“It’s always darkest before the dawn,” is a phrase often offered to those who have experienced a severe tragedy usually by onlookers filled with pity but lacking any idea on how to properly provide comfort to the bereaved and distressed. To those who are in the thick of the darkest blackness they have ever known, the advice to buck up because the sun’ll come out, betcher bottom dollar can only feel trite, insincere, and worse than useless. For someone whose grief is still so raw that never seems far, far too soon to feel anything like happiness again, they know that the darkness is going to persist for a long while yet. I think that the confusion lies in the fact that we sometimes treat dawn and sunrise as synonymous. For anyone who’s had the pleasure of being out and about before the sun rises, it is perfectly obvious that it is definitely not the darkest right before the sunrise. That’s because the true definition of dawn is the very first rays of light that start to trickle in long before the sun rises. This gradual lightening of the sky takes hours and for good chunks of the dawn, it is still much too dark to see much of anything. We have been conditioned to believe that we must go from darkness to light immediately, at the flip of a switch. The very moment we recognize we are sad or are experiencing negative emotions of any kind, we are to stop them immediately and just be happy. It doesn’t really work like that. We are not weak or broken or less than if we don’t go from pitch black to blinding light in the blink of an eye. Some of us may need to progress from pitch black to onyx to inky to midnight blue to gray and on and on until the sun rises. We may have to go from agonizing to horrible to dreadful to painful to morose to frustrated before we eventually arrive at happiness. When we are walking in the valley of the shadow of death, lost in the mists of darkness, swallowed up in the depths of grief, instead of expecting the sun to magically rise in all of its blazing glory, maybe we can just look for a lighter shade of black. Maybe we can acknowledge that right now, it hurts just a little less. And maybe that can be enough for now.
