When my father-in-law found out he had terminal lung cancer, he asked for a party. At the time, Southern California was at its highest Coronavirus numbers. His fragile lungs were obviously immunocompromised, yet the threat was overruled by his desire to celebrate with all the people he loved most.

Surrounded by his grandchildren, his children and their spouses, his ex-wife and his current girlfriend and their expended families, he sipped cognac. He laughed. He moaned over well-cooked meats and a delicate chocolate tart. That night, he delighted in the experience of living. He cancer was inside him, invading his organs, uniting cells into an army that would take his life within the year. Still, he located joy.

In the The Book of Joy, a conversation with the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and writer Douglas Abrams, the Dalai Lama acknowledges the frustrations in life, and adds: “The question is not: How do I escape [frustrations]? It is: How can I use this as something positive?”

In the last months of his life, my father-in-law’s body was ravaged by disease. His motherland, Russia, was bombing his family in the Ukraine. Covid had sent family members and dear friends to the hospital. But throughout it all, he sought the positive. He took long ocean walks, gathered with family as often as possible, and spent hours on the phone reminiscing with old friends. At one point he whispered, “It’s hard to leave all this when everything is just so beautiful.” He didn’t let his troubled times stop him from living, rather, they opened him to loving.

Painting our troubles with gold

The week after my father-in-law died, my best friend was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. I called another friend, high performance coach Damon Valentino, and asked how to not be broken over the combined grief over the loss of my father-in-law and my best friend’s diagnosis.

Reframe the concept of being broken, Damon explained. “Instead let this moment crack you open and be like the Japanese wabi sabi artists and paint those cracks with gold.” When we are broken open, we can choose to infuse the fissures with something beautiful rather than letting ourselves be tossed to the rummage pile.

He added what mental health professionals have been warning us about since the American mental health crisis first exploded. Actively seeing joy, through gratitude, exercise, connectivity, music and plenty of support helps us not feel so broken in troubled times.

A test case: My birthday

This week’s my birthday. It’s not a “big” birthday that ends in a 0 or 5, but it’s numerically big because the number is closer to 50 than I ever imagined I would get. And I’m trying not to feel terrible about it.

Unfortunately, lately, I’ve been feeling kinda terrible. Not about how old I’m getting. But because I miss my father-in-law, always the first to call me on my birthday. My best friend is about to start chemo. My teaching quarter is ramping up and I’m behind most of the time. I’ve spent more hours at the hospital bedsides of people I love this year than any human should have to endure. The US is plagued with terrible news of gun violence, political attacks against women, poverty, racial and social injustice, and Kermit and Miss Piggy’s breakup. On a global scale we’re approaching a climate apocalypse that might be avoided if we stopped making Fentanyl, or obsessing about Kardashians and Game of Thrones and instead starting holding corporations accountable for trashing the planet.

Yet, I keep hearing Damon’s advice to paint my fissures with gold. Though I don’t feel like donning a gold boa right now and screaming from a rooftop bar that it’s my birthday, he reiterated how important embracing the joy is when everything feels bleak.

So I have decided to throw a birthday celebration. Not the kind where I pick some overpriced hotspot and ask everyone to pay for me to dine on caviar. Instead, a few of us will prepare tacos and margaritas, turn up Beyoncé’s new album, and celebrate a night of being alive. None of the troubles will have disappeared — in fact, it is because of the tough times that we must snatch joy when it arrives.

On his second-to-last-day of his life, way more people than the hospital allowed crammed into my father-in-law’s room. We’d smuggled in the makings for a martini, and snagged the doctor who had been by his bedside for weeks now. The doctor held up a cup of tonic water dotted with olives and cast his eyes around the room at this man’s children and their spouses, his ex-wife, his current girlfriend and her family, his grandchildren, and the friends outside his window. The doctor then teared up as he thanked my father-in-law for showing us all that celebrations are necessary even when we’ve sucked the last drop out of life. Since (hopefully) it’s not your last day on Earth, how might you try to suck some joy out of this day, and the next?

~Michele

Michele Bigley is an award-winning writer with bylines in AFAR, Wired, Westways, New York Times and many more. She is writing a book, Mothering in the Anthropocene, about how taking her sons to meet people stewarding fragile ecosystems taught her how to tend to her community. Follow her adventures on Medium; sign up for her monthly newsletter, or check her out on Instagram.