I have worked with the same man for years. His wife is living with dementia. She is in memory care now, and he is still at home. He visits her, then drives back to a house full of her things.
He likes to have control. I say that with real affection, because that instinct is a big part of how he has held his family together.
We were talking about something he had been turning over for weeks. I told him what I have told him before, gently, because it needed saying again: this one is outside your control.
He smiled and said he had a quote for me, from Mickey Rivers, the old Yankees centerfielder:
“I don’t get upset over things I can’t control, because if I can’t control them, there’s no use getting upset. And I don’t get upset over things I can control, because if I can control them, what’s the use in getting upset?”
We both laughed. It’s good logic. Sitting there, though, I realized it skips a step.
I have been quoting a different version of this for years:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
The first line asks for peace. The second asks for nerve. The third line asks you to tell them apart, and that is where most of us get stuck.
Almost nobody I sit with lacks courage, and almost everyone is capable of acceptance. What trips us up is sorting. We pour energy into a coworker’s attitude, a grown child’s choices, a sister’s marriage, and while we’re busy with all that, the one thing we could act on sits there waiting. Mickey Rivers assumes you already know which pile everything goes in. Most of us don’t. Sorting takes wisdom, and wisdom is slow.
Then our conversation turned, the way the good ones do.
He told me his emotions had been all over the place. Up one hour, flattened the next, angry about something small, fine again by dinner.
I said, “That’s grief. You’re grieving.”
He looked at me the way people do when a word lands somewhere unexpected. Nobody had died. He sees her. She is right there.
Grief starts the moment the losing starts. It can go on for years, and it arrives in plenty of places besides a funeral: a marriage that changed, a friendship that drifted, a parent who isn’t who they were, a version of your life that didn’t happen. Nobody sends flowers for those. People tell you how well you’re holding up, and you grieve on your own.
That was the most useful thing I said all afternoon, and it was one word. When someone’s feelings are all over the place, giving the feeling its true name can be the kindest thing you do for them. It tells them they make sense.
He sat with that, then admitted he hadn’t reached acceptance yet.
I wanted him to hear this, and I want you to hear it too: acceptance arrives when it arrives. You can’t schedule it or talk yourself into it on a deadline. It means you have stopped fighting the fact that something is true, and that’s all it means. You can accept something and still wish with your whole heart it were different.
That afternoon I noticed something I had somehow missed for years. The serenity prayer and the stages of grief end on the same word, acceptance. One says it in the language of prayer and the other in the language of psychology. Both put it at the end of the road.
So the next time you’re carrying something heavy, or sitting across from someone who is, try one question.
Is this mine to carry?
Notice which answer makes you uncomfortable. That’s usually where the wisdom is trying to get in.
It was a meaningful conversation. I won’t forget it, and I don’t think he will either.