The Road to Happiness is Found Along a Path of Sadness

I believe that in order to know and understand true happiness you must first know and feel deep sadness. Emotion is innate, we as people do not work for emotion rather it comes just as your brain does- inborn and ready to function. To understand happiness or anything you must also be able to grasp the antithesis of that feeling or object. If you don’t know the opposite the world seems to dangle upon a string of ignorance.

On my birthday a few years back my dad went in for a simple angioplasty that my mother and he decided was best kept as a secret, but when that simple angioplasty turned in to a vital quadruple bypass surgery- the secret was revealed. I remember it so well, my pastor walking in to my house with a look of concern on what I had planned as a simple birthday; somehow I knew at that very moment that something had gone very wrong.

My siblings and I entered his room with fear, a fear of what to expect. When I first walked in, I saw my dad; the one I had called cutie-pie daddy, laying with his blue eyes filled with tears, the look he gave me is a permanent image in my mind- it was the look of attempted courage and strength. Up to that point in my life, my father had been an idol, but after those weeks of question his status had changed to hero.

Hearing the doctors tell my mother that my dad wasn’t going to wake up was the point where my hopeful outlook plummeted into deep sadness. Never had I thought of losing a parent, I was “happy” being normal, but those two weeks of limbo between whether to end life support or not drastically altered my view on happiness. My mom sat by his bed for two weeks, carrying on one sided conversations, praying, and staring. She wasn’t the same mom I had known, she had reached a point were the sadness was overwhelming, she remained strong for me and my siblings, but nothing could veil her sadness.

On that fourteenth day after numerous of “there’s a minimal chance of him making it ma’am” my dad performed the most fantastic magic trick I could ever dream of, he awoke from his coma. That was a feeling of true happiness, and that happiness has and will follow me forever, the happiness I had known before was in no way comparable to what I had felt on that day in June. I, along with the rest of my family had discovered true happiness and love through an unexplainable time of deep sadness and supposed loss. Never, will I look at my dad- the fighter, in the same way, he overcame so much and taught my family the most important lesson we have ever learned- the lesson of genuine happiness.

Without even knowing it, my dad taught me that the discovery of happiness is found through a path of sadness, this I believe.