Reply #22: Mine occurred [View All]

when my wife and I first found out we were three months from the birth of my first child. My mother-in law wasn't feeling good and she was a breast cancer survivor from several years back. Long story short she had pancreatic and liver cancer and had only months to live. So our baby is born while my mother in law is dying. Then my son is born and less than three weeks later my father is diagnosed with lymphoma. Supposedly it was a very curable form but he, too, was a cancer survivor so it made it more complicated. So both of them are going through serious chemo while we are adapting to the stressfull life as new parents, while our parents are dying.

Fast forward to Christmas. My mother in law lives longer than anyone suspected but dies the day after Christmas. My father dies 8 days later when the lymphoma became brain cancer. So here we are shell shocked, numb, hurting and still having to care for an infant.

On the stress scale we were through the roof.

So how do you get through it? You find things to live for, you accept that this situation holds important lessons about life and that if you are going to suffer you learn something from that suffering. You cry, your grieve, you memorialize, you pray (if that is your bag), you find others who can relate, you love, you find small things to be grateful for.

I will always remember this story about the Buddha. A woman who lost her child (the worst loss as far as I am concerned). She wanted a potion to make her forget her pain and grief. He thought about it and then told her he could do it, but her task was to get a single mustard seed from someone who had not experienced loss. She said ok. So she starts in her village and begins to speak to everyone, but she soon realized that there was not a single person who had never experienced the suffering of loss. So she leaves her village and goes to the next one and the next one. She began to understand that suffering and loss are universal and this understanding opened her heart to those who were suffering. In a sense the Buddha taught her how to change suffering into compassion.

Hang in there my friend.