I don’t think it is true that grief “steals our happiness.” Grief is not a thief; if we want to get all literary we could say that “Death is a thief” but grief? No, grief steals nothing from us. It simply settles over our bones like a heavy blanket, weighed down by emotions and crushing us.

Things like happiness and joy are suffocated, is perhaps a better description. And we cling to that sense of numbness as proof of our grief, since after all we can’t be happy if we are truly grieving.

In turn, that makes us angry.

All I wanted for years was to feel happy, but I believed that I couldn’t because I felt wrapped in misery. I thought that once the pain of grief was gone, I would get my happiness returned to me. Yet, happiness is not the absence of misery, it is a state of mind unique to itself. The thing is, happiness is not stolen or withheld from us while we grieve. We are simply too overwhelmed by sadness and anger to let genuine happiness in on purpose, and when it sneaks it (as it will, eventually) we are hostile towards it because we feel it somehow devalues our grief.

What a terrible cycle.

The longer it went on, the angrier I got, even though part of me wanted to be happy if only for a while. We create these situations for ourselves, even if grief itself is uncontrollable. I think the key is accepting our emotions equally, all over the board. We judge grief, we judge our happiness, we judge ourselves for so many reasons but that keeps everything in stasis…and then rot sets in.

We still command our own happiness, I think. Grief and happiness are not mutually exclusive, as the popular mythology of mourning would have us believe. We’re too complex for such simple tales. We are told that these things are stolen from us, when they are in our hands the whole time. We may shelve them or hide them or wallow in them, but it’s all there.

Grief is one long lesson in self-acceptance – happiness, sadness, pain and joy.