Lived Through This
Losing My Son Helped Me Learn to Surrender
Moments when ‘everything’s going to be ok’ isn’t true
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Everything is going to be okay.
We whisper it to our children when they skin their knees or have a fight with a friend. We proclaim it to those who have lost their job, their partner, their health. We post it on Instagram, showcasing our optimism. We repeat it like a mantra to ease our own anxiety.
Everything is going to be okay.
We assert it to bolster our conviction that the pain is temporary or even inflated. We utter it to regain a sense of control over the future, to reassure ourselves that the wrongs that plague us now can be righted.
Everything is going to be okay.
We also say it to obscure, to diminish, to tamp down big, unruly emotions. It’s a reflex that releases feelings of discomfort — a trite response to an experience we can’t or don’t want to understand. We say it to skim over the pain straight to the bright side.
The truth is scarier than the mantra. The truth is that everything you think you know could be gone in a moment. There are no guarantees, no promises of life without suffering. The truth is the universe takes as much as it gives.
Sometimes “everything is going to be okay” is an empty promise that makes us feel useful. We use it to deny—deny that the pain could be endless, that sometimes things are not okay.
“Everything is going to be okay” assumes life’s problems are meant to be solved, but sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes life’s problems are truths to be accepted.
“Words or pictures?” the doctor asked, attempting to assess our learning style for our first lesson on pediatric brain tumors. Mike and I looked at one another, bewildered, completely unprepared to guide this conversation.
“Both. I guess,” I responded, absolutely certain I was not ready to face the monster in our two-year-old son’s head but knowing we’d need all the information we could get if we were going to fight it. The doctor opened her laptop and pulled up several black-and-white images of Sam’s brain. She seemed perky as she did, happy, I suspect, to have a screen…
