A recorded conversation exploring how profound grief disrupts prior beliefs (e.g., "if I'm good I'll be protected"), producing feelings of betrayal, disorientation, and the paradoxical emergence of laughter and lightness amid despair. Speakers discuss how confronting deepest suffering can free people to reassess life, make new rules for living, and find a "cosmic joke" or silver lining that permits inquiry into meaning and a renewed focus on one’s own life.
One of the things that has always amazed me in the work that I have done, the grief work that I've done with literally thousands of families, is the laughter that appears right behind the despair, almost as if laughter were a bubble of air trying to find its way to the surface through the water. That laughter was life. Laughter and light heartedness somehow has something to do with the deepest despair. How do you see that?
I remember you saying to me in the early days after Jenna died that you really believed that if you lived a good life and you basically did the things that were going to be of benefit to your community, that you'd be protected by life itself. And there was this kind of omnipotent thinking that, well, if I'm a good person, of course I'll be protected.
And you laughed.
Life is fair after all.
Life is fair. And all those parents and you got the cosmic joke, which is we don't really know anything. We don't know how it works. And we can't live in that illusion anymore.
No deals. We don't get to play God. So what we get is what?
We don't know the rules of engagement. We don't know whether there's some kind of vast, clear, organizing intelligence or how it works.
And so it's like, oh, my God.
I was led to believe that this was life and it isn't life.
We feel betrayed.
That's right. And my children for sure were going to live forever. And frankly, I was going to live forever too. And now nobody's going to live forever.
It's an abomination of nature.
That's right. It feels like an abomination of nature.
And so all of our ordinary reality, all bets are off. And so now it's like we're absolutely disoriented and everything seems like a joke. Work as it was before seems like a joke. Success as it was before seems like a joke. Our reputation being enough to just make us perfectly happy doesn't fill the hole inside.
Seems like a bad sitcom, it's a bad sitcom.
And so we're free now in some paradoxical way, because we're feeling the deepest core emptiness that's possible, that's unfillable, that now we can afford to go into the depths of ourselves and get the joke of what ordinary reality appears to be. And we can be irreverent, we can be outrageous, we can be anything. And at one level we get to make our own rules. We get to laugh at what we want to laugh at. We don't have to behave the whole idea of behaving. Whose rules are we following anyway? And then what happens for many people is the lightness is released because the tight rules of engagement are are a joke. And so there's that hidden silver lining in there.
And that paradox of going deep enough to where we face our deepest suffering also does release the permission for many of us to be able to inquire.
What'S my life about now?
From a completely fresh virginal place. And it is the silver lining. And you of all people have earned and paid the price as dearly as anyone can pay the price and have come through the other end to be able to to actually care about your life now and not only or primarily so dominantly taking care of the lives of others. So in some way for you to really do the full 360 and to get the cosmic joke.
And be allowed my continued sorrow, it's all part of.
The packaging and the continued freedom at the same time.
