This Too Shall Pass

A lesson 50 years in the making

Nothing lasts forever: not flowers, scones, bagels, sunsets, candles, people

Eight years ago yesterday, March 11, was a Sunday. I remember because my son, Noah, was admitted to the psychiatric hospital for what I told myself would be a couple of days, until his depression lifted and he could get back to being a student at the University of Alberta, where he was studying civil engineering.

Those of you who have been following this Substack know that things didn’t quite turn out that way: Noah was in the hospital for six weeks, sent home on a Friday, tried to kill himself on a Monday, and went back to the hospital for another six weeks, this time to a different unit, where he received the help he needed to begin to heal.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that those three months and the ones immediately following were the most emotionally painful and stressful of my life. I hope they remain the most emotionally painful and stressful of my life. I can’t imagine anything worse. But the thing about life is that you never know what’s coming down the pike. It helps to have healthy coping mechanisms, like the mantra Noah adopted during his time in the hospital: This too shall pass.

So often when we’re in the middle of a miserable situation, we forget that nothing lasts forever. Time marches on is a cliché, but clichés exist for a reason: because they’re true.¹

There’s no question that on a macro level, we North Americans, who are generally blessed to live in peace, are in a miserable situation right now because the Trump regime is wreaking havoc not just in the United States, but around the world, with no obvious positive end in sight. To soothe myself I’ve been focusing on the micro instead of the macro. I can’t fix the world, but I can better my corner of it: tackle chores I’ve been avoiding, do something nice for someone, acknowledge my blessings, take the dog for a long walk in the river valley down the street from my house.

I especially like the walks, which afford me time for conversation with friends or, if I’m alone, time to think. On one of those solo walks recently, I was thinking about my daughter’s upcoming wedding. Elizabeth and her fiancé, Matt, chose July 4 for their date because while it’s not a holiday here, in Canada, they knew it would be easier for relatives in the United States to get time off.

Elizabeth was a bit reluctant to get married on the 250^th anniversary of American Independence Day. She chose the date not long after Trump took office for the second time and didn’t want people thinking she’d chosen it to celebrate a country whose leader was threatening to annex Canada.

I pointed out something she didn’t know: that my parents had gotten married on July 3, 1958. “Focus on that,” I said. “You’re getting married on the same weekend that your grandparents did, but 68 years later.”

Newly engaged Elizabeth and Matt in December 2024. Newly engaged Mom and Dad in January 1958.

What occurred to me on that recent solo walk was the connection between July 4, 2026 and the same date exactly 50 years earlier. I don’t remember what I did on any other July 4, but I know exactly where I was on July 4, 1976: on stage with my high school performing arts department at the Empire State Theater in Albany, New York, performing an original theater piece, Revolution, as part of the nation’s bicentennial.

As soon as the show ended, most of the cast returned to Utica. My sister (a cello player) and I packed up our instruments and boarded a bus for Cape Cod to meet our mother. It would be our third summer without Dad, who had died suddenly and mysteriously in the late winter of 1974. It would be our second summer in the house on Cape Cod that Mom bought a year after Dad died “because we have such good memories of being on the Cape.”

We’d spent many summers there with Dad, in a rented cottage up the street from the beach. But we had good memories because those had been good times: Dad was alive. Mom wasn’t on the verge of exploding with anger, weighted down as she was with guilt, shame, and the secret that Dad’s death hadn’t been an accident but a suicide.

All this to say that as Amy and I boarded the bus in Albany on July 4, 1976, I was looking forward to the summer with a mixture of excitement — summer! — and dread — our house is miles from the beach, we don’t know anybody in the neighborhood, and we have to be happy because Mom bought a house so we’d be happy.

I was 15, too overwhelmed with unacknowledged grief to understand that this too would pass. Maybe I would have had less dread if I’d known what was coming, if someone had told me, “Hey, things will get better. Trust me. Fifty years from today, at pretty much this exact minute, your husband will walk your daughter down the aisle on her wedding day while your son and his fiancé look on, knowing they will be next. Your sister will be there, too, with her husband, kids, and grandkids. Your life is going to be OK.”

I wouldn’t have believed it. I had yet to learn the basic truth about hard times: You have to go through them so you can get to the good ones, and if luck or karma or blessings or whatever God you pray to is smiling down at you, there will be more good times than hard times.

At 65, I’m grateful to have figured it out. If you know any 15-year-olds who are struggling, feel free to share my hard-earned wisdom: Hard times provide opportunity for growth. Good times yield joy. And hard or easy, bad or good, this too shall pass.

1. Well, mostly true. That one about “raining cats and dogs”? I have yet to be convinced.