Grateful and Grieving

You can be thankful for what remains and still grieve what didn't.

Thanksgiving is in two days, which means we've officially entered the time of year when everyone starts telling us what we're supposed to be grateful for.

Family. Friends. Health. Opportunities. The roof over our heads. The food on the table.

All good things.

All things I am grateful for.

But I've been thinking about how strange gratitude can feel when you're hurting.

There's this unspoken idea that being grateful should somehow cancel out being sad. That if you look around and recognize everything you still have, you shouldn't spend so much time thinking about what you lost.

As if emotions work like math.

Five good things minus one terrible thing equals happy.

Unfortunately, nobody told my brain.

I've spent a lot of this year feeling guilty for being unhappy because, objectively, I have a good life.

I have people who love me. I have a family I can go home to. I'm studying something I care about. I have friends who keep checking on me even when I've been terrible at checking on them.

I have more than a lot of people do.

And I've still been heartbroken.

For a while, I thought those two things couldn't exist together.

I thought sadness in the middle of a good life made me ungrateful.

So I tried reminding myself of everything I had whenever I started thinking about what I'd lost.

It didn't work.

Mostly it just made me sad and guilty, which seems like a terrible two-for-one deal.

I'm starting to understand that gratitude isn't supposed to erase grief.

It can sit beside it.

You can love the people at your table and notice the person who isn't there.

You can laugh at something stupid and feel a memory hit you thirty seconds later.

You can have a genuinely good day and still cry that night.

One doesn't make the other less real.

I think we put too much pressure on ourselves to choose an emotion.

Happy or sad.

Grateful or grieving.

Moving forward or missing what was behind us.

Maybe we're allowed to be complicated.

Maybe healing isn't replacing one feeling with another. Maybe it's learning that you can hold more than one without letting either one consume you.

I'm going home this week.

And I already know there will be moments that feel different.

There will be traditions that carry memories I didn't ask them to carry. There will probably be a second when I look around the table and notice something missing before I notice everything that's there.

I'm not going to punish myself for that.

But I'm also going to try not to let the empty space become the entire table.

Because there are people sitting around it who stayed.

People I love.

People who have loved me through a year when I haven't always been particularly easy to reach.

And I want to be present enough to notice them.

Maybe that's what gratitude looks like this year.

Not pretending I didn't lose something.

Not forcing myself to call the loss a blessing.

Not finding some beautiful reason everything happened exactly the way it was supposed to.

I'm still not convinced everything happens for a reason.

Sometimes terrible things happen because people make terrible choices.

Very inspirational, I know.

But something good doesn't have to come from every painful thing for good things to still exist around it.

That's the distinction I'm learning.

My life doesn't have to be perfect before I appreciate it.

And I don't have to stop missing what I lost before I'm allowed to love what remains.

So this Thanksgiving, I'm not making a list of everything I should be grateful for.

I'm just going to look around.

At the people.

At the noise.

At the ridiculous amount of food someone inevitably made.

At whatever argument my family manages to start before dessert.

And I'm going to let myself be there.

All of me.

The grateful parts.

The grieving parts.

The parts that are healing.

And the parts that aren't there yet.

Maybe gratitude isn't pretending the empty spaces don't exist.

Maybe it's refusing to let them make you overlook everything that still does.

You are allowed to grieve what you lost and be grateful for what remains. Healing doesn't require you to choose between missing the past and loving the life that's still waiting for you. Your heart is big enough to hold both.

Until next Tuesday.

— S.