How Suffering Became My Greatest Teacher
What happens when your greatest fear becomes a reality? That event or circumstance we dread, believing it would shatter our hearts completely. We hesitate to even whisper it, afraid that by vocalizing it, we invite it to materialize.
When such a fear meets us, it can be as terrible as imagined. Yet, it can also be one of the most revealing, painfully formative, and raw moments of our lives.
From the moment my youngest sister, Mary, was born, I think I quietly harbored a fear of her dying. Born fragile yet determined, she survived two open-heart surgeries in her first few weeks. Her vibrancy, immense love, and larger-than-life spirit made it easy to ignore the fear that whispered over the years. So, I did, even when she became critically ill.
When I was fifteen, I had a vivid nightmare of Mary, or Gina as we called her then, dying. In my dream, she fell ill and slipped away quickly in the hospital. The deep pain I felt in that dream lingered as I woke up in the midnight hour. It felt acutely real, as though it had happened. I remember rushing to her small room, kneeling by her bed as tears streamed down my cheeks. Deep relief mixed with sorrow at this dream that felt all too real. In her sleep, she reached out and pulled me in for a hug – another timeless example of her unspoken knowing.
When the worst happens, we often imagine there is more time before it becomes real, if ever at all. It's been close to a year and a half since Mary passed away, and I still can’t believe how, twenty years earlier, I had a dream that foreshadowed the pain I would feel. The truth is, it didn’t even come close to the gravity of the actual emotional distress.
In the midst of great pain, I realized how profoundly unequipped we are as a culture to talk about true suffering, loss, and lament. I want to help change that in whatever small way I am able. It is one of the most fundamentally human and universal experiences we will ever have. It comes in so many ways. Secondly, because it is actually one of the greatest teachers of a lifetime.
Less than 24 hours after Mary was transferred to inpatient hospice, I received the call that she had passed away. It happened much quicker and suddenly, seemingly impossible and much sooner than the medical professionals had predicted. Something deep inside of me broke. Shattered, really.
I was a survivor, as my sisters and I all are. You don’t score an 8/10 on the ACE score and find ways to build lives of substance for nothing. I had ten years of therapeutic tools, over a thousand hours of great counseling, a strong community, deep faith, good medication to manage my depression, and knew I was among many who were grieving. But even with all of that, the day my baby sister died, something inside of me died as well, and I almost didn’t survive it.
It took me making my way out of the acuity to realize I almost didn’t make it through the dark. Oh, the shame I have reckoned with that I couldn’t “do it better.” The pain of strained relationships, a low tolerance for conflict, lack of joy and feeling lost in the depths of sorrow.
Why am I sharing this? Because I wish there had been more resources and lived experiences I could access on the darkest days when all hope felt truly lost.
In recovery, I am learning perhaps the most important lessons a heart shattering like that can and does bring. Many of my most important lessons are still in progress, but many have already occurred.
This is what I have learned so far from this terrible and beautiful teacher:
You can survive the worst pain you could ever imagine. It doesn’t have to make sense to other people, how much pain you are in, but you can survive it. The feeling will pass. Sometimes it takes a long time, but it does eventually shift into a more tolerable companion.
Don't be afraid of suffering. It’s not something I would hope for anyone, but the reality is that we will all suffer in some way; many of us already have. The fear of suffering can stall the inevitable, which is the actual feeling of the pain. The processing of it all will soften you in profound ways.
As annoying as it is, the saying “the only way out is through” is true. The valley of the shadow of death can feel very real, and you just have to keep going.
You are never as alone as you feel. The greatest lie of major depression and traumatic grief for me was that I was truly alone in it, so I pulled away. I had people who journeyed so close to me, but the pain was so isolating, it took away my ability to feel connection to those who loved me. To God, to myself. I am creating a small “emergency kit” for if I am ever in that dark place again, including a note to remind me I am not as alone as I feel.
Grief, true deep sorrow, is wild, like the great forests of the Northwest or mountains of Wyoming, expansive and consuming. There is a deeply visceral wildness about it. We must physically move the pain and grief or it gets frozen. There is a book called the The Wild Edge of Sorrow, that was a constant companion last year, and one I want to gift to anyone who is walking through loss.
It will humble you. In my deep grief and depression, I took on too much, tried using every coping tool I had ever possessed to no avail. Because, this was different, compounded suffering and years of crisis and grief, a pandemic, and ending with the loss of the person I loved most in the world. In the reckoning that happened, I have seen myself more clearly than ever before. It’s the kind of clarity that will change your whole life, humble and heal you.
Trust your people. There will be mutual pain in witnessing someone you love struggle deeply, and both you and they will fail at times. It’s bound to happen as the most broken and vulnerable parts of you are exposed. But they will also love you through the worst days, and not everyone is meant to be on that journey with you. Trust them, and remember it’s okay to trust yourself.
Finally, one of the most important things I learned last year is about the Dawn Chorus—the phenomenon where, in the pre-dawn morning, birds begin to sing in chorus before the sun rises, while the sky is still dark. It's as though they are announcing the sun is about to rise, light breaking through the darkness. What a beautiful reminder of hope.
The Dawn Chorus struck me deeply when I learned about it from a beautiful woman last fall. Perhaps it resonated because it reminded me that God, in the formation of nature, wove in a daily reminder that light truly does always break through the darkness.