You’re not obligated to feel grateful.
As we move into the season of Thanksgiving here in the United States, I’d like to talk a little about grief and gratitude.
Last December, about 10 days after my sister died, I was talking with a friend who had known me and my sister for decades - someone who understood the true depth of my loss and who understood all the ways in which my sister and I were deeply connected and intertwined. The conversation was so comforting, until my friend said, “At least you can feel grateful that you and your sister were so close.”
I still remember the feeling that arose within me when she uttered those words, and the wall that went up inside me as soon as she said them.
It was five days before Christmas. My beloved sister, bright and beautiful, was gone from this world forever. My entire world was shrouded in darkness, and I couldn't remember how to breathe. I knew that soon I was going to have to muster the will to wrap the Christmas gifts that my sister had bought for my children and put them under the tree, knowing that these were the last gifts my kids would ever get from their Aunt Melissa.
Grateful? No. I did not feel grateful. Nothing that my sister and I had together before her death felt like a consolation for the pain I was feeling and for the life I would have to live without her.
I would wager that everyone who has experienced loss could tell some version of this story, of someone trying to fast forward them to the place of gratitude. One of the first things we tend to do in the face of loss is try to get people to focus on being thankful - for happy memories, for all the love that we shared with our person, for all that we still have left. We offer up gratitude to each other as though that is all we need to move through our pain.
To be clear, gratitude and grief absolutely can - and do - coexist. It is beautiful when grief and gratitude can sit alongside each other.
But if you aren’t feeling grateful? You aren’t obligated to feel that. You don’t have to try and bypass your pain or force yourself into the land of happy memories. You are allowed to feel however you feel in your grief - heartbroken, angry, anxious, jealous - without forcing yourself to manufacture gratitude.
And if it pisses you off when someone tells you that you should feel grateful, you aren’t wrong to feel that way. When someone is saying to you “at least you should be grateful,” what they are really trying to do is tell you not to be so sad.
You are allowed to be sad. Perhaps even more to the point, you need to be sad if that’s what you’re feeling.
Gratitude comes when it comes. Like grief, gratitude shifts and changes over time, and your relationship with it will change too. When gratitude knocks on your door, by all means invite it in, but don’t feel that you must go looking for it.
In this season of thanksgiving, it’s okay if you don’t feel grateful.
