Widowed: The One Good Thing About Grief ・Barbara Falconer Newhall

widowed the one good thing about grief damaged-mandala — The one good thing about grief, unlike life, is there’s nothing you can do about it. This mandala was created in 2014 at Seret and Sons art gallery in Santa Fe by monks of the Yellow Hat School of Tibetan Buddhism. When a visitor (not me!) dropped her camera on the mandala, the monks did not attempt to repair it. Imperfection is the nature of existence, one said. *Photo by Barbara Newhall*

The one good thing about grief is — there’s not a darned thing you can do about it. A life has been extinguished, and that’s that.

Jon died. My mother died. My father died. A whole raft of aunts, uncles and in-laws have perished. We grieve, but no one, neither I, nor you, nor anyone, can undo a death.

The One Good Thing About Grief

A death is a fact. And there is comfort in fact, in the finality of it, in the certitude of it. What’s done is done.

What’s not done and over with, however, are the challenges that those of us still in the throes of life can — and therefore must — do something about:

The cancer diagnosis. The intractable infertility. The job search that, months in, has turned up nothing. The checked-out spouse. The third grader who wets the bed.

You can’t ignore the cancer diagnosis and the soggy bedding. You’ve got to do something about it.

But what? Get the chemo — or opt out? Send the 8-year-old to therapy — or put a diaper on him?

Consciously or unconsciously, we anguish over the daily decisions we make or decline to make week after week, year after year. Our decisions are imperfect and there is no end to them. No sooner does the third-grader master his bladder than we take a pay cut at work.

We’re alive. That’s our predicament.

More thoughts on the Big Questions at “The Center of the Universe? It’s a Little Beach in Michigan, of Course.” And, “You Don’t Have to Believe to Be a Christian.”