Orange Marmalade Part 2: Bittersweet

This week’s essay was all set. I planned to write another Life Lesson learned from the Blue Car, this one about the joys of meandering. But then my thoughts meandered elsewhere (poetic justice?), so you will get that essay eventually, but not today. Today, there is more orange marmalade for consumption.

Who knew there was so much to be said about orange marmalade?

Last week I explored the usefulness of questioning long-held beliefs and tastes as we change through the years, and as the world changes around us. I also described the bitter sweetness of that first bite of my Parisian café breakfast.   

“I dipped my knife in the glistening orange concoction, with bits of deep orange rind threaded throughout, and spread a tiny dab on the very end of my baguette…The soft sweet flavor accentuated by the sharp bitter orange peel surprised my tongue as I chewed slowly.”  

The soft and sugary gelatinous concoction would have been overwhelmingly sweet without the bitter tanginess of the chewy peel. That bitter/sweet taste seemed just right.

Sometimes, the contrast is everything.  

The term bittersweet, which perfectly describes the taste of my marmalade, also defines emotions that are complex, offering simultaneous doses of joy and sorrow. Bittersweet describes an awareness that the moments of our lives are impermanent and fleeting.

I think of the month of June, and the joy of seeing my children complete another year of school, and the accompanying sadness I felt because they were growing up, and time was marching on. I think of vacations that were dreamlike and full of special moments, and the sadness of knowing they would end. I remember the pride and happiness I felt when my graduate students completed their studies and were launched into the professional world, sitting side by side with sadness that they were leaving academia, and I would no longer enjoy their presence in my classes.  

We all experience these moments from time to time; a life well lived is filled with them. But I have also learned that there is something deeper and more profound to the dual nature of joy and sadness, sweet and bitter.

It’s been 26 years since my husband died but the memory of that time is still clear. I sat in my grief, unable to see a future, overwhelmed by the task of parenting a five-year-old and a five-month-old, robot-like at work, wallowing in darkness.  

A month after his passing, I drove north to Plum Island in Newburyport, Massachusetts to spend the day at the beach with my boys. It was a typical weekend that summer, with me up and out of the house with the kids at dawn, diaper bag in hand, breakfast and lunch packed, escaping from the darkly quiet stillness that permeated our home. Running to fill the weekends with busyness until we returned exhausted to our empty house where we collapsed into our beds, hopeful that sleep would offer some hours of relief from the sadness.

On that summer day, Isaac was running in the wet sand, chasing the waves, and I was sitting at the water’s edge with Louis, dipping his baby feet into the frothy water. While eating a bagel, I dropped a piece onto Louis’ lap. In a flash, a screeching seagull swooped down from seemingly nowhere, wings flapping wide, and snapped up the treasure. My infant son’s eyes widened and his whole cherubic face lit up. Then he laughed.

The moment was a snapshot of joy: my son’s face, his look of surprise and delight, the seagull flapping its large wings on his lap and then flying away. Isaac running in the sparkling water. The brilliant blue sky. For that instant, our world was perfect and good, our lives were in balance again.

I drew in deep gulps of sea air, trying to understand that brief glimmer of the oh so sweet found nestled in the bitter and the dark. The brilliant joy and shock of delight in that moment was intense and other worldly; I never experienced anything like it before. Ever. Those five seconds on the beach were like the moment in the “The Wizard of Oz” when the screen shifts from dull black and white to brilliant technicolor and everything is brightly rendered in crystal clear clarity.  

A few weeks later, that piercing light, that brilliant color, that inexplicably overwhelmingly joyful moment, occurred again around our dinner table, piercing my grief. Just a few seconds, but it was there. And then it happened again. And again.

I was convinced in June that the bitter and dark would be with us forever, blocking out the sweet and the light. By autumn, sweetness was slowly but consistently returning to our lives.  So much so that I put aside my desperate yearning to eliminate the bitterness and the sorrow, and began to believe, ever so cautiously, that the sweetness would come. On its own time schedule for sure, but it would come.  

What most surprised me at the time was the intensity of my joy accompanying those fleeting moments. Clear to me now is that those moments of jubilation involved much more than a simple re-balance, an ability to taste the sugar again. Something profound was happening.

I don’t think the crystalline sweet, joyful moments occurred despite the bitterness of my loss. I think they occurred in breathtakingly beautiful new fullness because of the bitterness of my loss.

Because of the darkness, the bright moments were so much brighter than I had ever experienced before. Like a high-power spotlight shining on the laughter and the good, causing the light times to shimmer and sparkle.

I don’t know what it means that I had not felt that type of soul-filling joy before I went through the paralyzing loss of my husband. Maybe my grief served as a reminder of what is precious in life. Maybe it activated some deep need to find a new level of joy that would enable me not just to survive, but to thrive. I have no clear answers on why I experienced these moments, but I have carried some truths with me from that time. I know the bitter/sweet is not something to run from. That it’s not an either/or in life. The sweet softens the bitter over time and the bitter brings the sweet into astonishing focus.

When we feel deeply, when we take chances with our hearts, when we snatch moments of joy, we are playing with the odds, opening ourselves to encountering the bitter, along with the sweet. I wouldn’t have it any other way.  Would you? Would you give up the joys of your days, never experiencing the most heartbreakingly beautiful and intense moments of your life, to ensure safety from bitterness and loss? Our answers to these questions shape the fullness of our days.