“Everybody falls
sometimes
Gotta find the
strength to rise
From the ashes and
make a new beginning
Anyone can feel the
ache
You think it’s more
than you can take
But you are stronger,
stronger than you know
Don’t you give up now
The sun will soon be
shining
You gotta face the
clouds
To find the silver
lining”
(What Faith Can Do, Kutless 2009)
One of the
most difficult things a person will have to do in their life is grieving over
the loss of a loved one. To degrees, dealing with the death of someone we know can
be an emotional challenge. It’s not even the initial shock that does the most
damage. Sure, we weep and mourn and cry out through the pain, especially at the
onset of things. It is the constant pang of hunger for the person that rules
the roost. The ending is simply the beginning, maybe not for the dead but most
certainly for the people who loved and cared for them. Grief is a hard road,
with very expensive toll booths set up along the way. It can seem as if we keep
on paying but we go nowhere. Although each person goes through this wave of
sorrowing, it is the process of moving on that is the true obstacle to healthy
emotional survival. It can take weeks or even years for a mourner to return to
some semblance of a normal life. The gaping hole left behind may never be full,
not ever. Depending on your relationship with the deceased, you may never
really be whole again. Death can steal any hope, any resolve you may have
gained along your pathway. Most of us eventually heal, able to face the world
again regardless of the missing pieces stolen away. We don’t really heal, if
the truth be told. We simply get used to the pain, we get used to the empty.
Grief is like going bald, you just get used to it. You adjust to the loss. There are those who
do not adjust accordingly. They wallow in it, basking in the pain, basking in
the misery. For some, the death can mean surrender, a means of letting go of
everything, including themselves. People hurt so bad that they literally lay
down and die. On the other hand, there are people who rise above the situation
and carry on to lead productive and balanced lives. The variables are
apparently connected to both our coping skills and our sense of something
greater than ourselves. It is hard to find a silver lining when all you have to
work with is ashes.
“Every silver lining has a cloud.”
(Mary Kay Ash, American businesswoman)
The world
stopped turning the second he walked into the place. They had only lived there
a few short months but it had felt like home regardless. He could smell her in
the bathroom, her scent lingered like this on most good days. Her could hear
her on the messages left while he was away. He was at work when the call came
in and it lead him to the darkest of places. He just stood there. Her body looked
cold and seemed hard and unforgiving. Death did not become her. They had to remove
him from the room, when he collapsed in agony on the cold morgue floor.
Identifying her was a memory he would never escape. As a matter of fact, he
could never escape the wretchedness that enveloped him from the start. The car
that took her at 100 MPH, took him as well. There was no blood, no shattered
glass, just a tunnel that swirled deeper and deeper into the recesses of his
being. He jumped right down that rabbit hole. He told himself he would never
really get over the loss of his soul mate. They had been so happy together that
he just assumed it would last forever. He was wrong in almost every way. The void
she left grew more hollow and his world completely fell apart. For days, he
tried to face this life without her. He did not do a very good job. The empty
was more than he could handle. He had been with his wife for almost 10 years,
but each day he existed without her seemed to last forever. It had no end, not
for him at any rate. One day his mind shattered. It was much too soon for him
to rifle through her things. When he found her wedding dress, tucked into the
back of her walk-in closet, he went from mental to insane. He started screaming
and he could not stop. Every day he sits looking out the window, rocking
himself into some semblance of aware. He is as lost as he could be. There are
others in this place, different souls but all yearning for even one second of
clarity. He just sits there, day after day, watching for her to appear just
outside heavy glass, on the patch of land beneath the window. At night he waits
for her to come to bed. She never appears but he keeps on waiting. In the end,
the numbness of his madness was nothing but his escape. He never had to say
goodbye. He never stopped looking for her to show up. Perhaps, for him, the madness
was more like a silver lining.
“Every dark cloud has a silver lining, but lightning kills
hundreds of people each year who try to find it.” (E.L. Kersten, American author)
She was 84
years old when her husband died in his sleep. She awoke to his coldness and
then life went on without him. After 58 years together, you would have thought
she would shed more than a few simple tears. She was balanced even though the
world they shared together had disappeared in the blink of an eye. She carried
on without him, or so it seemed. They both knew that the day they parted would
come sooner than later. For years they planned for each other’s passing.
Preparation made things easier, easier and quicker. She didn’t have to think if
she didn’t want to. She handed the undertakers a copy of his wishes and left
all the hubbub to them. After the funeral, after they lowered him into the
ground, she went on in the strongest of ways. The first thing she did was move
from their 2-bedroom apartment to a small single bedroom 3 floors above. She
lightened her load, raising concern that giving away most of their belongings
meant something more than mere survival. They were wrong. For years she
lingered alone, always planning, always making sure that what needed to be done
was done. She was finally able to feel some sense of freedom, at least after
the initial shock wore off. She missed her husband, on occasion, but she meant
to seize the day regardless of any grieving she might encounter. For over half
a decade she danced by herself in the proverbial corner. She hunted down the
silver lining. Her faith didn’t help her through. Her family, her many friends
all did nothing but to try and ease her pain. She really didn’t have much to
speak of. There was something in her resolve. She picked herself up when she
wasn’t even down. She went on and she never looked back. She should never have
tried to take the stairs by herself. At almost 90, she was fearless still. She
slipped and did some grave damage. They say she may have had a heart attack,
which precipitated the fall. No one can be sure and she never revealed what had
happened. From her hospital bed, she made it well known that she would never
return to that building and especially those apartments. No one could really
say why. They placed her in a lovely retirement home where she could chat up a
storm all day and read in the privacy of her room come the night. It didn’t
take much for time to claim her. Mere months after the fall, she passed away,
quietly, peacefully. She had gone ahead and planned for this. She made sure she
was ready and, apparently, she was when she left us. Sometimes things just
happen and there is no rhyme or reason to them. People die every day.
“Live with the assumption that every day it will rain. If it
does, you were right. If it doesn’t, you were fortunate.” (Zack W. Van, American
author)
His
grandparents had passed away in his youth. He knew what it meant to grieve and
he thought he was prepared. He was not. It had been years since he saw his
brother, years since they spoke a word. The cancer took him slowly, they said.
The funeral was an experiment in horror. So many faces brought together by the
most horrible of fates. Each member of the family was a reminder of the way it
all had been. Name after name was chiselled in the guest book, people wanted to
be recognized for coming. He would have liked it, one may suppose. All those
years he spent alone, outside of his family, and now they all magically
appeared with little contrition or need for absolution. Most of the day was
spent holding it all in. It really didn’t hit until he got home. It broke him
in the most savage of ways. The world turned upside down then right side round
again. Perhaps it was the grief talking, perhaps it was the guilt. Perhaps the
combination is what made it so hard for him to breathe. His wife stood at a
distance, unsure of what to do and what to say. His insanity raged on, his
anger vented at himself and his situation. He had never felt like this before.
Sure, his grandparents and other family members had passed away throughout his
history but his response was never so extreme. This was his first death, at
least in a sense. His panic, his instability seemed to grow with each passing
day. His only wish was that things had been different. Most pipe dreams rarely
come to be. It was weeks before his temperament started to settle. Like all
good mourners, he picked himself up and he tried to move on. The pain, the
horror would return to him in surges. The further away from the death he got,
the more critical those surges got. Each episode sent him back to reeling. Time
keeps on going, that’s the silver lining in all this misery. No matter how affected
you are by the death of a loved one, no matter the loss, eventually enough time
will have passed that you can move forward, move past it or at least try to.
Some people face death head on, pushing back against the ways of our mortal
coil. Some people run in the face of such complete sadness. A fair amount of
time has passed since that day and this one. He walks softer in a sense, aware,
much more aware. Time has made things better, he can cope with much more
resolve. His still misses his brother. If only he could go back and change the
way things were. We can never go back. The best we can do is affect change here
and now. We must make the silver lining.
“Our happiness is certainly mixed in with the tragedies of
life.
You have to find the lemonade.
You have to find the silver lining in the middle of everything
that happens in life.” (Chandra Wilson, American actress)
One moment
he was there and the next he went missing. It’s not even that he was missing,
rather just gone. They found him cold and dead near the train tracks on this
side of town. The bottle of gin was frozen to his hand. His coat discarded only
500 feet away.
His frozen body more a statue than some mound of flesh. The
coroner simply confirmed his fate. He was not only drunk, he was smashed. He
died of exposure and that was that. The first weeks were trying. She had no
choice but to pick up and carry on without him. After 6 months, she started to
be social again. After a year, she started dating. She began a new life even
though she did not wish to leave the one she had. Each step on her journey
seemed a challenge. She had not escaped without consequence. She felt guilty,
mostly for mere survival. She felt remorse and contrition. She felt every
emotion you could imagine she did, all the while she kept pressing onward, moving
forward, eyes straight ahead. The second year without him brought more struggle
and more pain. She lost almost everything to a monster in disguise. He could
scream louder than she could. As the dust started falling, she met the next great love of
her life. He was everything that she needed at the time. He needed her just as
much as she needed him. They found each other and stayed that way. Twenty years
later and she still goes on. Times are not nearly as chaotic as they used to
be. A long marriage, a peaceful life and serenity have come with the territory
called living. She often sits in silence, listening for the clouds that would
pass her by. On occasion, she can hear a tinkling, a little ringing from
somewhere beyond her. She imagines it’s just the silver lining.
“Too many people miss the silver lining because they’re
expecting gold."
(Maurice Setter, English football player)
When it comes to grief, I don’t
believe that most people even consider a silver lining. We go through life
always desperate so we lack the ambition to notice. It can be difficult to get
past one’s lot in life and recognize what you have. People just don’t get it.
With every good there comes bad. With all the bad will come good. There is
always a silver lining. You may not see it. You might fail to even register
what it is but it is there nonetheless. The grass really is greener on the
other side. When someone dies, we rarely stop and see the purpose found in
their lesson. We fail to recognize the significance of our feelings and where
they lead us. There is always this schism, between what is and what might just
be. When we experience the death of someone close to us, we change. When we
change, we affect greater change. In hindsight, we all see it. There was
something there all along, we just didn’t stop and pay it attention. Death is
nasty, there is no doubt about it. It does not have to be so harsh. We can
learn, we can conclude, we can summon things worth knowing but we cannot escape
its grasp. Either way, even in the darkest cloud there is always a silver
lining.
“Hey mister don’t
shadow box with me
Cause I don’t wanna
someday be an old man cursing what I might have been
Now I realize what I
see that the wind was never chasing me
And I don’t feel so
alone
I can close my eyes
I’m going home
Behind the clouds the
sun is shining
Some rain will fall
no use crying
Oh no, not me
Got a picture in my
head that won’t let go of
Young man running in
search of
Count your blessings
Cause it’s in your
soul”
(In Your Soul, Corey Hart 1988)
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