TNH

HOW I MISINTERPRETED GRATITUDE

Every Thanksgiving I think about gratitude. I dearly miss my daughter Molly who died 11 years ago. For many years I mourned her death crom Ovarian cancer and was miserable and at one point suicidal.

At my darkest point i found Thay...or I should say he found me. I learned from his teachings that i could celebrate the 31 years that we had her in our life instead of perpetually mourning our loss.

That lesson helped to turn the corner and gave me a reason to live. But as time went on and i would feel bad about how much i still missed her i began to think, especially on Thanksgiving, how all these other fathers had their daughters and sons to celebrate the day with and i felt even worse.

At a Dharma talk the night before Thanksgiving day i heard the words of Thay through the Dharma teacher saying that gratitude is the awareness and acceptance of the way things are. Grasping for happiness just causes us sorrow and pain.

That's when i realized that I had allowed myself to think of gratitude as only a way to thank someone for something. In the same moment that i expressed gratitude i was thinking about my loss. It had gotten to the point that i ceased to talk about gratitude because it caused me tremendous pain.

Now, i am still struggling to ease my pain and as Thay says to embrace it. I am learning to accept and become more mindful of the present.

Sometimes with gratitude you just have to accept life as it is and be grateful for what you have.