Grief is the price we pay for love.
Queen Elizabeth II –

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today,
and creates a vision for tomorrow.

Melody Beattie –

This morning, a dear friend posted a photo of his 5-year-old granddaughter in honor of her birthday. Five!! Already.

Earlier this month, the day passed that marked a year since the death of my friend and mentor, Roy Sampsel. Too soon.

So it goes with time. And so, with being in these wild and precious lives.

There are joys – the celebrations of birth, of anniversaries, of success, the startling beauty of a dawn. And we know there are as many sorrows – lives ending, break-ups, failures, Paradise, Sandy Hook, Katrina.

The sorrow can appear to outweigh the joy. The weight of darkness and confusion – the isolation in memories, questions, emotions. We look around and see only wasteland. No one with whom to admit, or even share our fear, our concern, our fatigue, our deep-deep grief.

Even as we give in to the crazy-making seduction of believing we can control outcomes (that we ought to – that we’re losers if we don’t), the whole cascade of life circumstances mostly feels like endurance – popped from paddle to paddle in the giant pinball machine of our fate. And so we move through day after day, each our own version of Debbie Downer.

Oddly, there’s merit in just going there. In being entirely consumed by the helplessness and despair. In its time, it’s actually the healthiest response we can make.

Rabbi Earl Grollman is 93 now. Across his life he has developed and honed his understanding of grief. He has done this by supporting himself and others in the fact of grief. As the Rabbi advises, “Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.”

If we don’t grieve, we don’t grow. If we don’t let go, risk and embrace the ache of losing, we can’t see what remains. We can’t see the reliability of dawn, the promise in every birth, the miracle in anniversaries, built as they are on one step – one day – at a time. If we don’t grieve, we have no way of recognizing our lifelong skill with improvisation.

Here’s the good news. If you’re reading this, you have successfully lived every single minute of your life with uncertainty. You are here. Already you are a lifelong improvisation artist. You can’t escape it.

The moments that emerge as nodes for joy or sorrow, contentment or distress – those moments are not of a single piece. Check and see. There are gaps. Perhaps way more space – more quiet – than discrete events to which emotions attach.

Survivors who do best in the face of traumatic events come to know what the rest of us may find uncanny. Right in the center of the shock and confusion, an uncommon quality of attention can reveal the presence of – well – presence itself. The broad reach of peace and quiet as the stage upon which great loss plays out. A capacity to hold it all, and a gratitude for the inexplicable quiet – the love – weaving it together.

I still ache with the loss of my mentor, Roy. But my grief is now the sweet measure of my gratitude for the decade we knew and worked with each other. Taught together, saw together the vast goodness and brilliance of the people in our classes. Circumstances were wildly unpredictable across that time, but the friendship grew, the students enrolled. And the learning went exponential as together with those students we came to ways of seeing and knowing none of us could have gotten to alone.

Then there is my friend’s 5-year-old granddaughter. Eyes lit up with the wild precious life that is hers alone. Already, I’m certain, her days have held joy and sorrow. I am also certain she was born, as all of us were, into the infinite gratitude of a planet ready and waiting for the particular brilliance each one of us brings.

Grief and gratitude. We have the opportunity to pay attention. To feel it all. To improvise. And, as Joanna Macy suggests, “to be fully present to what is happening in the world.” Including the constant peace and quiet beneath and between.