The very earliest days of our lives, and our closest relationships, can offer clues about how we cope with adversity.
By Eilene Zimmerman | New York times | June 21, 2020
A few years ago, an unimaginable thing happened in my life . I wanted to help someone I caredabout, someone who was sick with an illness he was hiding. I went to his house, intent on a rescue operation that would end, I thought, with a trip to the emergency room. Instead, it ended with a trip to the morgue. What I found when I arrived was my ex-husband, dead on his bathroom floor. The hidden illness? An intravenous drug addiction.
It was, without question, the most traumatic event of my life, but not only mine. I had two
teenage children at the time, who had unknowingly been given a front-row seat to their father’s slow suicide. It took two years for me to settle my ex-husband’s estate, which was thrown into probate, and meant a kind of suspended traumatic animation for me, as I continued to live in what felt like a constant state of emergency.
Back then, I thought we would never really recover, that our lives would always be stained with this terrible sadness. But now, nearly five years later, we’re doing well — really well. Or we were, until recently, when along with the rest of the world we began living through the current convergence of crises.
It turns out that awful time in my life was good training for a pandemic, for political and social upheaval, for economic and financial uncertainty. The experience taught me that I never really know what’s going to happen next. I plan as best I can, but now I’m far more able to pivot my thinking. I have the capacity to cope with more of life’s unexpected slings and arrows, to accept the difficulties I face and keep going, even though it can be hard.
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