Finding Joy

Last Thursday was a normal day for me. My husband was on a business trip, I woke up, got my three oldest kids on the bus, cared for a feverish toddler and cuddled him on the couch instead of working out. I did the dishes. I made extra coffee.

While I was doing these ordinary things, a woman lay quietly dying in a town next to me, at a hospice home. She had lost her fight against breast cancer. She was a former member of my book club though I didn’t know her. She was almost my age, 37, and had two young kids.

Also circulating this week are the beautiful words of a neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, as well as his death from metastic lung cancer.  He was also 37, with one young daughter. Somehow it is our common age that makes these lives, these stories, set up camp in my heart. Being a parent, the one responsible for so many things, the doer of so many tasks, it is easy to think we are invincible. That death can’t touch us because there is breakfast to be made and a school run in 15 minutes.

At the same time, there is new life all around me. It seems like every time I turn around a new baby is being born to my friends, my family, bloggers I read. I went to my nephew’s baptism this past weekend, in a church overflowing with the children of my family and friends. The spirit of young children was so well captured by Paul Kalanithi as he wrote of his final days:

 “Yet there is dynamism in our house. Our daughter was born days after I was released from the hospital. Week to week, she blossoms: a first grasp, a first smile, a first laugh. Her pediatrician regularly records her growth on charts, tick marks of her progress over time. A brightening newness surrounds her. As she sits in my lap smiling, enthralled by my tuneless singing, an incandescence lights the room.

How can one world hold so much? How can one heart?

At the christening, I talked to my friend Dave, whose 7 year old son has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and is adorable and hilarious and has a life expectancy of 27 years.  I think about their family a lot, mostly because they post the funny things he says on Facebook. (Today’s example: When his mom got pulled over by a cop for speeding, he shouted, “Mom, are you going to jail!?” She got a warning.) They recently got turned down for a drug trial that they were really hoping to participate in, to hopefully buy time for their son. His wife Kathy took the news really hard. But Dave said, “I just keep telling her, we have today. We have right now. I choose right now.”

I am in awe of Dave and Kathy. And Paul. And the caretakers of people who will walk the narrow way on this earth. But I think they know something precious from their trials. Young people who have lost a parent, and husbands and wives who have lost their spouse, people with family members battling chronic illness. They know how to find joy, since they have had to cultivate seeking it out. And they know not to take it for granted.

As I waded through another week of a winter that is just hanging on, of colds that are just hanging on, I thought of those hurting, and I thought of Dave and Kathy. And how insignificant (though very real) my cabin cancer + sick kids + husband traveling week was was in the big picture. I had a chat with my heart that was buried under all these layers of coldness and loss and isolation.

Enough. Find some joy.

So I set out to turn my heart around. To chose right now too. I went for a run and took a shower, I bought some flowers and cooked a big dinner for all the people I love. I read to my toddler and five year old. I listened to my chatty first grader about diaries and first grade gossip (which is hilarious). I played chess with my second grader. I prayed.

And something happened. Something really remarkable. By opening up the space in my heart for joy, it had a place to go to. And it came. I don’t know if it was grace, or neurons, or something in our will that lets us choose joy, but it happened.

There is such a vastness wrapped up in the small, insignificant moments of our days. A loved one walking in the door, a belly laugh, the taste of good peach jam on toast. It is hard to catch sometimes, but it’s there. Here’s to seeking it, to being reminded of it, and to letting it rest in our hearts.