On sadness
Last week I went to see former Jays manager John Gibbons speak at the Toronto Public Library. While waiting for the talk to begin, I opened Facebook. I’m almost never on it anymore, just to occasionally post a photo (or my latest Musing), wish people a happy birthday and spend time in my baseball group.
I still don’t know what compelled me to check it then, but the first post I saw was the death announcement of someone I went to university with. We had lived in the same dorm (residence as we call it here). I had no idea that he’d been sick, that he had been living with cancer for six years. I’d just wished him a happy 50th birthday less than a week before. But being on FB so rarely, I hadn’t seen the photos where he looked progressively thinner and wan, an early warning that all was not well.
And so I was sitting in the Bluma Appel room of the library exchanging messages with other university friends and my sister who knew him too, while simultaneously listening to Gibby crack jokes. My heart breaking over the thought of two young children losing their father while an audience laughed in the background. It gave me emotional whiplash.
Last month I was wishing people a happy birthday as I do every morning, prompted by a Facebook notification that lets me do them all at once. I accidentally clicked through to the profile of one FB acquaintance. Someone who I’d known from my time at March of Dimes, she had started a young stroke survivors group - having had one herself at 25-years-old.
I was shocked to discover that she had died over a year earlier. I couldn’t find much information, but as best I could determine the condition that had caused her first stroke had resulted in another one, this time fatal.
To my horror, I realized I had wished her a happy birthday last year - shortly after she had passed. I had no clue. I can’t even imagine how insensitive my cheerful ‘Happy birthday!!’ with a smiley face and heart emoji must have seemed to her family. To her husband and the young kids she left behind.
Social media lets you be both personal and so impersonal. I wondered if I should message her husband to apologize and offer my condolences. But he barely knew me, and there was a good chance he didn’t remember me at all. I decided it might make things worse. Instead, I lit a candle and sent out a prayer in her memory.
While texting my friend T, who I also went to university with, she asked me if I felt the sadness of life lately. Was it circumstance, was it midlife, or some combination of both? She wanted to know if I would write about death and dying. I worried it would be too sad. But she reminded me that being sad isn’t terrible. It just means you feel.
I thought I understood grief before my dad died, but I didn’t. I didn’t know how your days become fuzzy like you’re walking underwater, but the people around you keep moving like nothing has changed. How jarring that is. How patchy your memory gets in the immediate aftermath of a loss. How the people you thought would be there for you often aren’t, but how someone you didn’t expect to understand or care unexpectedly will be.
I am becoming acutely aware that the sands in my personal hourglass are running ever lower, and that none of us know how many grains we even started with. That we aren’t promised anything, or that not everyone will know when they are in the sunset of their life.
Sometimes when I don’t do much over a weekend, or I go to bed early or on the rare occasion sleep late, I worry that I’m letting what’s left of my life pass me by. That I’m not doing enough. Even though I don’t know what else I’m supposed to be doing. Maybe I think that because I don’t have kids, or a career like some of my well-known friends, I haven’t created a lasting enough legacy.
In Judaism we have something called the Tikkun Olam - the obligation to repair the world. Like everything in my faith, it has infinite interpretations. For me it’s that whenever you do leave the mortal plane, and go back to wherever we were before we’re born - you’ve made the effort to leave it better than you found it. And that it’s a daily effort, in small things like being kind, checking in on your friends, listening. Just being good. But I need to really believe that this IS enough, because what else is there?
Today though, I am sad. I will yield to it, lives gone so early is sad. And if you’re sad too, know I understand. I don’t know what else to say without sounding trite, other than always reach out to that person you’re thinking about. Try not to put that off until tomorrow if it can be done today.
Love is always enough.
A couple months ago, after sending a childhood friend I haven't seen for more than 20 years birthday wishes on Facebook, his mother "liked" my message. That family was like my second family; we lived across the alley from one another, they had two boys about my age, and I was in their home or outside with the boys probably close to half the days of my life from the ages of 5 to 12, before we gradually drifted apart, and were completely out of touch after high school. Mrs. Coughlin was practically a second mom to me during those years, and I was totally unprepared for how emotional seeing that "like" from her was for me, like a big hug from someone I didn't realize how much I missed.
Of course I went to her page, to see what it would tell me about how she's doing. I learned she and her husband still live in the same house, I learned one of the two boys I was so close to in grade school started a family a long time ago, and has two children now in high school... it was all wonderful. Then I came upon something else though, a picture of their youngest child, the boys younger sister, from when she was maybe 3 or 4 years old, close to the age I still picture her at, and with it was a message about how it was eight years since they'd lost her. Learning that she'd died when she was only 31 broke my heart.
I messaged Mrs. Coughlin, largely to express gratitude for how wonderful she'd always been to me, and to tell her how good it felt to see her name pop up, but also to express sadness and condolences for the staggering loss I didn't know the family had suffered years ago. She messaged me back, telling me how good it had felt when she saw my name, and how loved I was in the Coughlin home. She also told me a great deal about what her daughter had gone through for years leading up to her death, and it was devastating, both to know it, but also to realize how little I had thought about people who once meant so much to me.
Your final statement "Love is always enough." is enough for me to start the day as I head out the door to work, and a great reminder to try and spread it everyday.