Winter of Discontent

One of my rules is to never claim something has happened “for a reason”. As a foster parent, and as an adoptive parent, I cannot imagine anything so cruel as to tell the children in my care that there was a “reason” they had to go through what they have gone through. Sometimes people do bad or careless things. Sometimes the sickness wins. There does not have to be a reason. It just is. But what we can do is look for the good, or at least the hope, that can come out of these events. Because good things can come from bad.

This last week, a man I knew committed suicide. I had not seen him in roughly 17 years. Even at that time, he and I were not close. I never would have called him a friend, but a friendly acquaintance. I liked him. He was a good man. And while we were not close, we were both close to another person, and it was in that context that we always saw each other.

Sometimes depression wins. Sometimes it wins in dramatic fashion. There is no “reason” for this man’s death. And for those truly close to him, it will be a long, long time before they are able to find any good, if they ever do. And by no means do I wish to minimize their pain and their loss.

But for me, other than knowing a good man is no longer in the world, there is no real personal loss. We had known each other in a different life for both of us. The fact that we ended up in the same city, over 700 miles away from the city where we had known each other, was pure coincidence. We were Facebook friends, but if another mutual friend had not told me that something had happened, I never would have known.

And so, it is easier for me to look for a good, at least in my life. And what is that good? A chance to reconnect with (yet another) friend I have not seen in 17+ years, the precipitating event I needed to reconnect with the friend we had originally met through, and the reminder to tell the people I care about that they are in my life because I choose them to be, and that I value them.

I am suffering from seasonal affective disorder this year. I am depressed in a way that is not normal for me. I feel the missing connections to those I care about more fully than normal. What I am not, and I count this as the blessing it truly is, is suicidal. I have never been suicidal. So far, the wiring in my brain has never gotten crisscrossed enough for that to happen. And I hope it never does.

Because of that, I cannot, and will not, claim to know what this man was going through. And because I have never lost anyone truly close to me to the disease that is depression, I cannot truly understand what those who loved him are going through.

But I can remember to be grateful for what I have, even in a winter of discontent. I can be thankful for the opportunity to reach out and reconnect. I can make the effort to let those I care about know how much they mean to me.

We are promised nothing. And bad things happen for no reason. We cannot control the world. But we can take hope.

I first read Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars series when I was in middle school. One message from those books has always stayed with me. No matter what the hero was faced with, situations in that might cause heroes in other books to seek death, John Carter (and other main characters in the books) never gave in. The motto was “I still live and while I live, I may still find a way.”

So to those who are reading this, no matter the struggles you have, I hope you can remember that you still live. And while we live, we may yet find a way.

Bad things happen for no reason. But that does not mean we cannot find reasons for hope.