What Punishments of God are Not Gifts?: On Gratitude and Grief
Anderson Cooper interviews Stephen Colbert on gratitude, grief, and loss. See the full interview here.
In an emotional interview with Anderson Cooper about the loss of his father and brothers at a young age, Stephen Colbert nodded to the power of gratitude in helping to reframe “the thing that [he] most wished had not happened to [him].” Cooper asked, “You told an interviewer…‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ Do you really believe that?” Colbert replied “Yes. It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering.” This interview highlighted the power of gratitude to reframe the negative events in Colbert’s life, and to help him work through his grief.
Like Colbert’s grief from losing loved ones, the Coronavirus pandemic has led to almost universal feelings of grief among the American public. Grief for those things we have lost, such as a sense of normalcy and routine, loved ones, economic and financial stability, and even interpersonal connection. The coronavirus also stimulates feelings of anticipatory grief, in which we feel sorrow or pain at the thought of impending loss. Anticipatory grief is particularly common in times of uncertainty. Uncertainty is a hallmark of the current times, as the COVID-19 pandemic has no specific expiry date.
Though many people have heard of the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—grief scholars David Kessler and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross suggest that there may actually be a sixth stage of grief: finding meaning. Finding meaning in grief can come in many forms, but one under-appreciated mechanism for meaning-making is gratitude.
Gratitude is a powerful emotion, because it allows individuals to identify the positive in a given situation, even when those events or circumstances are negative. This is because gratitude is related to positive reframing, which is a process by which negative events or circumstances are seen in a positive light. For example, gratitude scholars note that gratitude allows individuals to “reframe a negative event as an opportunity, a chance to learn something new, a chance to gain a new skill, deepen a relationship, and so on.” Therefore, gratitude can help individuals attend to that which is positive in one’s life, even in situations where grief is prevalent.
Importantly, gratitude cannot stop grief in its tracks or speed up the healing process. Though it can be a powerful emotion to help process and cope with grief after a negative life event, positive perspective on deep loss, like that of Stephen Colbert, may take months or even years.
In all, gratitude can be powerful in reframing the negative events in one’s life by underscoring the positive things in our lives. Perhaps purposeful practice of gratitude, through lists, journaling, and simple expressions of thanks, can help us all cope with the grief so common to the current time.
“I realized I was grateful for the thing that I most wished had not happened… I want it to not have happened, but if you are grateful for your life then you have to be grateful for all of it.”