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After Great Pain |
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Written by Andrew Solomon
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Thursday, 05 October 2006 |
The following is part of an article entitled "After Great Pain" by Andrew Solomon from the September Oprah magazine. This is something I wish I could share with the "clueless" as well. This was insightful – the author conducted interviews with people who suffered great personal tragedy and that is what she learned from those interviews. It was the 9/11 tragedy that sparked the idea for this article.
“After Great Pain”
by Andrew Solomon
..... I began to understand that, though people would tell me half their personal equation, there is actually always a balance to be struck between the remembering and forgetting. You can't simply hide from the facts. Feelings that aren't acknowledged, that aren't felt, are dangerous explosions waiting to happen. Feelings that are re-experienced too vividly, however, implode and are just as deadly. ...
A year after the terror of September 11, the loss we suffered - like the personal loss of a single person you have loved - is something we have to integrate into ourselves, not something we can transcend and put behind us. Even if you think you have adjusted to the changed reality that follows a catastrophe, you may find yourself being regularly reshocked by the same episode.
Eventually, you realize that there is no adjusting to something so profoundly grim, that the disastrous losses are perpetual losses, that you will never return to the innocence that predated them.
Once we've balanced the remembering and forgetting, we need to concentrate on controlling what we can control and to try to let go of the things we can't affect. A very limited part of our experience in the world is subject to our control, but we can make physical order in our own homes and we can accomplish goals in our work. We can avoid giving in to the depression by availing ourselves of medication and psychotherapy. We can improve on how well we relate to the people around us. We can make deliberate, conscious lists of priorities. We can be nicer.
Helping people in greater need also gives us a feeling of control and purpose we might not otherwise be able to achieve and is almost always an illuminating experience; I heard of its healing properties in every one of the exotic locations I visited.
When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them. Perhaps the most difficult part of recovery is squeezing good out of the horror. Since we're stuck with September 11, we should try to learn from it. We should live more fully in the present tense because we have been reminded how fragile our lives really are. We should remember those many cell phone calls from the buildings and planes that were about to go down, and how much that repetitive chiche of three words meant to all the people who heard "I love you" before the final moment. We can become a nation more conscious of our own good fortune.
The best antidote to pain is happiness, even if it is someday to be defeated by another sadness, in turn to be enlivened by another joy, and on in an endless cycle. The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci said that social reformers should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This means that one must have the intellectual ability to see how bad things are and the emotional ability to look forward with hope. It's a hard combination to sustain, but if you can do it, you can change your world."
~reprinted from Sept - Oct 2002 TCF Atlanta Newsletter
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