There is a strange thing we sometimes do when something good comes to an end. We go back and reevaluate the whole thing. If it didn’t last, maybe it wasn’t what we thought it was. If we lost it, maybe we were foolish for becoming so attached to it. If the ending hurt enough, maybe we would have been better off never having had it at all.
I don’t think that’s true.
Some things come into our lives and change them. They change how we see ourselves. They show us possibilities we hadn’t considered before. They give us confidence we didn’t have, or remind us of parts of ourselves we’d somehow forgotten along the way. They influence choices we make and directions we take, sometimes in ways we don’t fully understand until much later. And sometimes, despite all of that, they leave.
That doesn’t undo what happened while they were here.
I think we have a tendency to measure the value of things by how long we get to keep them. We treat permanence as proof that something was worthwhile and loss as evidence that something went wrong. But something doesn’t have to last forever to have mattered. An ending doesn’t reach backward and erase everything that came before it.
There are things in my life that I no longer have and am profoundly grateful I had at all. Not because losing them didn’t hurt. Not because I wouldn’t have preferred a different ending. And certainly not because I’ve managed to turn every painful experience into some beautiful little life lesson. Sometimes losing something wonderful just sucks.
But I don’t want the pain of losing something to become bigger than the gratitude I have for having experienced it. I don’t want an ending to be given so much power that it gets to rewrite everything that came before it.
Because I know there are ways my life is different today because of things that were never mine to keep forever. There are choices I made, chances I took, things I learned, and parts of myself I discovered because of experiences that eventually ended. The experience may be over, but what it gave me didn’t disappear with it.
I still have those things.
Maybe that’s what I’ve come to understand about gratitude. It isn’t pretending you don’t wish something had turned out differently. It isn’t making peace with every ending or convincing yourself that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes it’s simply being able to look back at something you wish you hadn’t lost and be grateful that, for whatever amount of time, it was yours to have.
I am so grateful I had it. And even knowing how it ends, I’d do it all again.
💕 Charlotte