Lense of Possibility

Our Reminder about Grief

Grief is personal. Grief has no time limit. Grief cannot be denied. Grief is not always bad, it is a connection to those we have lost.

When something terrible happens, we need someone or something to blame. Someone who we believe could have changed the course of events to come out with a different ending. There is often no one person or event, but a chain of decisions, that led to what happened.

When anything happens, we can look at the events leading up to that moment, to see all the details, all the decisions that lead up to that final outcome. When that outcome is a terrible, devastating tragedy, we look at all those details, take them apart and try to piece them together into a different ending. But we can’t. The event has happened. There is no going back. We can only look at it as if we are looking through a lens. A lens of inevitability. We can’t change it.

But we live forward. We live life where we can plan and change our mind and alter our decisions. I call it the lens of possibilities. Every decision we make can have an infinite variety of outcomes. When we do all this planning, and living, so many of our decisions we make could end in tragedy. Some of those decisions could be utterly stupid, such as drinking and driving. While others are innocent decisions like driving home in a storm. Life decisions made every day but for this decision, this time, it ends in tragedy.

When a tragedy happens, we need to switch our thinking around to look at the events through our lens of possibility backwards, to see that blame cannot be assigned to one individual or one action.

Look at all the decisions made leading up to the tragedy, and see the infinite number of outcomes that were possible. Leaving one second later or earlier, going left instead of right, going home a day early.

In doing this we will see that many we want to blame, are blameless. Their actions in another setting would have been an innocent life decision. We need to be careful, because to transfer our hurt and anger to these people can create more tragedy.

When you lose someone to tragedy as we did with CJ, it gives rise to pain and hurt and anger.

I have learned only this; there is no going back, there is no do over. I can take that day apart a million times and at the end, CJ will be gone.

There is no blame - I look forward. And live my life with the lens of possibility of connecting with CJ in a new form.