permission to be grateful without being happy

What do we do with this season of gratitude . . . when gratitude is so often about feeling happy  ?  

For the grieving heart feeling happy is hard.  So how do we reconcile  devastating loss with joyous  family gatherings around an abundant table ?  It all feels so incongruent.

 Maybe it would help if we were simply given permission to be grateful

 without being happy about it.  There is a distinct difference between gratitude and happiness.  

We can absolutely be grateful for all the delights in our lives . . . all those times when we smile at the thoughtfulness of a kind friend,  collapse into breathless belly laughs or greet some unexpected joy that changes everything for the better.  Who wouldn’t feel grateful and happy for such moments ? 

But there is a deeper gratitude, I think.  

And that is the speechless wonder, the pure gift, of a life that we were privileged to cherish for too short a time.  Gratitude this deep is born of the penetrating grace of memories that take us back to another time when happiness was easy. 

Now we know a more serious happiness of the heart - a profound gratitude that spills out of us through tears.  And this is perhaps the truest form of Thanksgiving there is.