Many Happy Returns

There is a site that I frequent called Offbeat Mama: it is a fabulous site, and I love it (although technically my status is Offbeat Auntie).  Recently I was reading an article about supporting your friends who are sub-fertile, and it included a list (several lists, actually) of things you just shouldn't say to people who are grieving.  Some of those things I agree with, some of them I do not (speaking solely as a person-who-has-grieved, not in a everyone-should-deal-like-I-deal capacity), but what particularly stood out to me was the violence with which some women reacted to the idea that everything happens for a reason.  That whole concept just really seems to piss some women off, which is both fascinating and bewildering to me, because (again, speaking only for myself here) to me the idea that everything happens for a reason is the only thing that keeps me sane, sometimes.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned on here before that I'm a fatalist- that is to say, I believe that things happen the way they do because they must.  Some people feel this is a bleak outlook- but I find it comforting.  Horrible things happen, and to imagine that there is no reason behind them- that they just happen- is too horrible for me to contemplate.  I choose to believe that as much as I may suffer over an event, it is part of a larger pattern that I cannot yet recognize- but that I will.  And I must say that events (in my life, anyway) tend to support this.  Bad things- truly awful things- have in time led to good.  Which in no way diminishes the awful- but makes it easier to bear.

For instance- if my father hadn't died when he did, I don't think that my mom and brother and I would be so close.  That's not to say I don't think we wouldn't be close at all- but not like this.  We're survivors of major life trauma, and the relationship the three of us have is not something I see very often in other families.  And yeah, it was a shitty way to go about getting it, but I'm so grateful that we have it.  If my father hadn't died when he did, I would not appreciate the family I have left like I do.  I certainly would not have as good a marriage as I do.  So many things in my life would be different...  and while I would give a great many things to have my father back again... there are things I simply would not give.  And, in discussing it with my mother, I discovered she agrees with me.

We talked about it and decided that it's sort of like... diminishing returns.  Right after he died, if there had been some way for us to undo what was done, we'd have done it in a heartbeat.  But time passes, and that one ugly thread becomes woven deeper and deeper into the pattern, until to pull it out would be to unravel so much good that... it wouldn't be worth it.  And we're at peace with that.

And I think he would be, too.