things my grandmother said about suffering

She didn't say much about it directly. What she said was mostly about other things that were, I've come to understand, about suffering indirectly. She said: don't wait to feel ready. Readiness is a story you tell yourself. You are never ready for the things that matter. She said: the body heals in its own order and cannot be hurried, but the mind heals in the order you set for it, and that order matters. She said, once, about a woman in the neighborhood whose husband had left her: "She is surviving. That's the main thing." Surviving was not, in her vocabulary, a diminished state. It was the primary accomplishment. Everything else was secondary. She had had a hard life by the measures I apply to things, and she never described it as a hard life. She described it as her life. This was not denial. She knew exactly what it had contained. She'd simply made a decision about what to call it. I was twenty-three when she died and I didn't know, yet, how to receive what she was trying to give me. I was too young to have needed it yet. I understood her advice about suffering the way you understand a word in another language before you have the experience to feel what it actually means — technically, shallowly. Now I am thirty-one and I have had a couple of things that qualify as real difficulty, not tragedy, but real, the kind that makes you understand why people need help to get through. And I think about her differently. The woman who made a decision about what to call her life. She made it look effortless. It wasn't. I understand now that it wasn't. Don't wait to feel ready.