“Everybody falls sometimes

Gotta find the strength to rise

From the ashes and make a new beginning

Anyone can feel the ache

You think it’s more than you can take

But you are stronger, stronger than you know

Don’t you give up now

The sun will soon be shining

You gotta face the clouds

To find the Silver lining”

(What Faith Can Do, Kutless 2009)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1JBSQMkQEo&list=RDu1JBSQMkQEo&index=1

            One of the most difficult things a person will have to do in their life is grieving over the loss of a loved one. To degrees, dealing with the death of someone we know can be an emotional challenge. It’s not even the initial shock that does the most damage. Sure, we weep and mourn and cry out through the pain, especially at the onset of things. It is the constant pang of hunger for the person that rules the roost. The ending is simply the beginning, maybe not for the dead but most certainly for the people who loved and cared for them. Grief is a hard road, with very expensive toll booths set up along the way. It can seem as if we keep on paying but we go nowhere. Although each person goes through this wave of sorrowing, it is the process of moving on that is the true obstacle to healthy emotional survival. It can take weeks or even years for a mourner to return to some semblance of a normal life. The gaping hole left behind may never be full, not ever. Depending on your relationship with the deceased, you may never really be whole again. Death can steal any hope, any resolve you may have gained along your pathway. Most of us eventually heal, able to face the world again regardless of the missing pieces stolen away. We don’t really heal, if the truth be told. We simply get used to the pain, we get used to the empty. Grief is like going bald, you just get used to it.  You adjust to the loss. There are those who do not adjust accordingly. They wallow in it, basking in the pain, basking in the misery. For some, the death can mean surrender, a means of letting go of everything, including themselves. People hurt so bad that they literally lay down and die. On the other hand, there are people who rise above the situation and carry on to lead productive and balanced lives. The variables are apparently connected to both our coping skills and our sense of something greater than ourselves. It is hard to find a silver lining when all you have to work with is ashes.

“Every silver lining has a cloud.”

(Mary Kay Ash, American businesswoman)

            The world stopped turning the second he walked into the place. They had only lived there a few short months but it had felt like home regardless. He could smell her in the bathroom, her scent lingered like this on most good days. Her could hear her on the messages left while he was away. He was at work when the call came in and it lead him to the darkest of places. He just stood there. Her body looked cold and seemed hard and unforgiving. Death did not become her. They had to remove him from the room, when he collapsed in agony on the cold morgue floor. Identifying her was a memory he would never escape. As a matter of fact, he could never escape the wretchedness that enveloped him from the start. The car that took her at 100 MPH, took him as well. There was no blood, no shattered glass, just a tunnel that swirled deeper and deeper into the recesses of his being. He jumped right down that rabbit hole. He told himself he would never really get over the loss of his soul mate. They had been so happy together that he just assumed it would last forever. He was wrong in almost every way. The void she left grew more hollow and his world completely fell apart. For days, he tried to face this life without her. He did not do a very good job. The empty was more than he could handle. He had been with his wife for almost 10 years, but each day he existed without her seemed to last forever. It had no end, not for him at any rate. One day his mind shattered. It was much too soon for him to rifle through her things. When he found her wedding dress, tucked into the back of her walk-in closet, he went from mental to insane. He started screaming and he could not stop. Every day he sits looking out the window, rocking himself into some semblance of aware. He is as lost as he could be. There are others in this place, different souls but all yearning for even one second of clarity. He just sits there, day after day, watching for her to appear just outside heavy glass, on the patch of land beneath the window. At night he waits for her to come to bed. She never appears but he keeps on waiting. In the end, the numbness of his madness was nothing but his escape. He never had to say goodbye. He never stopped looking for her to show up. Perhaps, for him, the madness was more like a silver lining.

“Every dark cloud has a silver lining, but lightning kills hundreds of people each year who try to find it.” (E.L. Kersten, American author)

            She was 84 years old when her husband died in his sleep. She awoke to his coldness and then life went on without him. After 58 years together, you would have thought she would shed more than a few simple tears. She was balanced even though the world they shared together had disappeared in the blink of an eye. She carried on without him, or so it seemed. They both knew that the day they parted would come sooner than later. For years they planned for each other’s passing. Preparation made things easier, easier and quicker. She didn’t have to think if she didn’t want to. She handed the undertakers a copy of his wishes and left all the hubbub to them. After the funeral, after they lowered him into the ground, she went on in the strongest of ways. The first thing she did was move from their 2-bedroom apartment to a small single bedroom 3 floors above. She lightened her load, raising concern that giving away most of their belongings meant something more than mere survival. They were wrong. For years she lingered alone, always planning, always making sure that what needed to be done was done. She was finally able to feel some sense of freedom, at least after the initial shock wore off. She missed her husband, on occasion, but she meant to seize the day regardless of any grieving she might encounter. For over half a decade she danced by herself in the proverbial corner. She hunted down the silver lining. Her faith didn’t help her through. Her family, her many friends all did nothing but to try and ease her pain. She really didn’t have much to speak of. There was something in her resolve. She picked herself up when she wasn’t even down. She went on and she never looked back. She should never have tried to take the stairs by herself. At almost 90, she was fearless still. She slipped and did some grave damage. They say she may have had a heart attack, which precipitated the fall. No one can be sure and she never revealed what had happened. From her hospital bed, she made it well known that she would never return to that building and especially those apartments. No one could really say why. They placed her in a lovely retirement home where she could chat up a storm all day and read in the privacy of her room come the night. It didn’t take much for time to claim her. Mere months after the fall, she passed away, quietly, peacefully. She had gone ahead and planned for this. She made sure she was ready and, apparently, she was when she left us. Sometimes things just happen and there is no rhyme or reason to them. People die every day.  

“Live with the assumption that every day it will rain. If it does, you were right. If it doesn’t, you were fortunate.” (Zack W. Van, American author)

            His grandparents had passed away in his youth. He knew what it meant to grieve and he thought he was prepared. He was not. It had been years since he saw his brother, years since they spoke a word. The cancer took him slowly, they said. The funeral was an experiment in horror. So many faces brought together by the most horrible of fates. Each member of the family was a reminder of the way it all had been. Name after name was chiselled in the guest book, people wanted to be recognized for coming. He would have liked it, one may suppose. All those years he spent alone, outside of his family, and now they all magically appeared with little contrition or need for absolution. Most of the day was spent holding it all in. It really didn’t hit until he got home. It broke him in the most savage of ways. The world turned upside down then right side round again. Perhaps it was the grief talking, perhaps it was the guilt. Perhaps the combination is what made it so hard for him to breathe. His wife stood at a distance, unsure of what to do and what to say. His insanity raged on, his anger vented at himself and his situation. He had never felt like this before. Sure, his grandparents and other family members had passed away throughout his history but his response was never so extreme. This was his first death, at least in a sense. His panic, his instability seemed to grow with each passing day. His only wish was that things had been different. Most pipe dreams rarely come to be. It was weeks before his temperament started to settle. Like all good mourners, he picked himself up and he tried to move on. The pain, the horror would return to him in surges. The further away from the death he got, the more critical those surges got. Each episode sent him back to reeling. Time keeps on going, that’s the silver lining in all this misery. No matter how affected you are by the death of a loved one, no matter the loss, eventually enough time will have passed that you can move forward, move past it or at least try to. Some people face death head on, pushing back against the ways of our mortal coil. Some people run in the face of such complete sadness. A fair amount of time has passed since that day and this one. He walks softer in a sense, aware, much more aware. Time has made things better, he can cope with much more resolve. His still misses his brother. If only he could go back and change the way things were. We can never go back. The best we can do is affect change here and now. We must make the silver lining.

“Our happiness is certainly mixed in with the tragedies of life.

You have to find the lemonade.

You have to find the silver lining in the middle of everything that happens in life.” (Chandra Wilson, American actress)

            One moment he was there and the next he went missing. It’s not even that he was missing, rather just gone. They found him cold and dead near the train tracks on this side of town. The bottle of gin was frozen to his hand. His coat discarded only 500 feet away.

His frozen body more a statue than some mound of flesh. The coroner simply confirmed his fate. He was not only drunk, he was smashed. He died of exposure and that was that. The first weeks were trying. She had no choice but to pick up and carry on without him. After 6 months, she started to be social again. After a year, she started dating. She began a new life even though she did not wish to leave the one she had. Each step on her journey seemed a challenge. She had not escaped without consequence. She felt guilty, mostly for mere survival. She felt remorse and contrition. She felt every emotion you could imagine she did, all the while she kept pressing onward, moving forward, eyes straight ahead. The second year without him brought more struggle and more pain. She lost almost everything to a monster in disguise. He could scream louder than she could. As the dust started falling, she met the next great love of her life. He was everything that she needed at the time. He needed her just as much as she needed him. They found each other and stayed that way. Twenty years later and she still goes on. Times are not nearly as chaotic as they used to be. A long marriage, a peaceful life and serenity have come with the territory called living. She often sits in silence, listening for the clouds that would pass her by. On occasion, she can hear a tinkling, a little ringing from somewhere beyond her. She imagines it’s just the silver lining. 

“Too many people miss the silver lining because they’re expecting gold."

(Maurice Setter, English football player)

            When it comes to grief, I don’t believe that most people even consider a silver lining. We go through life always desperate so we lack the ambition to notice. It can be difficult to get past one’s lot in life and recognize what you have. People just don’t get it. With every good there comes bad. With all the bad will come good. There is always a silver lining. You may not see it. You might fail to even register what it is but it is there nonetheless. The grass really is greener on the other side. When someone dies, we rarely stop and see the purpose found in their lesson. We fail to recognize the significance of our feelings and where they lead us. There is always this schism, between what is and what might just be. When we experience the death of someone close to us, we change. When we change, we affect greater change. In hindsight, we all see it. There was something there all along, we just didn’t stop and pay it attention. Death is nasty, there is no doubt about it. It does not have to be so harsh. We can learn, we can conclude, we can summon things worth knowing but we cannot escape its grasp. Either way, even in the darkest cloud there is always a silver lining.

“Hey mister don’t shadow box with me

Cause I don’t wanna someday be an old man cursing what I might have been

Now I realize what I see that the wind was never chasing me

And I don’t feel so alone

I can close my eyes I’m going home

Behind the clouds the sun is shining

Some rain will fall no use crying

Oh no, not me

Got a picture in my head that won’t let go of

Young man running in search of

Count your blessings

Cause it’s in your soul”

(In Your Soul, Corey Hart 1988)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMdm72iE2Fw

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/507796217