourself and your loved ones as we all try to hold the paradox of this season. May you welcome your grief as much as your gratitude.
