Choose Joy Even When Life Sucks

Long before I ever became a life coach, long before there was social media or even the internet, I laughed at funerals. My whole family does. In fact, some of the driest, most hilarious jokes I’ve ever heard in my life were graveside. If you think that’s inappropriate or disrespectful, then my guess is you’ve lived a blessed life. Only people who’ve rarely encountered grief or hardship hold it at a distance. They believe that if they can separate themselves from those negative emotions fully after the initial experience, then perhaps it won’t touch them again. Those of us who’ve lived through regular seasons of pain understand that there is no way to hide from it or escape it or circumnavigate around it. We know that when grief and pain show up in our lives-and of course they will-the only thing you can do is accept them, take whatever measure of comfort you can, and continue to live even in the wake of death. When Scott and I had been dating for a little over a year his grandfather passed away after a long and valiant fight with Parkinson’s. His funeral, when it came, was somber but also a relief to a family who had watched their beloved patriarch slowly succumb to a horrible disease. When we were driving away from church Scott was in a bit of a daze as he casually mentioned, “I think this is maybe the second funeral I’ve ever been to..or perhaps the third.” He tried to remember the losses in his mind while I sat there reeling, thinking, This is only your second or third funeral? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Because we only tend to see things through the lens of our own experience (perspective, remember?) it never even occurred to me that there were people in the world who’d never attended a funeral or had possibly only attended one or two. I had been to at least fifty funerals in my lifetime by that point..possibly more. Is that a lot? It never entered my consciousness as anything more than what my family did. I didn’t need to contemplate the reasons-they were so obvious they never crossed my mind.