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Look for the blessings
Blessings in the battle
There is no escaping the memories, so it's easy to dwell on the pain, the sadness, and the loss. Everybody is battling something every day, and the blessings that run through the battle are what keep a person going.
Mac's last year
Mac Sinise's family lived it. They watched him get very sick, with tumors appearing on his nose and elsewhere, and they couldn't avoid seeing them or the pain of imagining what Mac was going through. Through his last year he kept working on his music, and it lit him up.
That year was sad because it was his final one, but the family felt blessed. Mac felt he had done something special, and he had: the album led to two more records.
Why do good moments appear inside hard times?
Psychologist Susan Folkman of the University of California, San Francisco, studied caregivers of partners dying of AIDS in the 1990s. She found that these caregivers reported positive emotions alongside their distress, often tied to meaningful moments and small accomplishments. From this she developed the idea of meaning-focused coping. Her work showed that positive feeling and sorrow can run at the same time during severe stress.
Can people laugh and grieve together?
Psychologist George Bonanno of Columbia University studied bereaved spouses and, with Dacher Keltner, reported in 1997 that those who showed genuine laughter while describing their loss did better in the following years. The laughter was a sign of capacity to hold positive and painful feelings at once. Bonanno's later work on resilience found that many people who lose a loved one keep functioning well.
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