Gratitude for What We Do Not Have
Shells in the Sands Series #1
The intention for this series is to share cherished thoughts and reflections of life in bite-size pieces. I have been an avid journal writer since my early teens, and most of the original writings were initially captured in my personal journal. I have chosen the most pertinent ones to share with the world through this series. This joy is similar to picking out beautiful shells while walking on a sandy beach.
The other day our mail carrier Chris was delivering mail when my husband Roger and I happened to be standing at the top of our driveway.
“Y’all do not have any mail today.” He stuck his head out of the car and declared.
“Oh, that is disappointing.” I exclaimed. I always look forward to bringing the mail in to open.
“Well, at least you do not have any bills to pay today.” Chris replied enthusiastically.
“That is so wise.” I thought to myself as Roger and I walked back down the driveway. Chris must have the “big data” on the mailing patterns to know that more bills than presents often arrive in mails, especially when it is not Christmas time.
This is another beautiful application of “gratitude for what I do not have”, a discipline I have been practicing lately.
This year I have made major progress in reconciling with the tragic loss of my parents in my early years. Two stories I recently came upon helped to orient me to vastly unique perspectives.
I heard Clover Stroud’s story on Kate Bowler’s podcast Everything Happens. When Clover was sixteen, her mother was in a horse-riding accident that left her with a severe brain injury and permanent disability until she died 22 years later. The sudden tragedy of the accident was similar to my mother’s traffic accident, but the ongoing difficulty of the 22-year long caregiving was different. Clover described her experience as an “ongoing sense of grief, trauma and death being present in your life all the time”. After about ten years of hoping that she was going to get better with the right therapy, the family realized that she was not going to get better. Then Clover described the very poignant feeling of wanting her mother to die: “I remember really coming to the very difficult thing that I wished for, which was for my mum to die, for this whole thing to be over, for her pain. She was in great physical pain. We were all in great every kind of pain.” When her mother finally died 22 years later, Clover thought she was going to break through the glass window and find peace on the other side. But all she found was “more grief, more trauma and more loss.”
I was tearful as I listened to the story, and immediately thought of the blessing of not having a brain damaged mother to care for after her accident. Her death was quick, sudden and final. There was no room for negotiation. I have been grappling with that suddenness all my life, producing many “what-if scenarios” all of which seemed better than the one I was handed. But Clover’s story filled my heart with gratitude for the suddenness, for my mother, for me, and for the rest of my family.
This year I finally came around to grieving the loss of my mother. While making peace with my early loss of her, part of my heart was still in pain for her, for the loss of many possibilities when she passed away at the age of thirty-four. Yet my spiritual mother and Bahai mentor May set me straight with this vain imagining as well. May said “Your mother’s early death is God’s mercy to her. You do not know what thorny path lie ahead waiting for her. God transplanted her to more fertile soil to grow.”
May’s wise words transformed my perspective, as she has done many times. Now I am grateful for what my mother did not have: the many tests and difficulties she might have had to endure had she lived longer.
Similarly, Maggie’s story in the movie Runaway Bride filled me with gratitude for my father’s absence. The oppressiveness of Maggie’s father’s alcoholism was very present in the movie. Her father was drinking all the time. Maggie had to give up her college studies when her mother passed away in order to help her father with the family hardware store. The communication between father and daughter was broken down. Several scenes in the movies suggested that Maggie could not speak to what was in her heart with her father. She kept running away from her weddings because she was afraid of making commitments, a reflection of her wounded inner child potentially attributable to her father’s alcoholism.
This made me think of alternative lives I might have lived if my father were still alive. My father turned to alcohol after my mother’s death and his own traumatic brain injury from a motorcycle accident. I vaguely remember the difficulties my grandparents went through managing him in the two years between my mother’s death and his own death. What would my life be like if I had to continue to live with an alcoholic father with brain injury? What would life be like for him to go on living like that? A psychologist I consulted reassured me that it would have been “an uphill battle the whole way.”
These two stories have helped me to find the blessing in both my parents’ absence, for them and for me. From here on I know we can truly be grateful for what we do not have.
It is probably easier to be grateful for things we do not have when we do not want them: illnesses, wars, poverty, losses, hardship. The challenge comes in showing gratitude for what we do not have when we genuinely want them, like vacations, possessions, and various desires.
I have come to see life is as much about managing constraints as it is about leveraging opportunities. Developing gratitude for the constraints in life is an important life skill to develop. When we fill our heart with gratitude for what we do not have, we have learned the wisdom of acceptance, and have therefore transformed loss into meaning. Our trauma will become the gift that keeps on giving, because we have developed the “golden finger” that can turn every experience into gold.
