Grief and Gratitude
- Nov 21
- 3 min read
By Cindy Eastman
In eight years, I’ve lost my mother, my sister, my father, and my daughter and I’ve written regularly about how it has impacted me and my family. As a writer, I’ve always relied on writing to help me process my experiences as I try to make sense of them. Particularly the challenging ones. I do that for myself and I try to do it for the students in my writing groups and workshops, because I believe that writing the truth is what allows writers to make meaning of the hard times we face. If we’re open to making meaning from these times, it’s an opportunity to experience both grief and gratitude.
But it isn’t always easy.
I don’t think grief and gratitude are mutually exclusive, but when one is in the throes of grief, gratitude isn’t typically the first thing that comes up. We have to first wade through shock and anger and devastation. We have to find a path through, seek people to rely on, rewire our brains for a different future. It’s an adjustment and it takes time to understand the new path we’re on through grief and loss. And sometimes, somewhere, along the way, a little glint catches our eye. We see things through a different lens and it feels different. At some point, in our challenge, we find something to be grateful for.
It's hard to allow ourselves to feel grateful when we’re mourning a great loss from our lives. Why should we feel happy? Or joy? Or gratitude? But of course grief doesn’t cancel out our other feelings and emotions, but it does ask to exist side by side with them. It’s so hard to figure out how to do that.
After my mom died, my husband and I brought my medically compromised dad home to live with us for what the whole family thought would be a very short time. The loss of my mom was devastating to him, but he also had Type 1 diabetes, a heart condition, mild cognitive impairment and was legally blind—he was fragile to say the least. But, as I should have expected from my dad, he rallied and was with us for the next four years—including the pandemic. But those were difficult times and my husband and I said good-bye to what we thought would be our way of life in our retiring years. But there was no way we could live from day-to-day resenting what we ourselves had decided to do. It was imperative that I remembered that I was caring, not only for an angry and grieving old man, but the father who had cared for me and taught me responsibility all my life. I sought out gratitude in order to be present for the breadth of his life, not just the end of it.
But it was my daughter Annie who taught me about how to feel gratitude in the face of the greatest of all challenges—an end stage cancer diagnosis. From the day of her diagnosis to her last day on earth, my daughter epitomized living gratefully.
Annie insisted that we go forward living in the present and in facts. She and I wrote a series of articles about living with cancer and each one was filled with the gratitude of family, of friends and even the kindness of strangers.
After her death, and it’s been the hardest thing in my life, her understanding that we can live in both grief and gratitude has been what has sustained my own ability to live it. And for that, I’m grateful.
Connect With Cindy
Comments