A challenge for readers: Choose a word to describe my weekend
What adjectives would you choose to describe a weekend like this one?
You go to a reception attended by friends you haven’t seen for years. There’s lots of good food. The room is filled with laughter. You arrive early and stay late, and you’re warmed by all the reconnecting and encouragement you receive and give.
You spend the weekend with your daughter, catching up on each other’s lives, enjoying long talks and friends and good food and more laughter.
She helps you tackle a couple of projects around the house. By the time she leaves, your closets are cleaner and the patio furniture is in the garage for the winter.
On the Thursday before the weekend, you visit your Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife and decide to try a music activity. You open your computer and choose a YouTube video featuring fresh renditions of old hymns, with the lyrics displayed over beautiful landscapes. She sings along on some of them, whole verses or just snatches of phrases, without even looking up to read the words.
Her hands are busy with a fiddle cloth someone provided for the residents where she lives. Occasionally she looks up and smiles at you when she realizes you’re singing too. The words remind you of long-held truths, and you feel close to God.
Many adjectives would summarize such a weekend. Let’s settle on the simplest of them: GOOD
Another weekend
Now, let’s choose a word to describe another set of weekend experiences.
You attend the memorial service for the 40-year-old son of two of your best friends. He died too quickly and too soon, and the tragedy of it is a heavy weight.
You offer your daughter the chance to look at her mother’s clothes and jewelry and choose what she would like to wear herself. You have mental pictures of your wife in each garment carefully folded by your daughter to take with her.
You’ve come to terms with the fact that your wife will never need those sweaters or jackets or slacks or earrings or necklaces again. You must let them go. How will you feel when you see your daughter wearing them?
Your daughter goes with you to visit her mother at the memory care community. Evelyn hardly looks up from the magazines preoccupying her at the table where she’s safely sitting. You chat with the aides, greet other residents, get water and a snack for Evelyn. But she doesn’t really engage with either of you.
Your daughter gives her a hug as you leave, and Evelyn doesn’t look up or say good-bye.
Again, you might choose any one of several adjectives to describe this set of experiences, and again, we’ll name just one. Let’s call that weekend DIFFICULT.
Pain and pleasure
By now, maybe you’ve guessed where I’m going with this. All these experiences happened on the same weekend, some of them within hours of each other.
These were days of delight and grief. Good and bad. Wonderful and sad. And this is not unusual. For me, this is a season of holding in my palm at the same time both pain and pleasure. That fact came into sharper focus for me last weekend.
I’m deciding this is how it must be. The only way to emotional health is making space for both joy and loss. If we don’t allow joy, we’re setting ourselves up for depression and despair. If we don’t acknowledge the losses, our denial will eventually undo us.
This is probably true for everyone, certainly everyone who’s lived past middle age. Sooner or later life leads all of us to roadblocks or slender paths along a steep ascent. But there’s fulfillment in finding a way around the barriers. And after a hard climb, there’s satisfaction in finally reaching vistas seen only from the mountaintop.
“Man only likes to count his troubles,” Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote. “He doesn’t calculate his happiness.” I’m learning not to let the former blind me to the latter.
The ancient writer of Proverbs observed, “For the despondent, every day brings trouble; for the happy heart, life is a continual feast.” Feasting sounds better to me.
“Give all your cares and worries to God,” the apostle Peter wrote, “for he cares about you.” I’m counting on that every day, as I implore God for strength to cope with the cares, thank him for joy I see in spite of them, and seek from him wisdom to navigate my own narrow way.