Grief Articles

Rose Colored Glasses
By Darcie Sims

There are some days when nothing helps. Silent pain echoes across the heart leaving tear stains and shattered dreams. It hurts to move, to think, to breathe. It even hurts to be. On those days, when memories burn scars deep into the soul, there seems little relief.

All the coping tricks we have tried in the past seem to fail us, and we are left with a pain so deep that we fear we will be consumed by it. We firmly believe that we shall never again find hope or joy in this world. Our own death often seems the only escape….

That despair comes at the bottom of the valley. We have all stumbled across those treacherous rocks – many of us more than once. Just as we begin to think that we might survive, something tumbles us back into the darkness, and we are sure we have drowned.

What then? It is as if we are left without our dreams or our memories. Existence has become a void, filled with nothingness – not even hurt. On those days, we cannot even feel our pain. We come to know that we can never return to the land of nursery rhymes where Humpty Dumpty is put back together without a trace of the jagged edges where he broke into a million pieces and where everything lives happily ever after.

Those are the days when we must "put on" our rose-colored glasses and learn to "see" in new ways. I always carry my rose-colored glasses with me because I never know when such a day is going to happen. My special glasses give a rosy hue to even the most dismal of views, but more important, people look at me differently. Maybe they see me differently because I see things in a new way.

Just putting on my rose-colored glasses gives me a lift. I know that whatever I am looking at or feeling hasn't really changed. I have changed! Whenever I have dared to laugh in the face of pain, the pain didn't change or go away. I simply changed the way I saw the pain or the emptiness or the hurt of grief.

Rose-colored glasses are simply a dramatic (and perhaps a little silly) change in perspective. But what's wrong with being silly or even childish sometimes? If I can catch my breath and gain a few seconds of relief from the emptiness of my grief, then they have created a miracle for me.

Wearing them isn't denying anything, either. Rather, it is claiming it all. It is searching for joy and light and love, even in the darkest of corners. Love is the reason we hurt. But on those days when all we can see is the hurt, then we fear we may be losing the love as well. Life does become good and warm and loving once again, but only when we have learned to trust enough to claim even that which hurts so terribly. It is a part of us, and as such cannot be ignored or abandoned.

Looking at the world through rose-colored glasses isn't being a Pollyanna; it's being real in the most honest sense. It is an attempt to both accept and live what is, instead of turning it all away and denying that love ever existed. If you ever laughed with your loved one, you have already worn rose-colored glasses. Don't forget them now, they helped you conquer mountains before, and they will help you to see the other side of grief, someday.

Don't wait for joy to come to you – go find it. Search for it, insist on it every day. Wearing rose-colored glasses is a change in perspective; nothing more, nothing less. It is not a choice between pain or no pain, but how we manage the pain we feel.

The trick to those days is learning to live with what you got instead of wishing something else had happened. As you pick your next step through the valley, remember the rocks are everywhere, but so is the path! Don't let death rob you of the places in your heart where your loved one lives. Don't let death dominate the place where spring lives in your heart, either.

We cannot protect ourselves from the rain, but we can go together in search of the rainbow. We can't let death rob us of our rose-colored glasses.

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