Somethings in Life Cannot be Fixed – They Can Only be Carried

Ali Family Autism Truths #5 – April 5, 2016

Somethings in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

I am not the originator of that profound and immense thought. I wish I was. Surely I have felt it in my soul numerous times.

Like so many people, I have numerous articles and links saved in different places – on Facebook, on my computer, copy and pasted into a note in my phone, or cut out of magazines (yes, I still read actual magazines and newspapers and – gasp – books from time to time.)

Megan Devine has this phrase as the mantra of her grief-focused blog, Refuge in Grief: Emotionally Intelligent Grief Support. But I first heard it in a post written by Tim Lawrence on his “Adversity Within” blog, in which he adamantly writes that things don’t always happen for a reason. And, to say that to people in times of difficulty and adversity can “destroy lives” and is “categorically untrue.”

I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I do know that this phrase is fraught with minefields.

Writes Lawrence:

Let me be crystal clear: if you’ve faced a tragedy and someone tells you in any way, shape or form that your tragedy was meant to be, that it happened for a reason, that it will make you a better person, or that taking responsibility for it will fix it, you have every right to remove them from your life.

Grief is brutally painful. Grief does not only occur when someone dies. When relationships fall apart, you grieve. When opportunities are shattered, you grieve. When dreams die, you grieve. When illnesses wreck you, you grieve.

So I’m going to repeat a few words I’ve uttered countless times; words so powerful and honest they tear at the hubris of every jackass who participates in the debasing of the grieving:

Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. 

With this I agree: Grief is brutally painful. And hearing that these things happen for a reason, a reason we may not be able to know now but from which we will grow and something good will come of it – well, you never know how that is going to be received.

If you are a person who holds faith close to your heart, which I try to be, then this idea that God knows what He is doing, that He is the holder of our hearts and sometimes only He will know why things happen the way they happen, and why things must happen the way they happen – this dovetails into the idea that everything happens for a reason.

And, I do believe that. I do believe that there are things that happen sometimes that will never make sense to us as humans. We will only come to understand in the Hereafter.

And yet …

Yet …

I have born witness to D enduring some of the most terrible things. Years of self-injurious behavior, ongoing difficulties that have permanently altered him in some ways. And in those times, as we try everything to help him, to keep him safe, to figure out the whys and underlying causes for his pain, faith and belief kept me from falling off the edge of the cliff. But hearing everything happens for a reason, in those acute moments, pushed me to that edge.

The truth is that depending on what you believe and what you hold dear to your heart, everything may happen for a reason. Or it may not. But the one truth that remains, the truth that I suspect D has known from the very start, is this:

Somethings cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.