Pop 89: Trust the Joy

By Madonna Hamel

It is hard to trust moments of joy in times of misfortune. They feel like a cruel joke or a random response to the workings of the universe. My brother's stroke has left us all stunned and hurt and wondering where the joy went. And still, moments of sudden laughter and wonder break through. Then, the trick is to let them land, to give their credence and their due. Let them settle into the broken places of our being. 

I remember the first time I realized I'd started to trust "pain" more than joy. I lived in Memphis, TN, where pain is a long-standing reality. Memphis is The Home of the Blues, after all. And it sits, plop in the middle of the Trail of Tears. And it's a Civil War cemetery. Sadness seeps up through the red soil. There, the tendency of my fellow artists to flirt with danger seemed to come with the territory. They often wandered the shores of the Mississippi and the streets of Memphis at night and were more than once chased or accosted by junkies. I noted how danger is a drug in itself- a hit one can get hooked on.

But why isn't joy as powerful as danger? I wondered. Maybe this is part of the tragic romanticism of an over-extended adolescence - to believe the bad stuff was somehow more valid and real than the good. There's a phase in one's development - especially in those nihilistic twenties when it's all about me, and the drama is only and always happening to Me personally. When "wisdom" means accepting that "bad" is the default spot. Life is suffering, you say, so get used to it. Be realistic. Grow up. You begin closing up.

But now I respect the people who can resist the urge to be glum, misanthropic, distrusting, closed. I admire the risk it takes to be present to the big and small joys that surround us daily. Like the magnificent woods that surround my brother's cabin on Cortes. Despite the fact that he is forced to sell his land full of breathing, ancient, giant first-growth trees, the magic and beauty is here to behold until it's sold. 

The tendency to pre-empt wonder and enchantment because of a future loss is as insane as not falling in love with life because, hey, we're all gonna die one day. Like the old aphorism says: It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. So: Don't cry that it's over, smile that it happened.

Oh, so easy to say when you are not the one who's had the stroke. Walking the forest for the last time before heading back to the prairie, I realized that all the special places he loved to show us - the trees with cubby holes big enough to fit two standing adults, the moss-covered branches that look like creatures springing from tree trunks into the air, the rocky face with a clear view of the ocean - he can no longer make out. He can't even find them, let alone discern them or remember them. It's enough to make a person cynical. To not trust Good Times, to be on guard for inevitable Hard Times around the corner.

However, the only place wonder and enchantment, miracles and magic can occur are in this very moment and very close: like the arm blanket covering my feet as I write this.

But what if this very moment also reminds us of what we can't see or remember? How then do we trust the joy? My brother says that when he was in ICU he heard a voice say: "You must accept everything that happens to you." And he suspects that it is through acceptance that we pass through the fear, shock, and doom. In fact, fear, shock and doom - along with nausea, a bad smell in the sinus cavity and an electric buzz passing over the skull - describe his periodic semi-seizures. Several times over the last six weeks, he's reached out his hand to me, and I've grabbed it and held it tight while he passes through a few minutes of terror. 

So, when driving along a stretch of highway on our way back to the hotel after a visit with the brain doc, imagine the "joy" I felt when from the passenger seat he reached for my hand, and it was not because he was having a seizure, but because he could see. For the first time in a year and a half, he could see the road in front of us, the ocean on his right and me, seated at the steering wheel, on his right. When was the last time you cried for the gift of sight - the joy of being able to see? This is what my brother has taught me.

The miracle, as I've written, lasted about twenty minutes. But it happened two more times after that. And each time the moment was a cause for celebration. And a tiny opening for hope - something he dared not allow. Hope, he often said after his stroke, is a burden. What self-centred, over-intellectualizing moron told you that? I wanted to ask. Hope is human. Joy reminds us there is much to hope for.

Then there's the poet Christian Wiman who, having undergone treatments for a rare brain disease which should have killed him a decade ago, has just edited a collection of poetry on the subject of joy. He writes: "There is some inexplicable connection between suffering and joy. One of the greatest graces of this existence is that we are able to experience joy in the midst of suffering." 

While I understand what Wiman is saying, I'm not about to suggest to anyone in the middle of their suffering that they find the grace to experience the joy. Grace is not something you just call up. But maybe being open is a start.