The Line Between Celebration And Mourning
The Anniversary Of A Meaningful Passing
The Line Between Celebration And Mourning
The Anniversary Of A Meaningful Passing
Written by a human, for humans, always.
There are people who will be such an important part of your life...
That you will find yourself never forgetting them...
Even years after they have passed.
Today is one of those days for me.
The anniversary of my friend’s passing.
In my phone, I have a reminder...
Celebrate for Scott.
It is a difficult reminder...
Because...
I still mourn his passing.
Years later.
When you mourn something or someone...
It is easy to ask...
What is there to celebrate?
It can feel like the world is colder and darker with the loss...
So why would you want to celebrate?
Indeed...
It also is not easy to try.
The darkness is more than happy to smother and suffocate you in your mourning.
Yet...
There is a reason that the darkness feels so overpowering...
The light from that which you mourn...
Was so powerful.
The dark always seems darker next to the light.
This is also what gives us the clue that is needed to figure out what to celebrate.
The light.
To have experienced it in your life.
To have been embraced in that warmth.
To have learned what the light truly is...
So that you may carry that same light into the lives of others.
That...
Is worth celebrating.
There is another challenge that happens with this...
And it has to do with a psychological phenomenon that we experience...
Black-and-white thinking...
All-or-nothing thinking...
Dichotomous thinking.
Whatever you call it...
It is the belief that you can only take one side or another...
You can only believe all of one thing or another...
That you can only experience one thing or another.
When we mourn...
We often struggle to celebrate...
Because we subconsciously believe that we cannot celebrate when we mourn.
But...
This is a false dichotomy...
An incorrect belief that we are unable to have multiple things at the same time...
That there are sides instead of a spectrum.
As humans...
We have an incredible spectrum of emotional capacity.
We can hold any and all emotions simultaneously...
Happiness and sadness.
Anger and pity.
We also can...
Be mourning and celebrating...
At the same time.
We can indeed mourn that the light is no longer here...
While celebrating that we have experienced that light and have the capacity to carry it within us...
To spread it to others...
Just as it was spread to us.
I believe that there is a beauty that can come from holding these together...
In harmony.
If we celebrate without mourning seems wrong.
To mourn without celebrating makes us blind and numb to other good in life.
But...
If we discover how to walk the line between celebration and mourning...
We have the ability to still be impacted by the weight of what is no longer here...
To know that the love within us is real and meaningful...
While also bringing honor to that love by seeing what is beautiful within it...
And bringing that love to others who are still here beside us.
Some people, when they experience mourning...
Just want the pain to disappear...
And I understand that.
Yet...
I cannot help but find myself wondering...
If that pain were to disappear...
Completely...
What would that really mean?
To no longer feel that light?
Is there not something horribly sad and amiss with its disappearance?
Perhaps...
That mourning should stay with us...
Perhaps changing shape along the way...
But never disappearing...
Because what that mourning reveals...
Is something true and beautiful in life...
A light in the darkness...
That is well worth celebrating.
I encourage you...
Find that line between celebration and mourning.
To Your Sageship,
Cody
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