Miranda: The onus of happiness

I just stopped crying. The pile of wet tissues is still right here beside me. In part I’m hormonal, on account of having a baby two weeks ago, but the main reason for weeping is that one of my husband’s remote employees just lost his 3-month-old daughter. Apparently she got tangled up in her blankets during the night, and when her mother checked on her in the morning, she was dead.

We can all imagine what this family is going through, while at the same time we have no real understanding of what that bottomless grief really feels like (unless we’ve been there ourselves, which I have not). I hold my own infant and can’t help but delve into the pain that this family is experiencing.

Such horrific loss finds unhappy company in a larger context, even though it’s overwhelming to extrapolate this pain on a global level. There is so much grief and tragedy around us, every day, parents losing children, children losing parents. The astronomic death tolls in China and Myanmar are growing exponentially. Thousands suffer and die in Iraq–on the battle field and beyond. Our local and national news are filled with grisly tales of the awful things that people do to each other.

The enormity of pain around us is enough to make one shut down, which is of course what many people do. (As a kid, I refused to read books that I knew contained a tragedy or unhappy ending; I stayed away from Where the Red Fern Grows and at all costs avoided watching Bambi.) For those who manage to stay engaged, what kind of change can one person accomplish, after you’ve written out all the checks you can write, signed all the petitions that matter to you, held signs at the side of the road? How can we who are fortunate reconcile the trivialities of our own lives against others’ desperate realities? Sit around watching TV and gloss over the pain of parents in China who lost their governmentally mandated only child?

I recall that Christa once explained how writing horror fiction is one way that she copes with demons, and I imagine that applies to not just the demons in her mind, but the real demons around us. (Correct me on this point as needed, Christa.) I think this kind of therapy-through-art (even if it’s subconscious) is important, but I’m not sure what it looks like for me yet. I’m not brave enough to write about the things that most disturb me (kids in pain or parents losing children, for example); it hurts too much.

While I can’t wrap my arms around a starving, terrified orphan in Myanmar and provide her with food and shelter, perhaps my obligation is to wrap my arms around my own children and love them as well as I possibly can–and then some. Push beyond my previous standards and comfort zone. The fact that my life is not touched by tragedy means that I need to step up and make the absolute most of every moment. Of course, tragedy will likely come my way one day too–it seems to be inevitable–but while I have it so “good,” I have the urge to make up for the “bad” in the lives of others through my own mindful living, like some kind of karmic carbon-credit system. Is this ridiculous?

Maybe this means being the best mother I can be, the best wife, the best artist. Not “best” by some external measure, but best in terms of what I know to be true–following the inner voice that really does have all the answers if I shut up enough to hear it. How can I whine about not having enough writing time in the face of a family who just lost a child? It’s nonsense. There is time. Write. Create something meaningful that may heal someone else’s heart, even just a little bit. Understand creativity at a different level. Share the burden of others’ pain by feeling it and turning it into something good, something mindful, something full of joy. Something that matters.