bittersweet.

word of the day: bittersweet \ˈbi-tər-ˌswēt\ pleasure alloyed with pain

I’ve been thinking lately about the place where bitter meets sweet as though it’s a physical place in which I can reside.  

The past few weeks I’ve been feeling like I straddle the line at all times--one foot in the bitter and one foot in the sweet.  

Jake graduates from medical school on Saturday, and that new beginning brings so many subsequent “ends.”  It brings goodbyes and unknowns; things that can really only be defined as they are: bittersweet.  

But here’s what I realized today: In the bittersweet moments of life, things are bitter because they were sweet in the first place.  It’s not the other way around and it’s not two separate entities converging together.  Bittersweet are the good things that we wish we could carry with us for always but can’t.  

I stumbled across this verse in Ecclesiastes this past week as I churned the word around in my brain:

When times are good, be happy;

   but when times are bad, consider this:

God has made the one

   as well as the other.

Therefore, no one can discover

   anything about their future.

-Ecclesiastes 7:14

God has made the one as well as the other.  

Times aren’t bad.  They’re just bitter because they have been so sweet.  And when I really get down to the heart of it, that’s something to be thankful for.  It means that Jake and I did something right.  It means we surrounded ourselves with good people and good things and a support system that has walked this journey with us from the beginning.  

We could have written a different story for ourselves; we could have traveled the road alone which would, I suppose, have made this current transition much less painful.  

But I’ll take this over that.  I’ll take the sad goodbyes over living our lives in isolation because that’s not what we were meant for.  

We were meant for the bittersweet.  God made one as well as the other.

The beginning of the road.  Jake’s White Coat Ceremony four years ago.