Sometimes a hug is all you need. Photo: Maria Sbytova.
In small-scale disasters this week, one of my best mates might have to put her dog down.
Another is pushing through the flaming binfire that is dating in your 30s – trying to keep your standards high enough that you don’t get stuck with someone who sucks the life out of you, but low enough that you might actually get the chance to have kids of your own.
A third is battling infertility. She and her husband are weighing up whether to go through the physical, emotional and financial cost of another round of IVF, or whether they accept their lives without children.
As tough as all of those battles are – and geez they’re tough – each of them had one particularly hated line that gets trotted out by friends and family.
It was always some version of: “Don’t worry; it’s going to be OK”.
For the singleton it often sounds like: “You’ll meet someone when you least expect it!”.
For the couple struggling with infertility, it’s something along the lines of: “Just relax and it will happen naturally!”.
And for my friend saying goodbye to her best mate, it’s: “You can get another dog”.
Any of these statements might or might not be true – and short of an asteroid hitting Earth and wiping out all life in the immediate future, we’re all probably going to be some version of OK.
It’s not exactly what any of us want to hear when we’re in a hole, though.
We all struggle in the in-between places. The times in our lives when things might work out – and they just as easily might not.
Over my career I’ve done plenty of stories with people when things haven’t worked out.
The hardest was a wonderful, driven, smart, kind, funny young woman in her 20s – we were the same age at the time.
She was dying of a brain tumour she’d thought she’d beaten a decade before.
She still had moments of joy in her life. She still had things to be thankful for.
I’ll never forget watching this young woman, whose brain and body were failing her, race her cousin down the street in their matching electric wheelchairs.
I’ll never forget the way her parents, best friend and boyfriend cared for her day after day.
But it wasn’t “going to be OK” for any of them.
She taught me that as difficult as it is, sometimes the best, kindest thing we can offer the people we love is to accept what they’re going through is hard, it hurts, and it might not be OK.
It’s scary – but at least, if we can do that, they’re not alone.
When we tell the people we love not to worry about the big questions in their lives, that their heartbreak isn’t real, we don’t offer them comfort.
We cut them off from it.
It’s when we can get in the trenches with them that the moments of joy seep in.
Vale Sammi Sinclair.
Original Article published by Zoe Cartwright on Region Canberra.
