Brendan Hoban: It’s necessary to expect and accept sadness                 

Western People 9.7.2024

The word is that sadness is making a comeback. For years we’ve dismissed any display of tears as a sign of weakness or a form of posturing. But Hollywood could see what instinctively mattered to us and took advantage of our need to cry by producing memorable tear-jerkers like Kramer vs. Kramer, Titanic, Beaches, E.T. and, of course, the great tear-fest Terms of Endearment, where a dying mother says goodbye to her young sons. Anyone who has watched those films will attest to the communal catharsis that was once a constant in watching films of yesteryear.

Then Hollywood moved to a more understated melancholy, a more restrained version of the tearjerker where excess is often mocked or pitied or a sign of weakness. Like novels, films are now more measured, less direct, viewed on your own in a more controlled, less communal environment.

In Unless, the novel by Carol Shields, the heroine Reta, voyaging through the rapids of emotional self-discipline, says: I’m not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I’ve had a look and there’s nothing down that road. So Reta makes a self-consciously uncomplicated life for herself by sheltering near the shore.

It’s a mistake, of course, because making sense of the everyday drama of our existence is about going beyond sadness and finding a place where the experience of loss opens up a quiet, warm harbour of acceptance and peace.

It isn’t just about living as John O’Donohue writes, Like a river flows / Carried by the surprise / Of its own unfolding. Or about digging deeper, as Seamus Heaney has said. It’s about moving far enough along a road to a place beyond regret and sadness, where you get an exquisite sense of how precious life is from the very experience of letting it go and you find yourself in a place of happy contentment.

By definition, the young have not yet reached that promised land. What they will  learn is that there’s no substitute for experience. Some day they will discover that everything is not possible; that love passes; that the meaning of our existence is notoriously unsusceptible to every emerging ‘ism’; that there is such a thing as death – as distinct from attending funerals.

Once I used to envy the young with the perfume of freshness and vitality that they effortlessly communicate. Now I don’t so much pity them as worry that they won’t stay the pace long enough to get beyond where they are.

The mistake the young make is to presume that they know everything but what they don’t know is that the older you get the more certain you are that you know very little. The longer we live, the less you know is the law of progressively diminishing enlightenment.

But to get back to sadness. I’m told that some find this kind of chat depressing. Bleak might be another word. Sad, anyway. But sadness just is. I have to say that I’m sad, a lot of the time, and I think that’s a reasonable way to be for someone who finds himself where I am.

In old age, it’s an unavoidable truth that life is ebbing away. I’m very conscious of that. And I’m sad about it too. But there’s nothing I can do about it except maybe prepare myself, in so far as that’s possible, for the diminishments that old age bring. I love my car and the independence it affords me but the day will come when I won’t be able to drive, to stay on my own, to potter about the garden, to type words on a page in an intelligible sequence. And I think it’s reasonable to be sad about that inevitable diminishment.

I’m sad too when I think of the Church I’ve served for so long. I almost wrote so well for so long but I’m not the judge of that. It would be to ignore the theory of modern behaviourists that there’s no such thing as pure altruism – that, selfishly, there’s always a felt need being met, even when we don’t admit it to ourselves.

But at least I can say that I’ve stuck with it. Now I wonder where all the dreams have gone, all the hope and expectation that a series of new dawns promised.

I have my regrets too. I am, I think, what people might describe as borderline curmudgeonly. Not a great morning person. Or afternoon. Or evening. I regret that I haven’t always treated people with respect and sensitivity and in latter years the memory of some of my less impressive achievements can surface ominously in the small hours of the night. I am sad about my sins and my failures, personal and pastoral, especially when I face the gap between the promise of ordination day and the reality of my life, between the ideal and the lived. Could have done a lot better might be a fair assessment at the bottom of the page.

I am sad too that, at a human level, my life is less than I would wish it to be. I sometimes find myself longing for a different life. As I get older I feel that loss more and more and I know that I have to face that and other truths as the tide turns.

What I don’t need is advice on how to block the questions, to distract from the reality of my life. In particular, I resent the effort to jolly everything up as if we were performing seals at a circus. We need to face not just the sadness but the pain if we are to reach the kind of acceptance and peace that lie on a further shore. 

Sad is okay as long as it’s real.