“We become less human if we don’t tend to grief in an open-hearted and generous way,” says Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde of Washington, DC. “We face into that abyss and say yet I will live, yet I will pass on life and joy. Even if I can’t know it myself, I will ensure that others will, and I will find my greater meaning in that.”

EXCERPT: THE OTHER SIDE OF SADNESS by George A. Bonanno

In his famous memoir, A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis wrote, “The mind always has some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back.” As his wife was dying of cancer, Lewis found it “incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety” they “sometimes had together after all hope was gone.” When his wife died, Lewis’s grief felt relentless. Yet he reminded himself that it was not as constant, not as demanding as he imagined his wife’s physical pain must have been. “Physical pain,” he said, “can be absolutely continuous…like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment,” but “grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead.” It is that respite from the trench of sadness that makes grief bearable. It is the marvelous human capacity to squeeze in brief moments of happiness and joy that allows us to see that we may once again begin moving forward.