Not a Reason But a Lesson; Reframing Grief
By Tatyana Maizel, Pathways Family and Community Services
I used to believe that everything happens for a reason. However, as I’ve grown older and learned that life happens without warning or apparent meaning, I’ve learned that sometimes, things just happen. Harold Kushner spent an entire book contemplating the idea of why do bad things happen to good people? Life does not discriminate who gets which rewards or merits, who dies young in good health or lives long in poor health, who is born with certain conditions and who escapes all wrongdoing they’ve ever done. Oftentimes, life is just plain hard and unfair.
Our brains gravitate toward the known and if we have uncertainty or lack answers, we make our own meaning. That is the beauty of our human brains: they are meaning-making machines meant to keep us alive. When we don’t have answers, we create stories. We feel lost or out of control otherwise. We search for something that makes life make sense, be it numerology, astrology, psychology, nature, religion, etc.
While grieving, we flow through many parts of the cycle, often more than once, and at the end (if ever there is one), we hope to make meaning, not in the event itself, but in what provides us with a semblance of peace that we can hold onto and makes our suffering somewhat worthwhile. I stand on the position that not everything happens for a reason, but there is always a lesson.
In a public speech, David Kessler once described the loss of his son, and what meaning-making he was able to attribute to it: not that his son died, but that he got to be his father for the time he was here. He considered the lessons he learned as a parent and what to do with this knowledge moving forward.
We do not ask for our hearts to be broken by the people we care about the most, but it does happen. For a reason? Perhaps, and perhaps not. But there is certainly a lesson in this: would we rather love and lose than not love at all? I certainly would. I would not like to go my whole life without feeling the joy and exuberance that comes with love, even knowing that the other side of it is truly loss, because love teaches us so much about ourselves and who we are, what we can tolerate, what doesn’t fit, how to trust ourselves, among many other things. It teaches us about people and values like respect, honesty, friendship, trustworthiness, choice, sacrifice, and responsibility.
We are unable to control the families, status, society, faith, or race we are born into. While there may be attributable reasons to our existence, there will certainly be lessons to learn along the way. What we choose to take away from our experiences and this lifetime is up to us. Life is our greatest teacher, and maybe what matters is who we become, who we surround ourselves with, and what we do with the lessons we learn. Focusing on the why may prove harmful, but tending to the lesson may show us our strength, resilience, and power.
As you reflect on this notion, I encourage you to look more at the lessons of an event and less for the reasons they may or may not hold. Could it have been done differently, and if so, how, and if not, why? Did you learn what or who deserves your time and energy? Did it bring you closer to your faith, your loved ones, or a new community? Did it help you take action on something you’ve been delaying? Sometimes these questions require time before we can answer them, and sometimes they need a little assistance from others in parsing through them. Don’t hesitate to ask for help from trusted individuals or reach out to a professional to sort through what’s happened to you and what you want to do with it.