I'm sorry to tell you, but we have very little control in life.

But we still get to choose how we want to live.

I didn’t have control when my husband died of cancer almost three years ago. But I did have a choice about how I wanted to live.

The truth is, we have very little control in life. Sometimes, shit just happens and there’s no explanation. We often get stuck trying to find a reason why the bad thing happened, or what we could (or should) have done differently to avoid the terrible outcome.

Our brains are meaning-making machines. When someone dies we not only want to know how they died, but why. This quest for answers is not necessarily a bad thing when it leads to scientific innovation, however, that’s not what usually happens on an individual level.

When my husband died I wondered if I had done some things differently, might he still be alive today? What if I had noticed his tumor sooner? What if he hadn’t gone on the clinical trial? What if….

The “what ifs” live in the past, and as far as I know, there isn’t a time machine that can take us back for a do-over. That’s a very logical way of looking at it, but the “what ifs” are ruled by our emotions. 

Rationally, we know we cannot go back and change what happened. When confronted head on with the reality of how little control we have in life, we can be driven by fear to grab it back with magical thinking (such as going back in time).

So, how do we get past our fear of the unknown? How do we embrace this new found understanding about our lack of control over our lives, and the lives of the ones we love? This is where we lean on our ability to choose how we want to live in the present and in the future.

I know this is where I often get stuck because it feels like I have no choices. My husband died and I couldn’t save him. What choice do I have but to be broken hearted and alone the rest of my life?

When I’m not so deeply in my feelings, I can see the faulty reasoning around this belief. Of course I can choose to simply change my attitude about grief and healing. I could choose to join a grief group for widows (I did), see a therapist (I did that too), and/or be open to meeting someone new (I was). 

That’s the difference between having control and having choices. When we are deep in grief, and our brains are trying to make sense of “why” this horrible loss happened, we lose sight of our choices. We are desperate to wrest back what was always a false sense of control. 

We think that we can avoid heartbreak in the future if only we can crack the code of why this bad thing happened. The truth is, we’ve been kicked out of the land of magical thinking, a place where bad things only happen to other people. That door has closed for us, and there’s no going back.

Our choices are to stay stuck pounding on the door, begging to be let back into our old naivete, or we can turn around and see there’s another open door behind us. It’s scary to turn away from what we know lies behind that first door, I know. 

Please believe me when I tell you my friend, that even if the door opens, you are like Alice in Wonderland now, too big to fit through the doorway. We don’t know exactly what lies behind the open door, and that is so scary. I would never minimize how frightening it can be walking into the unknown.

This is the time we need our reasoning brain, but it needs time to heal. Grief work is slow work. Once we understand that emotional and physical trauma have similar effects on the brain, we can see that fast healing is an unrealistic expectation. 

I’ve often said there is no timeline for grieving. I still believe that’s true in the same way that we all learn differently and at our own pace. However, I’ve changed my thoughts around our ability to see that we do have choices, even when we don’t have control.

To grieve is to know on a cellular level that time does not heal all wounds. In fact, time may not heal any wounds, but we can choose to spend our time learning the tools to survive our heartache. We can use our time to feel our grief and rest, rather than swallow it and busy ourselves to the point of distraction and exhaustion. 

I know this takes an incredible leap of faith because intuitively we run from pain and uncomfortable feelings. If you can, seek out other grievers, especially those who have had the same type of loss. 

Find grievers who already have some tools in their grief survival toolbox. Those grievers have already chosen to believe that life gets better. They’ve invested their most valuable resource, time, in learning the skills to move through that newly opened door.

Time is not a renewable resource, so please, choose wisely how you will spend yours. 

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