I’ve spent quite a lot of my life being unhappy for one reason or another. Most of those reasons don’t really matter now. I wasn’t a very happy child, for reasons that are entirely in the past. I suffered a nervous breakdown at nineteen, and struggled with depression for several years. I was in unrequited love throughout my twenties, which was hard.
Since my marriage, ten years ago in August, I have in general been much more able to reach out my hand and grasp the joy. But of course, we are human beings in a fallen world, and there have been bad times. There was my husband’s illness which began in our second year of our marriage and caused our relationship to founder. We underwent counselling and built a much stronger relationship as a result, but there were two hard years.
Throughout that time, babies were very much on our agenda, but in human terms we needed to work on our relationship, and from a faith perspective we needed to be as sure as we could that we were following God’s will for our family. At last, everything fell into place and we started trying to conceive… and I was ill with labyrinthitis for most of the next year.
At last, after two years, I fell pregnant, and after a difficult pregnancy, three years ago we were waiting for our little girl. She will be three tomorrow, and nothing in the world has ever been a greater source of joy.
She will be three tomorrow. We never dreamt, three years ago, that she would still be an only child on her third birthday.
She’ll be three tomorrow, and she has started asking for a brother and a sister. Her angel siblings are definitely part of her parents’ lives, but how can you explain something like that to a little person who has no concept of death or of Heaven?
This is a bittersweet day. My birthday, yesterday, was full of joy, and I’m certain that tomorrow will be joyful too. So all the ambiguity and conflicting feelings and grief have come out today.
What is it like, to be a person whose inclination is always to embrace joy, and also to be someone who deals with grief and depression? I often feel two-headed, like Janus, but my two heads are joy and grief rather than the past and future.
In practical terms, what usually happens is that either grief or joy is uppermost. They are not opposites, but neither do they coexist comfortably.
There was a time when I felt very wary about accepting or expressing joy. When there is so much sadness in my life, how can it be right to be happy? But when it’s summer, and a day of celebration, or an ordinary winter’s day full of quiet happiness, it is not wrong to feel good. The painful thoughts and the grief will still be there when the happiness recedes.
Neither is it wrong to feel sad. The last two years have been full of sadness. I never knew it was possible to feel this bad and still to get out of bed every morning. Even on the days when I am overwhelmed with grief, my innocent child has mostly happy days.
And, when the latest wave of sorrow passes, there is joy to be found.
So perhaps this is the answer. Grief comes in waves, unpredictable, uncontrollable, terrifying and overwhelming. But if you are a person to whom joy comes naturally, in between the waves are the quiet calms of joy.
Joy in the Mourning 