Life is hard. It’s one terrible thing after another, and you constantly struggle to get through to the next thing. Life is filled with sadness that just keeps coming. Life is difficulty and pain, and no one tells you this when you’re growing up. Kids are told they can be anything they want to be, and yet no one mentions that being an adult means heartache, struggle, and grief that you have to carry around on your back. I know you wanted to be a rock star, kid, but instead you get to hold back tears in the school drop off line.

This is part of what I spewed at my therapist during my last session. Life felt unbearable. Again. (But stick with me. It gets better. This isn’t just a rant, and if you are struggling, too, read on for a great grief hack that really works.)

The Grief Pile

Well meaning people tell me that God won’t give me more than I can handle. This is really hard to hear, especially when grief seems to pile on top of grief and more tragic and horrible things keep happening. I’m not sure who hands out these griefs backpacks and fills them with rocks, but some people certainly seem to carry more than others. I see plenty of people with happy homes, enough money, and not dead mothers who live nearby, while others carry the intense load of a seriously ill child, a father who died, and a mom with dementia on a nursing home waiting list.

In the past four years, my mother died, my marriage crumbled, and my father had a stroke. Then last week my co-parent had an unexpected major seizure on my kitchen floor, and for what felt like an eternity, I thought he had died, too.

911 didn’t answer and immediately put me on hold with an automated message that told me not to hang up, that someone would be with me shortly. The message repeated in Spanish. Then English again. Then once more in Spanish, while I searched my brain in a panic for what I know about CPR. I couldn’t remember how many pumps or how many breaths. I was stuck in panic and the shock of oh my God is this really happening.

Layers Of Grief

Grief events just seem to keep coming, as if life is making me a trauma sandwich. So many layers. Instead of lettuce, tomato, and cheese, my sandwich has stroke, heart attack, and death. The layers stack on top of one another and press down like the earth–the soil, minerals, vegetation, and rocks, all pressing down further, layer upon layer, pushing toward the core. The gravity of grief pulling me down feels much like the earth deep down, compression and temperature rising until life feels as if it must burst. Maybe after many years our grief layers become diamonds.

Some of us have old grief from long ago. This is our grief with the most history, the most seniority. It is the most experienced, deep down grief. This grief has weathered holidays and anniversaries. This grief is more like an old friend faraway, whom we keep close in our heart. It is familiar and rides next to us in the car. This is the grief where we can see a rainbow, a cardinal, or a shiny penny on the sidewalk and smile, knowing it’s our lost one saying hello. This is our innermost layer, the solid core.

It is unfair that life adds to our grief, that traumatic and awful things keep happening, and we must begin the grief cycle anew. Surely one tremendous loss is enough for one human? It can certainly feel like too much to bear, and yet for many of us grief events happen again and again, especially as we get older and continue to live. Layers fall onto and wrap around our core. Each one hits with an impact and sticks. Each one feels somewhat familiar, but comes with a unique sting. It shakes the ground beneath our feet.

What Do You Carry?

As new grief events happen, we go into them wearing that backpack filled with our old grief. We come with experience, and so in some ways we know what to expect. But in other ways it is more difficult because we come to grief again bearing a heavy load. It weighs us down more each time.

We can’t take off the backpack. Just as grieving changes who we are, that history becomes part of us. It is etched into our hearts and minds. If we could print out our grief history, that list of events, the inventory of what we carry inside our packs, it might help to explain how we are affected by new grief, when something else hits us and grief happens again.

When a very old tree is cut down, there are visible rings inside the cross section, the visual representation of the tree’s life. You can see the years of growth, when the rain was consistent and plentiful. You can see the thinner, drier years, and the scars of surviving seasons of wildfires.

If a magician sawed us in half like ancient trees, maybe then people would be able to see the rings of our grief. Look there, they would say, at that thicker band that looks like burnished gold. That is the year her mother died. The year she melted. The year she transformed and reformed into something new.

Whether it is destiny or bad luck, whether it is the Force or the universe, or if there really is a God up there handing out “what we can handle”, it would be nice to request that they give it a rest for now. To put it on pause. Just stop adding layers to the grief sandwich. We are full.

I am full. But even though I feel that I’ve had enough, with my mother’s death, and my father’s stroke, the universe is giving me more. Not more money or more free time, but more grief.

In the midst of a pandemic I do not need to see my co-parent and the only other adult in my life stop breathing, eyes rolled back in his head, his ashen gray face on my kitchen floor. I don’t want to have to think of how to tell my children that their father has died. I don’t want to be the bringer of their grief. I don’t want to make them a grief sandwich, to be the one who pours that molten metal ring into their very young trees.

Grief and trauma are hard enough to process as an adult, but if your grief events happened, if you lost your parent at a young age, as a child or teen or young adult, processing that loss throughout your lifetime as an adult and living with it can be even more difficult and complicated.

And so I while I was on hold with 911, I swept the blood and saliva out of my children’s father’s mouth. In the back of my mind I heard the Spanish hold message repeat and realized that I understood the words. A bizarre and out of place flicker of memory happened as I thought of Mrs. Gideon, my high school Spanish teacher, of how maybe she’d be proud that I retained foreign language skills as I was kneeling down urging someone to breathe and hold on to life.

Thankfully he resumed breathing, the paramedics eventually arrived, and my children, although fairly traumatized from seeing their parent in such a weakened and helpless state, will avoid trauma and grief for just a little bit longer.

Enough Already

There should be a universal rule that says if you are grieving the loss of a parent nothing else bad can happen to you, at least for a certain amount of time. Unfortunately, there is no such rule, and somehow for some of us, more sadness comes. ‘When it rains, it pours’ has never felt more true.

Sometimes life feels like a circus of sadness, and we are the jugglers of grief. Are you multitasking as well? I often feel as if I’m balancing a hot glass ball of grief over my mother’s death in one hand, while I must have my eyes on my co-parent after the seizure. And simultaneously I cannot drop the ball that is my father, the stroke survivor living on his own.

The Golden Repair

Tangled up in and beneath all of these difficult grief layers, there is a bright spot. It may not always seem this way, but there are reasons to keep going. I may not be wealthy or live in a gorgeous, new home, and I don’t have a full set of living, healthy grandparents to come to my kids’ birthdays or school performances, but today I saw a hummingbird. She was teeny. Her little gray body positively pulsed with life, and down her back the smooth feathers flashed green and metallic in the sun.

That tiny bird keeps going. She breathes and flies and keeps going. She is delicate and fragile, but she is a powerhouse, an amazing, walnut-sized miracle, so beautiful and fleeting and joyful.

Start by finding the tiny joys. The small, beautiful things. Now is the time not just to ‘stop and smell the roses’. Now is the time to push your whole face into that flower, feeling the soft petals crush against your cheeks. Breathe it in. Your joy might be the sipping the perfect hot chocolate. Stretching your body. Laughing with a good friend. Your dog’s nose. It can be anything. You just need to see it.

You have grief, but not all grief. Life is not all grief. Life is grief also. You have grief, also joy. Also beauty. Also appreciation. Also gratitude. You can have it. Possibly not in the amounts you’d like, but starting tiny and building up is the key.

This is the trick for us, the grievers. This is our hack, our habit, and how we can continue to live and go on. We must find the tiny joy. We may have to seek it, to actively look for it, but it’s there. The small beauty. The brief moments of happiness. This is how we will live. If we know how to find this joy, even in minute amounts, we will know what to do when life adds another brick in our backpack. We will know how to fall and how to land. We will know how to bounce and not to break.

Tell me about your tiny joys in the comments below. You never know–your joys might help others see them, too. We’re in this together.