Sola dei Gratia

t’s really not like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross got it completely wrong.

It’s just that, perhaps, she didn’t flesh it out enough. Instead of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, I propose a few less abstract labels. The first one looks a lot like Pablo Francisco’s sketch of “Tommy” in his standup routine in New York on Comedy Central: “No! It’s not over! I love you! The band’s gonna make it, c’mon”—now, that’s Denial. Anger, well, maybe it looks something like this.

The third level of stages of grief usually looks like something we’ve all done before, at some time or another, involving some good work that we promise to do (consistently or not) in exchange for a change of a situation for the better. Of course, none of us holds up our ends of the bargains,

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But that’s only because we somehow know that if we did, we’d be no better off. Depression usually looks like something of an amalgam of that which has already been described and that which is yet to come, a transition : a little anger mixed with acceptance.

Acceptance looks different than acquiescence, though, I think; and a lot different than we have traditionally conceptualized it. When we grit our teeth, dig in our heels, and accept the situation for what it is and assume that because of entropy it will only worsen (and remain stable for all that)— that is acceptance.

There is no need for acceptance in the face of true pleasure; so only in the case of pain, we say, “I am content,” and are able to mean it in a sense that extends beyond the moment; come what may, we say, even though the situation shall deteriorate, I will bear it. Frankly, this is often a beautiful state for one to inhabit because it makes one aware both of grace and of his or her own relations to others;

but sometimes— sometimes—this is the very attitude God uses to shatter the hell-on-earth we take for granted and turn it into something better than we expect. I don’t recommend adopting my dear friend’s old philosophy that by expecting the worst we will never be disappointed because

if we truly always expect the worse, we will drive ourselves into a state that cannot comprehend the good that happens around us (the same happens in the case that we expect too much, and it is named Depression).

There is something about which we all grit our teeth and bear it. Some are more punishing than others, but we all have one or two at the top of our list that has been there so long

we’ve forgotten them; or, more accurately, we’ve become jaded to them to the point that we take them as for granted as gravity in our lives, that force by which we are dragged down but against which we struggle with some measure of success day by day, and becomes as natural to us as breathing.

As a major in philosophy, I love to challenge people’s beliefs; I love to discuss why and how you and I believe that which we believe. As a psychologist, sometimes that includes the feelings that we have for each other, against each other, and generally in our own lives.

(As a cognitive scientist and experimental psychologist, that makes me extremely curious about the nature of subjective experience in general and, particularly, how we conceptualize sorrow; but that’s, of course, besides the point for this post.) Where the rubber meets the road? Right at our points of the most certain. Until a few weeks ago,

I was sure that the surest thing in the world apart from “Sol appears to rise on such-and-such a time within such-and-such a solstice from the planet Earth” was “She and I shall never again share laughter or fellowship—only bare-bones forgiveness at best.

Maybe in the same sense that you can live in a structure with four walls and a roof against the elements and call it a house (though never a home). But like a character out of a Dickens novel,

I eventually took this for granted; not as a thing to be warred against, but an obstacle to be worked around. One more wall in a life-perimeter lined with failed expectations, lost promises, and quiet acceptance of what must have always been.

Nevertheless: for Christmas, God granted me reconciliation and laughter.

We all get used to the ruts in our lives, our minds, our patterns of behaviour, without knowing it; that’s how they become ruts, after all. You make a decision and that’s final, and it will never change; whatever else happens, you know that X is in stone, and that’s all there is to it.

The force that took me down was more powerful and more subtle than the brute force (including argument) of which I’m so fond: it was the true Laughter that I’ve been missing for more than half a decade.

My favourite method of argument to coming around to a mutually agreeable solution is that of intense fighting, from a position of rock-solid opinionated to open-minded willingness to really listen on both sides.

But for Christmas, I was given something sweeter and more powerful than a brute-force argument: mutual laughter. What?

Seriously. This is the man in whom the Dragon dwells; this is he who stands, a statue in the cracked desert floor, another simple program in the great OS from the sky, and nothing more. And yet—

Aye, the impossible was granted. The best Christmas present I’ve received in memory was over half a decade in the making; and it was Yield in the form of Laughter that had nothing to do with artifice generated by comedy flicks, stand-up, or what-have-you.

I would never have thought that Laughter could have melted the fortress of ice I’d hid in, but nothing says “sovereign” like something five years in the making.

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