Some things will never be okay. I think it’s really important to grasp this. Some losses are so devastating the only hope is just to find a way to hold the pain in your heart and manage to put one foot in front of the other. To trust that the searing hot red of it will subside to a dull ache. You may have experienced this in your own life, to one degree or another. The loss of your innocence. The loss of a loved one. The temporary loss of your dignity. There are times I wonder how people are doing it. All the parents who lost children at Sandy Hook Elementary, for example. Those families are still dealing with a sudden, recent, violent loss that is so knifing, so brutal, I can only hope they all had at least one other child. Otherwise I don’t know how you get up in the morning. What motivates you to take a shower, or eat, or do anything, really, when you have to live with the reality that your child’s last moments were spent in terror, and you were not there. I know this is hard to think about, but it’s real. There’s no amount of healing or positive thinking or belief in the idea that “everything happens for a reason” that will ever make that okay for any of those families, or for anyone, anywhere who loses a cherished person through a violent act. Cancer is violent. So are heart attacks. Drones. If you want your spiritual practice to hold you up and get you through, you cannot turn your eyes away from the painful truths. You have to be able to hold it all. Otherwise you’re living in a state where you can only receive the light. And that’s simply not real. Life is full of incredible joy and incredible heartache.

A year ago, Jennifer Pastiloff told me about a friend of hers who’s little boy was dying of Tay Sachs disease. I started reading her blog, Little Seal, and I can tell you as a mother, it broke my heart nine million different ways. I never made it through a single post without bawling. She has a book coming out, “The Still Point of the Turning World” which I have no doubt will be devastatingly gorgeous. You can pre-order the book on Amazon, or you can simply hold Emily Rapp in your thoughts, because yesterday, Ronan left his little body. For his mother and his father, and all the people close to him, that will never be okay. Knowing him and loving him will always be a gift, but losing him slowly and then finally, will never be okay. A friend of mine watched his father die of a heart attack right in front of him when he was eight years old, and that has never been, and will never be okay. For my cousin and his wife who lost their six year-old son to brain cancer 25 years ago, it will never be okay. I think the acceptance of that truth is the doorway that makes it possible to move forward. Expecting to be okay with that kind of loss keeps you stuck and disappointed in yourself when it doesn’t happen. But not being okay with something doesn’t mean it has to reduce you. It can inspire incredible compassion. It can expand you, make you greater than. People in pain like that are usually the ones who take action. Who stand up. Who draw attention to a problem we all need to hold in our hands. Life cannot be wrapped up in neat little sound-bytes. It’s too messy and inexplicable and excruciatingly beautiful for that. It takes a softness and a vulnerability and a willingness to weep if you want to be awake to the realities of this experience of being human. If you want to receive every single day as the gift it is. If you want to live every moment fully. And I surely hope you do. Because this life IS beautiful, even with all its pain. The pain opens you if you let it. Sending you so much love, Ally