Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

Susan advises us to choose something we’ll be comfortable sharing with one other person in the room. But she also invites us to go deep: “You’re not saying there’s something wrong with you. You’re not saying that you have a pathology. You’re saying that you’re human. Welcome to humanity.”

What once was will never be again.

The RAADfesters believe that beating death will reveal the road to peace and harmony. And I believe exactly the opposite: that sorrow, longing, and maybe even mortality itself are a unifying force, a pathway to love; and that our greatest and most difficult task is learning how to walk it.

awareness of impermanence. It’s the knowledge that time is limited. It’s the sense of “but even so.”

Poignancy, she told me, is the richest feeling humans experience, one that gives meaning to life—and it happens when you feel happy and sad at the same time.

As we come to the end, we forgo expansion in favor of communion and meaning.

She also recommends meditating on death. Notice impermanence in nature—the splendor of autumn, the baby sparrow fallen on your driveway. Spend time with older people in your family; ask if you can record their life stories. It’s hard to believe that they won’t always be there to tell them. Realize that one day those stories will live only in digitized form.

George Bonanno, author of an influential book called The Other Side of Sadness, focuses not on “letting go” but on our natural capacity for resilience.

In the immediate aftermath of a bereavement, it’s common to move back and forth between intense emotions of happiness and sorrow.

This doesn’t mean that even the most resilient move on completely. “They may not resolve the loss,” he says. “They may not fully put aside the pain. But they’re able to continue functioning.” We’re built to live simultaneously in love and loss, bitter and sweet.

“it is too readily assumed that ‘non-attachment’ is not only better…but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult….If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for ‘non-attachment’ is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which,

But the doctrine of reincarnation doesn’t solve the pain of separation between two attached souls, Ami explains. “It’s unlikely those two souls will meet again. And who knows where one will land and where the other will land. And that is a true loss.”

the pain of separation, the desire for reunion.

Both Buddhism and Hinduism teach that, once our attachments are gone, we reach nirvana, which is not up in the sky or in some distant and fantastical place, but rather an enlightened state that anyone can access here on earth—a state in which we meet pain and loss, as well as comfort and togetherness, with equanimity and compassion.

Nonattachment is a third way, and it helps us aspire to an expansive love that exists apart from possession. Others take comfort in the faith that they’ll reunite with their loved ones in heaven.

“defensive pessimism.”

“It’s like a cracked mirror now,” Lois says. “Something is always missing. The mirror doesn’t get put back the way it was, but if you work, you can get a piece of it back.”[*]

we shouldn’t pretend that grief disappears. No matter how much your culture tells you to smile, it’s not human to simply move on. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t move forward.

This distinction—between moving on and moving forward—is the heart of a TED Talk given by author Nora McInerny, and it’s the most powerful framework I’ve found for embracing the bittersweet nature of existence that unites us all.

“What can we do other than try to remind one another that some things can’t be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal?”

What is silenced in the first generation, the second generation carries in the body. —FRANÇOISE DOLTO

But he believes that between this world and the next is a window, not a wall, and that our “death-phobic” society stops us from seeing this.

But then Simcha says something else: that I’m carrying not only my own grief; I’m carrying my mother’s grief, too, and the grief of her mother and father, and their mothers and fathers. I’m carrying the grief of the generations.

“But you can keep the connection to the generations alive,” he adds, “without holding on to their pain.”

not only can pain last a lifetime; it can last many lifetimes.

His mission is to give his patients a sense of meaning in the time they have left, through a program he developed called meaning-centered psychotherapy.

Meaning making, he believed, is the heart of humanity; it gives us the power to transcend suffering.

“I’m not someone who’s here to gain power,” says Breitbart. “I’m not here to accumulate material wealth. I’m here to ease suffering.”

“But even with all these loves,” he says, “you’re born with a set of limitations: your genetic legacy, your time, your place, your family.

Your responsibility is to create a life of meaning. Of growth, and transformation. It so happens that very few people grow from success. People grow from failure. They grow from adversity. They grow from pain.”

The protocol they developed was based on the idea that we all have two existential obligations. The first is simply to survive. But the second is to create a life worth living.

But the key to fulfillment, says Breitbart, is learning to love who you are (which is unconditional and unceasing) rather than what you’ve done.

When you’re diagnosed with cancer, you can feel robbed of your identity. But the job of the meaning-centered therapist is to listen for the essence of the person that’s still there.

that after all the grief and loss and disruption, you are still—you always will be—exactly who you are.

Do you feel the tug of an ancient grief, and if so, what connection could you make with your forebears that might help put it to rest?

I held on to my guilt as a way of holding on to her,

can keep the connection alive without keeping the pain.

longing into belonging? Have you asked: Who is the artist or musician or athlete or entrepreneur or scientist or spiritual leader you love, and why do you love them, what do they represent to you?

do you know the lessons of your own particular sorrows and longings?

maybe you mourn your breakups, or your dead, which tells you that separation is the most fundamental of heartaches, but also that attachment is our deepest desire, and that you might transcend your grief when you perceive how connected you are with all the other humans who struggle to transcend theirs, and who emerge in fits and starts, bit by rocky bit, just like you.

These small moments of quotidian devotion are a form of artistic expression for him: quiet, ritualistic, bittersweet celebrations of a small peace.

shared longing for the art of peaceful repair.

That, in the beginning, all of creation was a vessel filled with divine light. That it broke apart, and now the shards of holiness are strewn all around us. Sometimes it’s too dark to see them, sometimes we’re too distracted by pain or conflict. But our task is simple—to bend down, dig them out, pick them up. And in so doing, to perceive that light can emerge from darkness, death gives way to rebirth, the soul descends to this riven world for the sake of learning how to ascend. And to realize that we all notice different shards; I might see a lump of coal, but you spot the gold glimmering beneath.

Note the modesty of this vision. Note that it doesn’t promise Utopia.

He showed me, by example, that if you want to live a quiet life, you should just live a quiet life; that if you’re a humble person who has no use for the spotlight, to just be a humble person who has no use for the spotlight. No big deal.

We’re drawn to the sublime domains, like music, art, and medicine, not only because they’re beautiful and healing, but also because they’re a manifestation of love, or divinity, or whatever you want to call it.

The night my father died, I listened to music, not because I would find him there—I didn’t find him there—but because loving a parent and loving song or sport, nature or literature, math or science, are just different manifestations of the perfect and beautiful world, of the people we long to be with, the place we want to be. Your loved one may not be here anymore, but the manifestations live forever.