The Gratitude Diaries

by Janice Kaplan

  At intermission, Ron and I walked up the red-carpeted staircase to the opera café, where the maître d’ led us to an elegant table that was already set for us—chocolate mousse cake and cappuccino for me and tiramisu and tea for Ron. We sat down and tried not to giggle. It all seemed much more sophisticated than we deserved.

  “Remind me how you know the fabulous Rose?” Ron asked, taking a spoonful of his dessert.

  “She’s a new friend,” I said vaguely.

  “Let her know we’re . . . grateful.” He grinned.

  The next day, I sent Rose a little orchid as thanks (maybe I should have sent roses?) but I realized my gratitude went far beyond the night at the opera. Rose happened to be funny and smart, with a quirky style that made her thoroughly engaging and fun to be around. But beyond that for me, she served as proof that you never know the twists life takes. You might as well be grateful every day, because even seemingly bad events can have good outcomes.

  The circuitous route that led to that glorious night at the opera started by my feeling completely miserable. I’d just left a big magazine job and the world felt unfair. What would I possibly do next? My older brother in California kindly stepped in and made some introductions that led to a project in the tech world unlike anything I’d done before. Very briefly an expert in apps, I got invited to speak at a conference and met a woman there who later invited me to a charity breakfast where I sat next to Rose, and we started working together on a business project and then became friends.

  Got all that? The details don’t really matter. The point is that when I first left that job, I couldn’t think of any reason to be grateful at all, but you never really know where new opportunities will take you. Steve Jobs once gave a commencement speech at Stanford University where he said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” He described being devastated at age thirty when he was fired from Apple, the company he had started. But it turned out to be the most creative period of his life and ultimately led to his meeting his wife, starting other successful companies like Pixar, and then triumphantly returning to Apple. “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith,” he said.

  For much of this year, I’d been seeing how gratitude could transform experiences from run-of-the-mill to truly satisfying. But gratitude could also be an antidote to life’s troubles, helping put them in perspective and take away the sting. In the greater scheme of the world, I knew my misfortunes were small compared to what others faced, meaning I should be grateful. But a lot of research has shown that how we feel at any one moment has very little to do with externals. People with every advantage could still be cranky and unhappy, while those who faced huge obstacles sometimes radiated good feeling and bounced merrily along. The Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, who had been teaching gratitude for years, had a simple explanation: “It is not happiness that makes us grateful. It’s gratefulness that makes us happy.”

  In the midst of any struggle, we feel like our woes are the worst. But I had been learning this year that there is always another side to find, a different perspective to take. In his great epic Paradise Lost, the seventeenth-century poet John Milton wrote, “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” This month, I wanted to see how gratitude helped us move from darkness to light.

  I caught up over coffee with a former colleague named Lora whom I hadn’t seen in a while and told her about my gratitude project. “You should come to an AA meeting with me. Gratitude plays a big part in meetings,” she said.

  She made the offer casually, so I tried to sound similarly offhand in asking how long she’d been in Alcoholics Anonymous. It turned out she’d been sober for twenty years and had attended meetings at least once a week (and often more frequently) for all that time. I met Lora years ago when we worked together on the same TV show, and though technically her boss, I admired her as talented, funny, and very quick. Others admired her too, including an older on-air reporter who had a reputation as a drunkard and spent too much time taking her to bars.

  “I always blamed him for getting you into drinking,” I told Lora now. “You were just a kid in your first job.”

  “True, but my mom had also been an alcoholic, so I had a problem long before I met him,” Lora said. “Not a lot of good role models.”

  Lora told me that when she found herself drinking seven or eight beers a day, she went on a final binge—and then showed up at her first AA meeting. She never stopped going to AA.

  I didn’t drink (I’d even given up Diet Coke for water), but one of the meetings Lora regularly attended allowed visitors on the last Monday of the month. We met for an early dinner that night, then went to an old church across the street. I didn’t quite know what to expect—maybe something dark and degenerate, people with haggard faces and dull eyes, a grim scene out of The Lost Weekend. I anxiously followed Lora up a narrow staircase and into a small room set aside for the all-women’s meeting. The moment I stepped in, all stereotypes of alcoholics went out the (open) window. Instead of haggard faces and dull eyes, many of the women perched on chairs in the center looked young and radiant, with long hair, slim bodies, and skinny jeans. A few well-dressed women who could have been business executives rushed in at the last minute, tucking away their cell phones.

  The week’s leader sat cozy and cross-legged in a big chair. Like Lora, she had been sober many years, but she described the “bone-deep, soul-piercing pain” she felt when drinking and added that back then, “I wanted to die on a daily basis.” From the beginning of her sobriety, she kept a gratitude list, and she reminded herself that “I had been diligent with my drinking, so now I could be diligent with gratitude.”

  Those sitting in the circle then passed around an egg timer so anyone who wanted could talk for a couple of minutes. Several of the younger women thanked the leader for inspiring them. Others said how grateful they were to have the group to support them. One mentioned that she was “grateful for all the things not happening to me that used to”—like blackouts and waking up in a strange bed. She said she sometimes wished she could erase the past, but she could only move forward and “be grateful for the energy and joy I could bring to the future.”

  Gratitude wasn’t the only theme, but it was sprinkled generously through many of the comments. Sitting outside the circle with me, Lora listened calmly and kept herself busy knitting a scarf. She nudged me when it was time to stand up, hold hands, and say the serenity prayer together.

  Back on the street, Lora looked at me worriedly. “I tried to see this through your eyes and imagine being there for the first time,” she said.

  I told her I’d been moved by the women’s warmth, kindness, and positivity and felt nourished to hear gratitude used as comfort, hope, and therapy. Having read the AA literature before I came, I knew one of the organization’s principles was “an honest regret for harms done, a genuine gratitude for blessings received, and a willingness to try for better things tomorrow.” That sounded like a reasonable plan for life in general.

  “But help me out. I’m still not sure I understand how gratitude helps you stay sober,” I admitted.

  Lora nodded. “Okay, two parts. At the beginning, you keep a gratitude list as a reminder of all the positive trade-offs you’ve made by not drinking.” For her, cutting eight beers from her daily diet meant she quickly dropped some extra pounds, so she wrote about being grateful to lose weight. And not buying booze gave her more money to spend elsewhere. “I had a lot of entries about buying new khaki pants,” Lora joked.

  Once sobriety became the norm, the playful reminders about pants and pounds didn’t carry the same import. “Problems come when you’ve been sober for a while and it starts being the norm,” Lora said. (Habituation, anyone?) “Then you keep the gratitude list as a reminder not to take the new state for granted. A grateful alcoholic doesn’t drink.” Or relapse.

/>   Lora and her friends at AA couldn’t change what had happened in the past, but as the Greek philosopher Epictetus taught, what really mattered was how they responded right now. External events may be out of our control or determined by the fates, but we can decide how to look at them. If any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone, Epictetus said.

  But what happens when those past events are so devastating that gratitude seems out of the question? I called my friend Jackie Hance to talk about gratitude—a favorite subject of hers, despite the fact that she had suffered an almost unimaginable tragedy. Her three adorable daughters, Emma, Alyson, and Katie, then ages eight, seven, and five, were killed in a shocking car accident on the Taconic State Parkway in New York in 2009. Even worse (if that’s possible), her own sister-in-law had been driving the car and toxicology tests came back showing alcohol and drugs.

  A full-time mom with a generous spirit and a fun-loving soul, Jackie plunged into the abyss. Her husband, equally shattered, couldn’t help, and she wanted only to join her girls in heaven. A devout Catholic, she visited several priests to make sure God would understand. Her friends, determined to keep her on earth a little longer, stepped in with a different plan. They made a schedule so that at least one of them would be at her house and by her side 24/7. They cooked and cleaned, took her on morning jogs, brought her to therapists, enrolled her on a bowling team, and insisted she join them on shopping trips. In their fierce loyalty and devotion, Jackie found a crack of light in the impossible darkness.

  The first time we met, about eighteen months after the accident, Jackie seemed so fragile that I feared she would break. Her eyes flashed constant pain and her voice came out as barely a whisper. But then we started talking about her friends, and her whole demeanor changed.

  “I have the most amazing friends. I feel so incredibly lucky. I’m grateful to them every day,” she said.

  Awed that after all she had been through, she could describe herself as “lucky” and “grateful,” I sensed Jackie had depths I hadn’t begun to imagine. Under that vulnerable shell, she had a strong core fighting to be happy again (though worried that she no longer had the right to be happy). We went on to write a bestselling book together, a gratifying collaboration for both of us. She wanted to tell the girls’ story, and I could share the message that life is random and horrible events occur, but even when the worst happens, you can still move on and find reasons for gratitude.

  Jackie and I had stayed in touch, and twice now when I’d traveled abroad, I visited historic churches and lit three candles for the girls, my way of bringing them to places they hadn’t had a chance to see. I’m neither religious nor Catholic, but I admired the courage Jackie showed every day just by getting out of bed. I liked to think about the spirit that kept her going and the gratitude that remained a key part of her life.

  When I called her now to check in and talk about my year of gratitude, she jumped at the chance to add her view.

  “I still try to find reasons every day that I’m grateful,” she said. “I write a list in the morning and keep it with me all day.”

  Jackie told me that she typically got up very early to run with friends, and the six or so miles outside always improved her mood. Back home at six thirty A.M., she had a few minutes to herself. “That’s when I let myself be sad. I take five minutes to cry because I miss my girls. And then I make myself write what I’m grateful for,” she said.

  I smiled at the distinctly Jackie pattern: run, cry, be grateful, and get on with life. The pain of losing her daughters would never go away, but once she decided that she wouldn’t join them in heaven just yet, she fought not to be overwhelmed by anger, resentment, and despair. More than anyone else I knew, Jackie understood what it meant to appreciate every moment while you had it. “If I’m going to be here, I want to make it a great life,” she said.

  Jackie started thinking about gratitude after the accident when she heard a therapist on Oprah (she was a big fan) explain that in the moments you’re feeling grateful, you can’t also be sad. At that point, she had fallen so far into a black hole that she couldn’t imagine ever crawling out. Psychiatrists had already prescribed antidepressants and sleep meds and tranquilizers, so keeping a gratitude list didn’t seem like too much of an added burden. She realized very quickly that gratitude worked as well as anything else. She eventually gave up a lot of the drugs, but she never had to wean herself from the gratitude lists.

  “Does being grateful come naturally to you now?” I asked.

  “No!” she said with a laugh. “It’s a decision to do it every day. Writing a gratitude list takes work for me, and I have to keep reminding myself not to skip it. But the feeling lasts, so it’s worth it.”

  Jackie’s thankfulness had, in many ways, saved her own life. Even in the haze of hopelessness that engulfed her after the accident, she was moved by the kindness of people (many of them complete strangers) sending notes, gifts, and donations. Appreciative of their time and concern, she determined to thank every one. At one point she announced that she still planned to kill herself—but she had twenty more thank-you notes to write first. “I might have been suicidal, but I wasn’t rude,” Jackie explained to me later.

  Her thankfulness multiplied when she got pregnant again—something she never imagined could happen. She’d had a tubal ligation after Katie was born, and the in vitro fertilization she would need to conceive seemed prohibitively expensive. She abandoned the idea until a doctor named Zev Rosenwaks offered his medical help at no charge.

  “How can I possibly thank him? A bottle of champagne just doesn’t seem like enough,” Jackie had said to me, only half joking, when she was pregnant.

  She decided on the most heartfelt gift she could imagine and named her miracle baby Kasey Rose, the middle name in honor of Dr. Rosenwaks. (The name Kasey had a different significance since it used all the first letters of her lost sisters’ names.)

  Now Jackie joked that when she wrote her daily gratitude list, she knew it couldn’t be only about Kasey.

  “So what makes you grateful now?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s little stuff like how good it feels when the sun is out and beaming on my face. Or the other day, I wrote about my legs. Who ever stops to be grateful for their legs? But they’re such a strong tool for me, and I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t run.”

  Grateful people like Jackie create an aura of giving that immediately makes you want to reciprocate. Once when she heard Oprah (yes, again) exhorting viewers to stay away from people who projected “negative energy,” she called her friend Jeannine to ask if she fit into that category.

  “No, you’ve had a very bad time, but we still feel the positive person underneath,” Jeannine told her.

  Even with that assurance, Jackie promised that she would try to get rid of any negativity left. She wanted to be the person who brought energy into a room, not sucked it out. I marveled, because how many people in Jackie’s situation would worry about being too negative? Everyone would have understood if she spent the rest of her life ranting and crying and being the saddest woman on earth. But Jackie wanted to live with gratitude, not grief.

  Soon after we spoke, Jackie sent me a long letter that she wrote to her daughter Alyson on what would have been her thirteenth birthday. (She always sent the girls letters on birthdays and holidays. Sometimes gifts, too.) It was touchingly beautiful, telling Alyson how much her mom missed her and wanted to celebrate by her side. She wrote how hard it was for her or any parent to lose a child, and how sometimes her tears wouldn’t stop. But then came the heart of the letter.

  This year, my birthday gift to you is this list of what I have learned to be grateful for since you went to heaven.

  She described her gratitude at knowing from her daughters what true love means, gratitude for her faith, gratitude for the little things people did: A friend sayi
ng a prayer, sending a card, stopping by with coffee, or taking Kasey for an hour so she can have fun and I can be sad . . . these mean the world to me. The list went on, eight reasons to be grateful.

  I read the letter and tears filled my eyes. When so much had been lost, Jackie could still find a way to be grateful for what remained.

  —

  After spending time with Jackie and Lora, I started thinking about why gratitude was so closely connected with difficult situations. Jackie wasn’t grateful for the life-shattering loss she had experienced—that would be beyond comprehension. But like Lora, she wanted some semblance of happiness again and achieved it through what I decided to dub intentional gratitude. They kept gratitude lists and consciously looked for reasons to appreciate the world around them.

  I thought of a guy I knew in college named Jamie McEwan, a few years older than me and something of a legend. He had dropped out for a while to train for the Olympics and won third place in slalom canoeing, the first American in the sport ever to medal. Back on campus, he competed on the wrestling team, which I covered for the school newspaper. I liked watching him because he was handsome and strong and very smart, with an irreverent twinkle in his eye. He wrestled at 177 pounds, which I probably remember because he was solid muscle so had trouble cutting to the lower 167 weight class.

  He married his classmate Sandra Boynton, who became famous for her clever children’s books and greeting cards. (Her classic: “Hippo Birdie Two Ewe. Hippo Birdie Two Ewe.” Say it out loud and you’ll get it.) We stayed only intermittently in touch, but I knew they had a rambling house on many acres in Lakeville, Connecticut, where they raised four children and various dogs, and Jamie turned the nearby river into a kayaking slalom course.

  The perfect life for the perfect couple.

  So I had been shocked when we connected a few years ago and I learned that he had just been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood. We had a dinner with our spouses in the city and then Jamie and I talked a bit more regularly as he went through dramatic treatment therapies.