There will also be joy.

Today I took my kids to school for the first time in a year. As I watched children disembark from a bus and listened to neighbors reconnecting, I felt tears well up in my eyes. I was overcome by these simple pleasures of life in proximity. 

The moment was poignant not because the pandemic is over, but because it continues. So much has been lost: a year of school, of grandparent visits and sleepovers, of hugs, high fives, and handshakes, of closeness, body language, and smiles—and a million other things. This is to say nothing of so many lives, and the families who mourn them. It is heartbreaking, all of it.

Important ideas are circulating about the enormity of our collective grief and the mourning that must happen. Books about the nature of loss. Art about the many facets of mourning. Warnings that pandemic grief could become its own crisis, reports of the toll on teenagers, and personal essays that explore the difficulty in processing this. I welcome such efforts to break down understandable but unhelpful taboos around death and loss.

At the same time, I want you to know that there will also be joy. My schoolyard moment reminded me that grief exists alongside an equally uncompromising joy. Both leave us vulnerable. And both deserve our presence. 

Grief and joy—two extremes of human experience—are interlocking. This is true in “normal times,” and in COVID times that complexity is intensified, layered, and confusing. We may not experience joy and grief simultaneously, on the same day, or even in the same year, but they both are. We don’t have to choose between them; nor could we if we wanted. (One order of joy, please, and 86 the grief. 🙋🏼‍♀️)

This paradox is central to the human experience. I don’t understand it, but I’m trying to trust it. When I struggle to do so (which is often), I go running and visit the trees and think of Rumi, the great Sufi mystic and poet who advised: “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all!”

How I imagine “welcoming and entertaining” the full range of human experience. Filipo Buonanni’s Harmonic Cabinet (1722), Library of the University of Seville, via Public Domain Review.