In the heart of pain, you find joy

I remember walking through the park the first spring after he died.

I remember walking through the park the first spring after he died.

Published Sep 21, 2014

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London - When I was 20, a middle-aged neighbour confided in me that the happiest time of her life had been when she was bringing up her family, but that she now felt rather lonely and sad.

Hearing this, I was taken aback: I had always assumed the journey towards happiness to be a one-way street, an upwards trajectory.

It had simply not occurred to me that you could find happiness, then lose it again. With youthful optimism, I believed that, as I grew up, felt more sure of myself and began living the life I wanted, I would go on getting happier.

Looking back now, from the age of 56, I see, of course, that life is far more complex than that: a continual ebb and flow of all kinds of experiences and emotional states.

We tend to regard happiness as a destination - a blessed state of permanently raised spirits that we can reach and then hold on to. In my experience, it is more like an occasional reprieve: somewhere we alight for a while on our way to somewhere else on the journey.

And yet happiness is still something we think that can be “achieved” or quantified - as in a recent study of female happiness, which concluded that most women feel happiest in their mid-20s, but become less so in the following decade, due to the pressures of work and childcare.

My life, as I imagine is the case with so many others, has not followed such a neat narrative. Each decade - each year, even - has had its mixture of light and shade, its peaks and troughs, and a whole range of experiences in between.

The mistake, I think, is to believe you can avoid unhappiness. Or to see experiencing it as some existential failure. How would you know when you were happy if you hadn’t felt the opposite?

Just as in the Chinese yin-yang diagram - a circle divided into dark and light, symbolising the balance of opposing forces - we need the complete spectrum of feelings for our lives to be whole. The light half of the circle is defined by its dark edges - and, if you look closely, even in the dark half, there is still a spot of light.

I know from my experience of losing my husband, Michael, ten years ago to a brain haemorrhage at the age of 50, how the sheer intensity of a painful experience can contain within it a kind of special gift.

I remember walking through the park the first spring after he died. Tears filled my eyes as I realised that he would never see another spring.

but just then I caught sight of a tiny, yellow narcissus with delicate petals that flowers every year, perilously close to the footpath. I felt suddenly overjoyed at the sight of this little flower, surging into life with such indomitable spirit.

For me, this is a metaphor for all of life - right at the heart of pain can also be where you find joy.

When asked recently what I thought were the best and worst days of my life, I replied that, in a strange way, they were one and the same: the day of my husband’s death.

There was absolutely nothing happy about it - and I certainly didn’t believe so at the time - but, although utterly devastated, I also felt intensely, vibrantly alive. It was as though I suddenly understood the truth about life and death, love and loss, happiness and sorrow, for the first time.

I didn’t get a particularly good start in the happiness stakes. My mother, who died a few years ago, was a desperately unhappy woman, who suffered from bouts of suicidal depression throughout my childhood and adolescence.

From the outside, we probably looked like a typical middle-class, Surrey family, with a comfortable lifestyle, rather than the seething morass of dark emotions I experienced growing up there. I was an anxious, overly conscientious child, who could rarely relax into playfulness.

After leaving home, I went all-out to seek a happier life elsewhere. I lived in Paris for a while, then, after university, travelled the world with a backpack: visiting India and China, then working my way across America and Canada. It was a time of enormous freedom and adventure, with few responsibilities, yet tinged with yearning and confusion.

In your 20s, there still seems everything to play for - life is just opening up ahead of you, and you are eager to grasp it and make it your own. But I didn’t quite know who I was, or where I wanted to be. Then, while living in Chicago in my mid-20s, I met the poet Michael Donaghy, the man who would become my life partner and later husband. He was playing the tin whistle in an Irish band on the street corner, and I knew, as soon as I looked at him, that we would have a history together.

We fell in love and, when my visa expired and I had to return home, we carried on our relationship between the two continents. For the first two years, we were caught between the intense delirium of being in love and the dreadful wrench of parting.

Eventually, Michael moved to London to live with me, and we bought a small flat together. At last I had a sense of home, one chosen and created by me, with the man I loved. I was happy, for a time, although always slightly afraid it would all go wrong and slip out of my grasp.

Then, in my 30s, we started trying to have a baby. I had an ectopic pregnancy, from which I almost died, and which led to me losing my fallopian tubes; and, finally, after years of fertility treatment, in vitro fertilisation, which to my great delight worked.

At last, I had the baby I longed for - and I remember sitting in the garden, with tiny Ruairi wrapped up in my arms, feeling happier than I’d ever been.

But anyone who has had a baby knows that the sleepless nights and the sheer exhaustion of caring for another human being can take their toll, and there were often moments when I wondered whether I had done the right thing having him.

Being a mother, though, has made me happier, and, at times, more wretched, than anything else in my life. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The decade after 40 has been described as “the age of grief”, when those you love begin to be intimately affected by illness, bereavement and other troubles. Perhaps it’s just that as you turn the corner of mid-life, you stop feeling immortal. Life no longer seems full of endless possibility, but short and, sometimes, very rough going.

It was when I was 46 that Michael died suddenly, and I was left to raise our eight-year-old son alone.

The loss left me staggering under a profound sense of shock and grief, which, ten years later, is still a part of who I am. But it also gave me a sense of new possibilities; new directions I might take as an individual, rather than as half of a couple.

My 50s have, so far, been a decade of considerable personal fulfilment. I have written and published a book about my experience of grief. My son has grown up to become a lovely young man.

As a woman, I definitely have a sense of becoming less visible in society, but, in a way, this means I can watch the world without being seen, from a higher branch. The benefit of growing older is seeing life through the wide-angle lens of wisdom and experience.

And I realise now that a lot of things that seemed so important don’t matter nearly as much as I thought they did.

We have to understand our own temperament to be happy. My friend’s husband has the most even disposition of anyone I know: he wakes up every morning feeling exactly the same, steady as a rock.

Whereas I, with my constantly changing moods, never quite know from one moment to the next how I will feel. It has taken me years to forgive these dips and surges of the spirit and understand them for what they are - just part of who I am. And to realise that, like everything else in life, they, too, will pass.

Adversity has strengthened me as a person. I’ve got a good idea of my capabilities, my needs, my vulnerabilities. I feel happiest now when I have a sense of quiet acceptance of whatever is happening in the moment, of being ‘in the flow’.

When people who are dying are asked what they would have done differently, almost everyone replies that they wish they had spent more time with the people they loved.

Family, friends, being needed, being loved - these are the things that bring us satisfaction. Not heaps of money or a washboard stomach.

I’m pretty sure, also, that if you asked whether they’d rather have had a life blissfully free of troubles, or a full, rich experience of all that life has to offer, most would opt for the latter.

It’s hard, in a society where we are bombarded with images of other people’s happiness, to remember these smiles are often just for the camera, or trying to sell us something. We can feel ashamed of not living up to such ridiculous ideals.

But what if the pursuit of happiness means we don’t always recognise what is already good and fulfilling in our lives? “Contentment is wealth,” as an old Irish saying goes.

Perhaps it’s time to stop worrying about being happy, and, instead, allow ourselves to feel whatever we feel, with acceptance and compassion and understanding that, however good or bad, it won’t last.

Who knows - that might even make us happier, for a while.

Daily Mail

* Maddy Paxman is the author of The Great Below - A Journey Into Loss, Garnet Publishing.

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