Joseph L. Bishop PhD, from his book of the above title writes regarding the premature passing of his wife:
. . . . In my grief, I did not know what to do. In short, I was one of the “afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted” (Isaiah 54:11). My past experiences were not particularly relevant in solving this kind of problem, nor was the counsel of my well-intentioned friends, who said such things as, “take it one day at a time”: or “This too will pass.” Time seemed to change nothing for me. Like the movie ‘Groundhog Day’, my tomorrow was always just like today. All I had to do was casually think about Carolyn’s fight with cancer and my mind was off again, rehearsing the devastating details of her passing.
Unlike me, she had not indulged in toxic thoughts like, “What if I had discovered the cancer sooner?” or “What if I had not done the chemotherapy? How much longer would I have lived?” For her part, she entertained no such useless thoughts of blame, doubt, or despair. The past had passed. She had no anger nor had she wasted time “bargaining” with God. She didn’t have to battle any opposition because she had chosen to accept the reality of God’s will. It seemed to me, by her accepting what was, she had somehow ignored the pain that I and others were feeling, blithely skipping through the typical stages of grief and with, unrelenting faith, quickly and quietly moved on. But how she quickly got to that last stage was a mystery.
In my case, the more my mind reviewed those painful events, the more confused I became. My singular grief seemed to hold no pattern of reason. Instead, I was stuck—lost in my grief with no apparent way out.
The Terrible Trigger Points
It was about this time I remembered what Elder Wirthlin had spoken of in one of his conference addresses. He wisely and simply said. “The way we react to adversity can be a major factor in how happy and successful we can be in life.”1 Obviously, the way I had been reacting to my adversity was not working well with me. He went on to question: “How can we love days that are filled with sorrow? We can’t—at least not for the moment.”
He was not suggesting that we suppress discouragement or deny the reality of pain. Nor was he suggesting that we smother truths beneath a clock of pretended happiness. His singular point was that how we honestly react to adversity can be a major factor in how happy and successful we are in life. In spite of adversity and discouragement, those who are happiest seem to have a way of learning from difficult times, becoming stronger, wiser, and happier as a result. Although I did not recognize it at the time, that also was the same “counsel” I had received from Carolyn before she passed away.
For the first time since her death many months ago, I started to examine her terminal condition. Up until then, I had not paid attention to the obvious: that with her own brave, faith filled example, she had already shown me the way out of grief. For example, she had not grieved about her death sentence pronounced by some unknown doctor because she had fully accepted the conditions of that announcement. ~Joseph L. Bishop, Peace Be Unto Thy Soul (Covenant Communications, American Fork,2012) p.5-6 (continued)
