When Bad Things Happen:
Three valuable lessons life threw into me when my son was killed
“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something,” announces Westly, the farm hand lost-love turned masked pirate in ‘The Princess Bride’ by William Goldman.
There is truth in these words. Yet more jarring to sense is the definitive pessimism that pervades them. How many of us have experienced hard times of pain, confusion, regret or misery in our lives? How much easier is it to let that pessimism turn our outlook to apathy and victimhood, and have good reason for it?
When my infant son, Tristan, was killed in 2016 when we were run over in a crosswalk near our home, it was unequivocal that life would not be more painful than experiencing his death. Even just remembering that day enough to write these few sentences still makes my heart seize and a lump form in my throat. My physical injuries were invisible in comparison to the emotional trauma of that experience. It was only when I realized that I was actually the one keeping myself prisoner in that pain, that things began to change for me. It was I who enabled my healing. I am now unrecognizable from that woman so few years ago, and yet, in many ways the same.
Here are three of the biggest lessons I learned about life, pain, and the truth of being human:
1. We are not our pain.
Pain brings with it innumerable negative emotions that we often absorb into our identity. When life drops us into an insurmountable abyss, the darkness feels more familiar than the light we once knew.
The more uncomfortable the world feels when we feel so out of place, the more comfortable that darkness becomes. The danger is in assimilating into that darkness and abyss so fully that our identity becomes inseparable. We can then start to define ourselves, and others will define us, as angry, resentful, broken, negative, pessimistic, vengeful, etc. and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy against that which we truly desire.
No one with a penchant towards their mental health wants to feel dark, desperate, lonely, and rage-filled for any length of time. This then becomes the crossroads at which we must choose: the abyss or the individual. Only by recognizing that we have a choice to maintain our identify separate from the pain, is when we have the opportunity to begin healing from that experience.
Our pain does not define who we are, or our existence.
2. But, our pain is part of us.
It is foolish at best, and negligent at worst, to consider that we are not continuously impacted by our experiences. It is human design to judge the world around us so that we are able to discern our place in it. This is survival and evolution. The difference is when we are able to understand that the sum of our experiences are not greater than the whole of ourselves.
While we are shaped by pain and the intrinsic lessons about ourselves and the world that we find therein, we are not a full and constant reflection of our pain. Pain is softened by joy, regret is molded by gratitude, despair is effused by hope. Neither end of the spectrum is possible to understand without the other.
Without accepting the pain and the joy, the dichotomy of existence and entirety of the sum of you, then you are able to live only as a portion of the person you are meant to be.
3. And, only we decide how we define ourselves with that pain.
Pain, like love, is an experience that helps shape who we become. It is our interpretation and reaction to that experience that decides just how that experience will be allowed to shape who we are. Do we allow that pain to soften and mold us into more compassionate, curious, and contributory humans? Or do we enable that pain to isolate, torture, and defeat the very soul within us that we yearn to nurture?
Pain is the greatest catalyst to change. We will not change until the pain of remaining the same is too great.
The question then becomes: What is the cost of remaining the same in the midst of pain?
For me, that meant isolating myself from a world that I’d once known as an empathic, highly-sensitive creative who saw beauty, wonder and curiosity in everything. The pain of my son’s loss kept me in a dark abyss where that beauty and curiosity could not find me, nor I, it. A life without that richness of being started to erode my soul and what brief and minuscule glimpses of happiness I thought I might find.
It was like feeling perpetually starved, but where grief had initiated the starvation torture, my own fear of the unknown perpetuated it. I didn’t know how to live a life without my son, and I didn’t want to.
It was when I realized that I could either live a life with the pain of his death and hope to experience the beauty of the world around me, or I could continue to live a life with the pain of his death and live without the richness of beauty, wonder and curiosity, I made my choice. I then let that choice allow me to use the pain of my son’s death to enable me to try to find even more beauty, wonder and curiosity in the world. I chose to allow my grief to heighten my empathy and sensitivity rather than dull and isolate my pain as a deep, dark wound that I would try to ignore.
Some pain, we can’t erase. We can’t mitigate it. We can’t assuage, soften, heal or ignore. These are the moments of pain that, if we let them, can accentuate the things about us and life that we have always treasured.
The secret is that we have to allow the pain, and us, to be… wholly, fully, intrinsically… and know that we will not be lost to that pain unless we choose to remain lost.
About the Author: Mindy Schulz is a transformation success coach, writer, wife, and mother of three. As pedestrians in a crosswalk, her baby in his stroller, she experienced the tragic loss of her middle child at five months of age in August 2016 when they were hit by an SUV. She advocates for tougher distracted driving laws in Virginia while also managing “Tristan’s Light” in memory of her son. Her new book about living through loss, loving through grief, and the intimate soul work of being human debuts in fall 2021.