The Sun Still Rises: Surviving and Thriving After Grief and Loss

After my wife died - I decided to create what I called a joy list. The next thing I did probably sounds insane to most people, but I really never cared too much about what other people think because sometimes people just lack creativity. What is the joy list? My thought was that I was obviously in a tremendous amount of pain and I was grieving and dealing with the loss of a loved one. So I would say that could be known as the “sad list”. The “sad list” was filled with all of the activities that I had to do which were sad. For example several weeks after my wife's funeral, the funeral director called me and said that the urn of my wife's cremated ashes were ready to pick up. It was a short drive to the funeral home to pick up the urn but a very sad one. Contacting friends that we could not locate to let them know about Cindy's death was sad. Closing credit card accounts and changing bank accounts was sad. Sad activities were central in my life for several months which, let's face it, can be depressing. So I decided to overcome all of the sadness to create a joy list.

The joy list is very simple. It is just a list of all the things that make me happy, bring me up, put me in a good frame of mind, or things that just bring me joy. My thought was if I could plan each week to do some of the things that brought me joy, it would help balance out some of the sad things I had to do that were on the sad list. My joy list included some of the following items:

So I noticed once I started to work items from my joy list into my weekly schedule—I'm sure this is no surprise—they brought me joy. It felt good to have some joy. More importantly, while I was doing them they brought me joy and I was not thinking about the grief. It was a tremendous boost to my morale. So I would feel sad, I would go do something joyful and then later that day I might have felt sad again. My point is I didn't feel sad when I was in joy. Now the cynics of the world will say to me “well sir, how can you have joy when your wife just died? How can you go anywhere and have fun when you should be grieving?” Well, I say that is nonsense! Just because I worked some moments of joy into my life did not mean that I was not grieving, and it did not mean that I was not missing my wife. I was miserable enough grieving—why would I want to sit around and continue to be miserable? I never understood that mindset. So as for me I choose joy, I choose happiness, I choose to celebrate life because life is short. I am sure there are some folks reading this book who will say “Well, that is a great idea to do the joy list—but to be brutally honest, I don't feel like having joy.” I understand, I really do. The timing of incorporating the joy list is entirely up to you, or you can never try it at all. I'm going to strongly recommend that you do it anyway.

Six weeks after my wife died I went to an amusement park. I found that it did help me tremendously to get out and do things that brought me joy. I'm not saying it is a right approach for you. I'm only saying that worked for me. I also believe that when you are grieving that sometimes you have to “fake it until you make it”. It's almost as if you have to battle your mind—your mind wants to grieve but your body and your spirit want to go out and play. What I noticed is when I put my body into action (like standing in a wave pool) my body convinced my mind to relax and have fun. So sometimes the mind follows the body and other times the body follows the mind. Just give it a try. Here is a bigger question I would ask anyone—what is so wrong with being happy?

Another advantage of making a joy list is it forces you in some ways to schedule activities instead of just sitting around the house being stagnant and sad. You don't have to do the items on the joy list by yourself you can invite friends and family to join you if you like. For example my daughter and her husband went with me to a wonderful art museum and we not only had the joy of art but the joy of being together with each other.