The One About Existence

© NBC

The fall TV line up looks slightly different at the moment due to COVID-19. One show that has returned as scheduled, however, is This Is Us. In a time jump back to the past, as the show often does, the characters Rebecca and Jack in the 80s are upset by the memory of losing their son during childbirth one year previously, and they seek counsel from the kind pediatrician (brilliantly played by Gerald McRaney) who delivered their babies Kate and Kevin. Listening to his story, I came to the realization that he was telling them - perhaps, in a gentler way, and using much less profanity than is my penchant - to embrace the suck:

My go-to was "Blue Skies." You know that one? "Blue skies smilin' at me. Nothin' but blue skies do I see. Bluebird singing' a song. Nothin' but blue skies, from now on."

I sang that song every day to my unborn child. And then we lost that child. For the first month after that, my wife and I would sit in our den and listen to that song on our scratchy old record player over and over and over again. It made us so sad. It was like we were punishing ourselves. 

But then one day, my wife got pregnant again. And to my great surprise, I found myself singing that very same song to that very same belly. And then 25 years later, I'd dance with my daughter to that song at her wedding. 

That song. It made us happy, it made us sad, it made us happy again. I think the trick is not trying to keep the joys and the tragedies apart. But you kind of got to let 'em cozy up to one another. 

When model and TV personality Chrissy Teigen and musician John Legend lost their baby in September, many of us wept alongside them. And yet, Chrissy Teigen acknowledged that "everyday can't be full of sunshine," and that for everything they have to be grateful for, "On this darkest of days, we will grieve, we will cry our eyes out. But we will hug and love each other harder."

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— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) October 1, 2020

Science and health journalist Tara Haelle wrote a great piece for Elemental entitled, Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful. She explains that one way to cope with the stressors of living through the despair of pandemic times is to experiment with "both-and" thinking, as termed by Pauline Boss, a family therapist and professor emeritus of social sciences at the University of Minnesota - coming away from binary thinking in order to deal with ambiguous loss:

For the families of soldiers missing in action in Vietnam that Boss studied early in her career, or the family members of victims of plane crashes where the bodies aren’t recovered, this type of thinking means thinking: “He is both living and maybe not. She is probably dead but maybe not.”

An analogous approach during the pandemic might be, “This is terrible and many people are dying, and this is also a time for our families to come closer together,” Boss says. On a more personal level, “I’m highly competent, and right now I’m flowing with the tide day-to-day.”

It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s existence, but when you can’t change the situation, “the only thing you can change is your perception of it,” she says.

Of course, that doesn’t mean denying the existence of the pandemic or the coronavirus. As Maddaus says, “You have to face reality.” But how we frame that reality mentally can help us cope with it.

A very dear friend died in 2019 after a malicious and aggressive cancer. A few weeks after her death, her friends and family all gathered for her "celebration of life." Just think of this a moment: here we are, utterly and totally bereft, collectively mourning our loss - and yet, at the same time we can also think back on how wonderful she was and be happy we were able to know her. I miss her every day, and while it is still sad to think about how she is gone, I smile and laugh at all of the ridiculous times we had together, and am grateful.

The Buddhists say, "Life is suffering." And they're right - but that's only part of it. There is suffering, but there is also joy. But joy does not, and cannot, exist unless suffering does, as well. Without suffering, there is no joy. Without hard times, no good times. We have to acknowledge and embrace the suck in order to recognize that happiness even exists. 

That's what I love about the concept of embracing the suck. That, so eloquently, life cannot not suck, unless it sucks... sometimes. There's no "getting through a bad time" or "getting over it." For all the good things we experience in life, we will experience just as many of the bad. The bad stuff is just part of it all.

This is the complexity and duality of life, what it means to exist and be human, and there's no way around that. As show runner, creator and writer Dan Fogelman so aptly puts it, "This Is Us." 

Go figure.