"the terrible club to which we all eventually belong"

Not long after my dad's death, I felt like everywhere I turned--in every article on the internet, every youtube comment, every news story or movie or tv show--there was someone who was also mourning a terrible loss. I remember laying on my bed, thinking about how many other people were most likely suffering, right now. I thought about how much pain and grief and sadness and emptiness had always been swirling around me as I blithely lived my life.

 How many of the people I encounter every day, I wondered, are hiding some terrible sadness? Maybe that barista woke up crying for her dead parent this morning. Maybe that mailman just got the news that it's definitely cancer. Maybe that rude customer is acting angry to mask their terrible, terrible fear of how will i feed my kids. I thought about how much loss there actually is in our world. No one lives forever. Every loving relationship will eventually end in heartbreak. I suddenly felt an intense connection with everyone else around me, because eventually we all are hurting in our own ways, for our own reasons.

I recently stumbled across a quote from Rosanne Cash that beautifully describes the feeling I'd had about the suffering all around me:

“In the months since my father’s passing I had come to understand that the loss of a parent expands you- or shrinks you, as the case may be- according to your own nature. If too much business is left unfinished, and guilt and regret take hold deep in the soul, mourning begins to diminish you, to constrict the heart, to truncate the vision of your own future and to narrow the creative potential of the mind and spirit. If enough has been resolved- not everything, for everything will never be done, but just enough- the deep grief begins to transform the inner landscape, and space opens inside. You begin to realize that everyone has a tragedy, and that if he doesn’t, he will. You recognize how much is hidden behind the the small courtesies and civilities of everyday existence. Deep sorrow and traces of great loss run through everyone’s lives, and yet they let others step into the elevator first, wave them ahead in a line of traffic, smile and greet their children and inquire about their lives, and never let on for a second that they, too, have lain awake at night in longing and regret, that they, too, have cried until it seemed impossible that one person could hold so many tears, that they, too, keep a picture of someone locked in their heart and bring it out in quiet, solitary moments to caress and remember. Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.”