On a family trip to the beach, my little girl played on the edge of the waves. My wife and I played nearby, reading our novels and catching up on months of going and going without rest.
As kids do, my girl moved from the water to the sand and back again with her green shovel and bucket. With her feet in the water, she leaned over to fill her bucket and dragged it back to her sand castle.
Her back to the sea, a wave washed in and erased her footprints.
She packed the sand and created her castle, then returned to the water to repeat.
She refilled, dumped, and built for over an hour. My daughter brought joy to the beach and everyone who watched her work. She molded the final tower and stopped to admire it.
With a proud smile, she walked over to alert her parents. As she pulled us from our books, she turned and pointed toward her castle just as a wave crashed over her work.
Her smiled faded like her footprints.
The wind blew. A seagull flew by. Still her face waited to respond. You could read the calculations of time and effort on her blank stare.
And then after another wave washed over her flattened castle, she let the tears wash over her.
The wind and the crashing waves could not drown out my girl’s cry. For five good minutes, she wailed and gazed at the spot where her castle once stood. Then, wiping her tears away, she walked back to her bucket and shovel. She picked them up and with reddened eyes and wet, teary hands, she went back to work.
My girl, once the epitome of sadness, became joy again.
Sadness quietly waits for us. For my daughter, it waited until her heart opened to welcome her loss. Life continues to crash like waves onto the sand, but sadness is far more patient than the waves. In moments of grief, we know sadness lingers nearby. Part friend; part enemy. It does not shout or call out for our attention. It sits still and quiet beneath our layers of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. The actual act of acceptance comes when the heart opens itself to the loss, even to a sandcastle.
Sadness is a coming home to the heart.
Our fear of and resistance to sadness often make grieving feel more like a category five hurricane than a common storm. C.S. Lewis captures the fight we make against sadness when he says,
“Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.”
Thinking becomes a safe alternative to feeling. I have never met a client, or a therapist for that matter, that enjoys nakedly bearing his soul. For as long as the human race exists this side of heaven, we will cringe at the invitation of vulnerability. When we deny our heart the grief its due by thinking or pretending, we side step vulnerability in favor of intellectualism. While intellectualism may save you from tears, it cannot heal the soul.
Only honest tears restore the heart.
Then and only then can we return to the sand, look back at the sea, and pick up our shovel and bucket to build again.
