I was reading an article where I came across the statement that sorrow makes life rich and turns us toward an appreciation of all things meaningful. Oh my goodness NO. Sorrow does not make life rich. If it does, it isn't sorrow. It is something else. Disappointment maybe. An unfulfilled wish or dream that, when it dies, leaves room for something else, something just as good or better. But not Real Sorrow.
In "Give All to Love" Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) says "when half gods go the gods arrive." When I was young and a boy I loved broke up with me, I repeated these words over and over. He was a "half-god" I decided; he had to be. Someone better would appear, and did--the person I still love. So as bad as I felt about the break-up, I knew it wasn't the end. The future was still limitless--only he would not be in it.
When real sorrow occurs we are more likely to feel that our life as we knew it is gone. If someone has hurt us to the core, that fact never changes, whether we forgive and reconcile or not. The devastation may recede but it remains an immutable fact. The repentance, the forgiveness, the reconciliation may make our life richer, but the hurt itself or the sorrow over it does not.
If someone we love dies young, real sorrow is the only response. The death will never be right. If someone we love is mentally ill, real sorrow is the only response. Their transformation into someone whose personality is borderline, hurtful, fathomless, does not make life rich. Not theirs, not ours.
At the same time, sorrow is not despair. Sorrow can abate, as we become better at living with it's cause, like a person who has lost a leg becomes better at being a one-legged person. Or a parent can becomes better at living with the loss of a child. What caused the sorrow may change. Sorrow does not kill resilience and it does not kill us. We know we don't actually die of our broken hearts because they can break again.
Sorrow can be the most appropriate response. It isn't the liar. Depression is.
This summer two well-known people took their lives: Kate Spade (d. June 5, 2018) and Anthony Bourdain (d. June 8, 2018)--celebrity designer and master chef. (Post: HEALTHY ATTITUDES (ULTIMATE THINGS). We feel sorrow over that. Since then the rise in suicide rates has been in the news. Like a rise in poverty or in the numbers of uninsured, behind each statistic is the suffering of a precious man, woman or child. Today I read of a 9 year-old boy found by his mother--this is almost too hard to write--hanging in his room. It was the 4th day of school and the bullying from last year had begun again. These three succumbed to more than sorrow; they succumbed to despair, the wall with no door.
The poet Longfellow (1807-1882) said, "Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not." Some people say that everyone gets depressed sometimes, but everyone just doesn't talk about it.
In response to the recently publicized suicides, many people wrote in to the New York Times about their own encounters with not wanting to live. None of them said that this kind of sorrow made their lives richer. No. What they did say is important for everyone to hear. They said, "Depression is a Liar."
Depression made them feel trapped, made them think that no one cared, that ending their life was a good solution, even reasonable. This made me think about the post I wrote about loving ourselves (Post: Fall in Love with Yourself for Valentine's). There is not a person alive whom no one cares about. Not one. Strangers care. God cares.
The Universe or their own inner being cares. If we feel the lie that no one loves us, we can still love ourselves, love our world, love the trees and stars and sky, love the universe, love God. Love all of these long enough to realize that yes, "Depression is a Liar." It never tells the truth.
Then what? Therapy, prayer, medication if necessary, seeking the ways to nourish our souls, living for the moments we can't put into words. Setting our intentions for a peaceful mind, a loving heart, a healthy body. And being prepared to do it again and again.
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