Is Life Really a Box of Chocolates when there is so much suffering – by Kelley Barton

In the 1994 film Forrest Gump, Forrest famously said “My mama always said ‘life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get’”.

The line quickly became a cultural reference for how life is unpredictable; you don’t know what you are going to get until you live it. But the fact that the box held chocolates, gave it a bit of a positive spin, about the good things in life just around the corner.

When the film was released, my husband and I were still grieving how the door had slammed shut on our future to have biological children, due to infertility issues we could not get through without a lot more money than we had. For me, the new grief drudged up old grief, that my father died suddenly when I was 11 years old. Forrest was too optimistic.

So I sometimes declared that “Life was a box of hand grenades. You never know when one is going to go off.”

Was I drowning in cynicism? Or was I simply being realistic, based on current and past experiences?

What I do know is that what I felt back then is what so many people often feel when they are grieving and suffering. What in the hell is going to happen next? Could it possibly get any worse?

As we heard from Jeremy and Carey on Sunday, when you are in this place of suffering, you might need people to simply sit with you. And if you are the one sitting with a suffering friend, try to let them describe how they see darkness everywhere, how they might feel life will never get better. Don’t try to tell them it will get better, to offer words of hope from a place that you might feel, but is beyond reach for them in that moment. Don’t act as if the grenade in their lives didn’t just go off.

Tell them you love them. Tell them you are there for them. Tell them that together you will journey through it.

Maybe the next one in the box will be chocolate. Maybe not. How we support those who can get either one is what can truly make a significant difference.