SITTING IN THE SHADOWS
BY 
DONNA HENES

IN LOVING MEMORY OF
JAMES GRAY VAUGHAN
AUGUST 9, 1949 - MARCH 8, 1993

Everything has a shadow. Night is the shadow of day. Winter is the shadow of summer. Sickness is the shadow of health. Old age, the shadow of youth. And death is the shadow of life.

The shadow is not the opposite of the light. A world without shadows would seem very flat and lifeless, indeed. A life without shadows, shallow, superficial and false. It is only because of the shadows that we can see the wholeness, the three-dimensionality, the complex completeness - of which the dark is a part - of the world around us. If it were not for the shadows, we could not appreciate the light. It is the contrast which illuminates.

Yet, when the shadow visits us with adversity, darkness, pain, and death, we tend to bemoan our fate, our bad luck, our sad fortune. We feel sorry for ourselves. Yet, ironically, we find it so hard to feel bad when we feel bad. To allow ourselves to be really sad. (And not mad, which is different.) We are too scared - exposed and vulnerable. Nothing has prepared us. 

We find ourselves feeling resentful, gypped somehow of our constitutional right to pursue happiness. We wish life just wasn't so hard. We want things to be different. Better. Easier. We yearn for brighter times, lighter moments. We want to run away, preferably to someplace warm and sunny. The problem with escape is that if we only strive for, live in the light, we lose half of the day. Half of the year. Half of our feelings. Half of our lives.

And there are some things that you can only learn in the dark. 

We are like frightened little children who need a night light. We forget that the light is always there - somewhere - anyway. We just can't see it when it's dark. It's like the dark side of the moon, which we perceive only as absence of light, failing to recognize the dark richness of its own ambiance, its own opaque energy. It's own invaluable lessons. The dark offers us a chance for enlightenment, but our eyes fail us in the shadows. And so we panic, preferring anything to the deep pitch, the petrifying recesses, of our own souls.

This terror is the turning point. The time for determination. It is at this critical moment that we can consciously choose to dwell in the dark for a spell- for as long as it takes - despite our fear. We can decide to take on the dark and to take it in. To deal with it. To go where ever it takes us. To explore the blind byways of our pain, inching along, feeling our way through the tunnels with our tongues if we have to.

To plumb our emotional depths and mine that precious secret ore of our own poignant life experience. To feel our heart actually break, explode apart, like a geode, revealing the tender crystals growing inside. To engage ourselves passionately in all that life has to offer. For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death due us part.

At the funeral of Thurgood Marshall, The Reverend Doctor Calvin Butts, Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, eulogized, "In order to GET somewhere, you got to GO THROUGH something."

During the last real conversation I had with my dear brother friend Jimmy before he died, I asked him what he had learned through his long, hard suffering struggle. "You've' been through so much, honey. What was the lesson? Please share it with me." 

He told me, "I learned that you have inside of you what you need to be able to get through what you have to."

"I never knew that before," he said.

© 1998 Donna Henes