On Losing One's Pony

My daughter is one of the luckiest people on earth. Literally. She lives a life filled with opportunity. She is accomplishing great things that should provide her with a lifetime of satisfaction, the kind of deep fulfilling satisfaction that carries one the full course. And yet, things happen and sometimes it's hard to see any of it. This weekend, while she was away, she lost the pony she's had since she was two. And, dammit, she was sad. And that got me thinking about sadness and just how incredibly powerful, thoughtless, and damaging an emotion it can be.

Sadness. It strikes me that sadness is one of the most intensely personal and palpable of emotions, the weight of which can physically hold you down, pinned under its emotional mass. And while the event that precipitates sadness can be shared by many, the actual impact and character of the emotion can be so very different, one person from another.

Sadness is a greedy emotion. Too often in its voracity it swallows up all other emotions, a giant vacuum of infinite capacity, pirating every other possible emotion, every other reasonable perspective, and blocking all exits in the course of its action. Recollections of happiness, adventure, growth, and satisfaction are swept up and away. All views of opportunity are effectively obstructed.

And, too, sadness is one of those emotions that has radar. It seems to know when to strike. Somehow, inexplicably, sadness pounces when a person is most vulnerable, when they've had enough, when all they really need is a break. Or, to the contrary, when everything seemed so great, to have finally started to come together. Ha!

I am reminded of an old Austrian waiter we got to know a few years back. He would always remind us that, no matter how good or bad one’s life can be, we should always be grateful for our good health and the wellbeing of the family. Funny how that sentiment is so easy to overlook when everything is going your way and so hard to appreciate when everything seems to be against you. And that’s the problem with sorrow—it tends to consume a person, sometimes seemingly with an insatiable appetite. If happiness is a launchpad, sadness is quicksand.

To the bystander, even the intimate partner or compassionate parent, a loved one’s sadness is able to generate such incredible feelings of inadequacy. You can encourage, console, comfort, distract, and support—but you cannot necessarily fix. And while support, comfort, and consolation are the proper things to do, they don’t excise the emotion. Nothing is fixed by saying it will get better. Nothing stops because you say how sorry you are. In spite of best intentions, the monster that is sadness always seems to get its due, never leaving the table half full.

The older I get the more I do come to realize that time, in fact, does heal all wounds. Sometimes a scar may remain, some more visible than others, but it always does get better. Thankfully, in most cases time does heal and, like the scraped knee that seemed catastrophic as a child, the pain is gone, there is no scar, and the event itself has lost all significance aside from being just another memory, scrubbed clean and tucked away where its force is only able to generate a faint smile and a shake of the head. At the same time, we are once again able to appreciate the good that came, the value, the pleasure, the happiness that sorrow had so heartlessly stolen.

Sorrow takes. But it will only keep as much as a person allows. In short, it does get better. Just like your dad said. And in the end, it’s your health that matters, just like your waiter said.