Learning to Be Grateful for All That Happens, Especially the Tough Stuff

Finding meaning in the school called life

Hawaiian Sunset, image credit: author.

My wife and I have been married for more than half of our respective lives. During that time, we’ve experienced some very difficult challenges, the greatest of which may be learning how to keep a marriage intact through thick and thin. Lately, we’ve been tested in a big way, and despite the pain, we are grateful it’s not worse.

And we are better than ever.

To get here, Janice and I have each had to develop a spiritual and psychological approach to maintaining our mental health, especially as we age. Nobody gets through life untouched. We each have our way of dealing with the struggles, and together we find love in the middle.

Suffering is a fact of life

I’ve been thinking about suffering a lot lately. More in a reflective, grateful way that sounds like, “Wow, I’m glad I got through that okay.”

I’ve found meaning in my suffering after looking in all the wrong places.

Reading books made a huge difference in learning how to be grateful. The wisest among us have been telling us this for thousands of years. More importantly, they left us ways to live through difficult times without letting them destroy us.

I remember the tsunami of painful emotions that crushed me when our family dog died in my arms. I was a junior in high school. I cried for a week. Anyone who has loved deeply knows the full weight of losing someone or something we love.

Finding gratitude takes time

Maybe we aren’t grateful that the painful thing happened. Maybe gratitude comes later, when we begin to see what suffering taught us. When we give ourselves time to reflect, accept reality, and find peace.

Looking back on the many things I did to test my parents, and the same things our sons did to test us, much of it makes more sense now. Humans are meaning-seeking beings. For me, the meaning I derive from trudging through several treacherous hell storms earlier in life is that they made me wiser.

I learned patience, steadfastness, acceptance, compassion, forgiveness, and unconditional love. I would never have chosen some of the experiences that taught me those lessons, but I can still be grateful for what they eventually revealed.

Family is a domain that tests us

Families can be a real mess. I can be grateful for all of the rip tides I found in my gene pool. I feel sorry for those among us who have yet to forgive their parents for whatever their misgivings.

Forgiving parents requires forgiving ourselves.

Children test every parent. Later in life, the tables turn, and parents begin testing their children, as many of us are experiencing now. No matter what our children or my Mother do that I don’t like, I always love them unconditionally. I’m immensely grateful to have learned that.

We have dear friends who still have children in high school while also caring for aging parents. Both fathers depend heavily on their adult children. One Mother has died. The other lives in a nursing home for people with Alzheimer’s disease.

How can my friend be grateful for the weekends when he takes his father to Saturday evening Mass, drives him home, bathes him, cleans him, and makes sure he is safely in bed? He does it the same way his wife can be grateful that her father moved into their guest bedroom. It’s the same way Janice and I get through our toughest times: faith, love, and devotion.

I was recently describing to a friend how my faith, my spiritual approach to life, is every bit as important as my mental health toolkit. One is not better than the other. They work together, just as mind, body, and spirit somehow work together far beyond my understanding.

Wiser people before us can reveal the way

Across history, people facing circumstances far worse than mine found this to be true as well. Ancient Egyptians understood this. Their spiritual ideal of ma’at taught that gratitude helped keep the heart light and life in balance. Hathor, goddess of joy, was associated with remembering the gifts that remained even after loss. Isis carried a related message: after mourning Osiris's murder, she gathered what had been broken and helped restore life from death.

Gratitude did not erase grief. It helped transform it.

At the Last Supper, knowing suffering lay ahead, Jesus gave thanks before sharing the bread and wine. The Apostle Paul, writing while imprisoned, expressed gratitude and described learning to be content whether he had plenty or almost nothing. Elsewhere, he instructed believers to give thanks in all circumstances.

Nearly two thousand years later, Jewish writer Etty Hillesum faced Nazi persecution and eventual deportation. Surrounded by death and uncertainty, she wrote in her diary that she remained grateful to God for choosing her heart, in those times, to experience everything it had experienced. German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, imprisoned for resisting Hitler and later executed, wrote from prison that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.

None of these people taught that suffering feels good

Gratitude is not pretending tragedy is a blessing while we are being crushed by it. It is not denial. It is not spiritual anesthesia. It is a way of refusing to allow suffering to have the final word.

At this stage of life, I’m learning that gratitude sometimes requires time. I can hate what happened, grieve what was lost, cry when I need to cry, and still ask a different question when I am ready: What has this experience taught me about how to live?

That is where gratitude becomes more than saying thank you for the good things.

Sometimes the deepest gratitude comes from realizing the tough stuff didn’t finish us. It formed us. It gives life meaning if we’re willing to see it that way.