How Gratitude Stitched My Broken Heart Together (and can yours too)

“You see it?” she said.

“Hold it, hold it in your hands. Feel that round, cold, sturdy rock and know that yours which is now in pieces will be whole again.” My cousin reminded me as as I sobbed in my parents’ kitchen, holding a palm-sized, heart-shaped rose quartz delivered that afternoon.

It was like a weight, as I held it, transferring the weight of guilt, shame, a broken spirit, hopelessness, despair. Into this small object, I lumped everything.

That same cousin encouraged me that day to start writing down 10 things every morning and 10 things every evening for which I could be grateful.

TEN?!

I had just lost my house, access to my young children, my career, my dignity. There was nothing to be grateful for, much less ten (twenty)things. Before my train wreck of a midlife crisis, I was doing well to come up with three things on a given day that weren’t totally obnoxious.

The mornings were especially hard — there’s not a lot to be grateful for if the only thing you saw since the last time you wrote a gratitude list was the back of your eyelids (if you’re lucky). It’s hard to begin the day in the midst of tragedy with a sense of complete existential dread knowing that today will be somewhat like the day…