The High Road in Grief Recovery

You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

I was on the phone with a colleague that I don’t speak to very often when I opened up about my husband’s cancer. I was struggling and very fearful of the future. I was exhausted and spent.

I understand, she said. A few years ago, she had also been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. She didn’t tell anyone other than her immediate family until just before her surgery. She told her colleagues and friends at work that she was taking a year off for surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. She wouldn’t keep in touch with them about her progress. More than anything, she wanted a clean break to hunker down with her family and dedicate herself to treatment. Although I was sad for what she had gone through, the validation that someone understood my pain was incredible.

Here was a person that understood the dumpster fire that cancer had wreaked on our lives. Here was a soul that could grasp my innermost fears of losing my husband. She knew all about the dread before chemotherapy, worries about my children’s future, and the general fog that I lived in. She understood my dread before visiting the oncologist. Would a new test result be shared that showed the treatments weren’t working? Anxiety would enter my body and nestle into my chest.

But while I was full of fear, she was exceedingly positive. The cancer had changed her life and her family’s life in a beautiful way. They appreciated one another more than they had ever done before. Time together meant something much deeper. The vacations and family dinners were longer. She loved and was loved more completely. The cancer had been a transformative gift for her and the family. You’ll see, she said.

Until this point, I had felt a magical connection in our shared experiences. But when she said that cancer was a gift, I suddenly felt like I was on Mars, and she was on Venus. It was like we were standing in alternate universes with each interpreting the world from a perspective that was upside down from the other. While I hated his cancer, she embraced it as a life changing bump in her journey and was thankful for how it had changed her personal and family relationships. You will be grateful, she said.

When she said those words, I stopped breathing.

I was awestruck. Her words became lodged in my brain, and I turned them over again and again. Then, I realized what she was doing. She was fighting the anger and grief demons, with the most powerful of human emotions –gratitude and love. Grief tried to pull her down into the swampy bog – and she countered by taking the high road and rising above the negative emotions.

I had the feeling that she was sent to me to show me the way forward, like an angel. She was teaching me that it was possible to rise in my recovery using positive emotions. Although it might be possible, I could see already how hard this would be.

First, I felt that I could never be grateful for his cancer. This was more humanity than I could conjure from the charred remnants of my soul. But I was intrigued by the idea that one could feel gratitude for some aspects of the lifechanging experience stimulated by grief or loss. Especially, if that gratitude led to a change in oneself for a better and higher purpose.

She began by explaining to me that I would never be the same again. Agreed. I felt broken, like a shell of my former self. A few moments before he told me had cancer, I genuinely believed that my healthy husband would outlive me. I would never need to know a world without him, and we would grow old and gray together. Now, the future was gray.

My friend went on to say that grief would change me for the better and I would eventually be grateful for how it opened my eyes. It would change how I interacted with people in my life, how I spent my time on Earth, and how I cherished the small moments. Life is a journey, and I would emerge stronger from this experience and treasure my husband even more. My relationship with my family would become more meaningful. Eventually, I would be grateful for how this experience had changed me.

How could I be grateful for something that would reduce my husband’s life expectancy and ultimately take him from me? There could be no harder challenge for my personal growth. Yet, I didn’t feel that I could go on without a radical change in my outlook. I still had the ever-tightening vise-grip around my own chest that I had come to equate with my grief misery. My body and mind felt worn out. I was desperate for love, happiness, and peace for our family.

Yet, the sentiment of what she was saying felt true. I had already begun to feel a change inside of me. I appreciated my husband and our family more than I ever had before. When we took the dog for a walk, the air was sweeter, the leaves were greener, and the flowers more beautiful. When a bird was singing, I would stop and listen to their song. Work became less important, and I became more in touch with what was truly important.

Over the next few months, we continued to talk about her gratitude. She had made peace with dying if that was to be the eventual outcome. In the place of anger and grief, she felt gratitude and love for her family, her life, and remaining time. After facing her fears, she had chosen to truly live.

I knew that gratitude was a powerful emotion that was linked with greater happiness. Psychology research had shown that people who developed a practice of gratitude had more positive emotions, better mental health, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. Instead of feeling gratitude for his cancer (which I don’t know that I can ever do), could I instead feel gratitude for having met my husband, our time together and the family that we built? If I could leverage these feelings of gratitude to fight my grief, I thought that I could make a lot of progress.

Feeling gratitude for one’s grief and loss isn’t simple. For me, I would need to let go of my anger at his cancer, my guilt for not having caught it earlier, my fears for the future and all the rest of the negative baggage. That oversized luggage of negative emotions that I was carrying around felt like a vise-grip tightening its hold on my chest. I needed to breathe again. It was time to try to let this stuff go.

Secondly, I would need to see life as a gift, rather than a given. I don’t know why this is so difficult. We are all mortal with a beginning and an end. Why is it shocking when someone dies? Why do we live our life as if we will all live forever? I needed to take my gratitude practice down to the very simple act of living. Each day that he (and I and everyone else that I loved) was a gift.

Finally, I would need to meet the grief demons with an open heart and show them love and gratitude. They had changed my life and I would become a better person for it. Hence, the writing of this book. I was ready to take the high road even if it was the greatest challenge of my life.