Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

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. After losing her husband Aaron to brain cancer, McInerny asked other bereaved partners what advice about grief they’d hated most. The most common reply: the exhortation to “move on.”

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

Simcha isn’t judging me, though, and as far as I can tell, neither is the group. “I hear that there’s not been a full and healthy individuation,” he tells me. “So, part of you is still stuck at sixteen, where you’re still wanting to stay bonded to your mother. Where you had to say, I can either be an individual, or feel loved, but I can’t be both.”

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.

Early in her career, when Yehuda was studying post-traumatic stress disorder, she and her colleagues set up a clinic for Holocaust survivors at Mount Sinai hospital in New York City. Their intention was to serve the survivors themselves, but that’s not what happened. The survivors, who tended to feel that no clinician could understand their experiences, stayed home. It was their children who showed up. The lives of these children—most of whom were now middle-aged—turned out to have a unique pattern. They still felt troubled, decades later, by having witnessed their parents’ grief. They felt an overwhelming pressure to live for those who had perished. And they had difficulty with separation—especially from their parents. Most people in their forties and fifties identify as someone’s partner or parent. But this group still described themselves as so-and-so’s son or daughter. They lived in the shadow of their mothers and fathers.

The survivors’ children were three times more likely to suffer from PTSD, if they’d been exposed to traumatic events, compared with demographically similar Jews whose parents weren’t survivors. They were more vulnerable to clinical depression and anxiety. And their blood tests showed the same neuroendocrine and hormonal abnormalities as the survivors themselves. Clearly this population had a particular emotional inheritance—but how had it been transmitted? Did it have mostly to do with the way they’d been raised, with their relationships with their parents? Or was it also written somehow into their DNA?

But we learn not to talk about it. We don’t talk about their experiences as a society, we are ashamed—the way my mom won’t cry in front of us. We have no pictures of my sister—we don’t talk about her. We have to teach grief to our children. The grief of previous generations. The grief of what you could be, but you’re not, because you’re told who you are.”

We’re all given legacies, he explains. “We don’t have a choice. Legacies can be profoundly joyful and wonderful. I was given a legacy of suffering and death, but also of survival and existential guilt. I grew up lonely. Everyone had died, so many of our relatives never had a chance to create a life. We were left alive, and we didn’t know why.” His voice, as he relates all this, is muted, in a way that I recognize from my own grandfather. It’s as if there’s a larger, more powerful voice in there, of the grandson of partisans who fought bravely in the Polish forests. It’s as if he’s keeping that voice safely hidden in the hole under the stove. “One could view it as a burden, be crushed by it,” he continues, looking away from me, at the rain outside the window. “But it’s a matter of choosing your attitude to the legacy you’re given. There has to be a reason—a meaning for why we survived, and others didn’t.”

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 first version of meaning-centered psychotherapy. 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. If on your deathbed you look back and see a life lived fully, you feel peace. People who believe that they didn’t do enough with their lives too often feel shame. 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.

But the job of the meaning-centered therapist is to listen for the essence of the person that’s still there. Maybe all your life you were a caregiver, and now you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of having to receive care. But the therapist might notice that you’re still going out of your way to make him or her feel comfortable. You’re still asking “How are you?” You’re still a caregiver. The idea is not to paper over your loss, which might be of cataclysmic proportions. The idea is smaller than that, yet also grander: that after all the grief and loss and disruption, you are still—you always will be—exactly who you are.

For me, writing this book was yet another act of transforming the sorrow and longing of the past into the wholeness of the present.

My father was an alcoholic: I don’t want to be like him. Such declarations echo the ancient proverb quoted in Ezekiel: “The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children’s teeth were set on edge.” But the Bible quotes this proverb in order to reject it: We aren’t responsible for the sins of our parents, it says. And neither must we bear their pain.

I visit my mother often now. She’s eighty-nine as I write this. Her Alzheimer’s is advancing, but she still knows who I am. Dementia has taken so much from her, but it’s returned her loving soul, uncompromised by the challenges of everyday life. Every nurse, every doctor who treats her, comments unprompted on how sweet she is, and funny, too; they also bask in this unvarnished version of her spirit. “I won’t be able to say it for much longer,” she tells me urgently, every time we speak, “so I want you to remember how much I love you.”

We all think what we think, feel what we feel, are who we are, because of the lives of the people who came before us, and the way our souls have interacted with theirs. Yet these are also our own, singular lives. We have to hold both these truths at the same time.

What are you longing for? You may not have asked yourself this question before. You may not have identified the important symbols in your life story, you may not have examined what they mean. You’ve likely asked other questions: What are my career goals? Do I want marriage and children? Is so-and-so the right partner? How can I be a “good” and moral person? What work should I do? To what extent should my work define me? When should I retire? But have you asked yourself these questions in the deepest terms? Have you asked what is the thing you long for most, your unique imprint, singular mission, wordless calling? Have you asked where on earth is your closest approximation of home? Literally, if you sat down and wrote “Home” at the top of a piece of paper and waited a while, what would you write next? And if you have a bittersweet temperament, or you’ve come to it via life experience, have you asked how to hold the melancholy within you? Have you realized that you’re part of a long and storied tradition that can help you transform your pain into beauty, your longing into belonging?

Could your ache be, as Leonard Cohen said, the way you embrace the sun and the moon?

do you know the lessons of your own particular sorrows and longings? Maybe you experience a chasm between who you are and what you do for a living, and this tells you that you work too much, or too little, or that you want fulfilling work, or an organizational culture in which you fit; or that the work you need has little to do with your official job or income source; or countless other messages your yearning might be sending you: Listen to them, follow them, pay attention.[*] Or maybe you’re thrilled when your children laugh, but suffer too vicariously when they cry, which tells you that you haven’t truly accepted that tears are part of life—and that your kids can handle them. Or maybe you carry the griefs of your parents or grandparents or great-great-great-grandparents; maybe your body pays the price of their trouble; maybe your relationship with the world is compromised by hypervigilance or hair-trigger anger or a dogged dark cloud, and you must find a way to transform the pain of the ages, even as you find the freedom to write your own story. Or 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. And maybe you crave perfect and unconditional love, the ki...

After all those years in the field, he started to feel that his work was futile: There were always more bad actors, more mutilated bodies, more indifferent onlookers. Despite good intentions, no heroic organizations, no noble countries, no individuals with pure motives; things could turn brutal anywhere, anytime. He came home. But “home” meant something different now. Home was friends and family, it was the pleasant shock of on-demand air-conditioning, water running from the kitchen faucet, hot or cold, whenever you pleased. But home was also the Garden of Eden after Eve ate the apple. Never forget, we say. But forgetting wasn’t Ken’s issue: He couldn’t forget what he’d seen; it rarely left his mind. The only choice was to write it all down, to record what he’d witnessed. As he wrote, he kept a framed photo on his desk, a vast field of Rwandan bones. That photo’s still there, all these years later.

My father and I talked on the phone, just before he died. He was in the hospital, trying to breathe. “Be well, kid,” he said, as he hung up the phone. And I intend to. And so, I hope, will you.

There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in —L. C., “ANTHEM”