The Gift I Never Wanted

Losing My Dad, Living With Anxiety, and Learning From the Pain

“What punishments of God are not gifts?”

That line from writer J.R.R. Tolkien stopped me when I heard Stephen Colbert quote it in an interview with Anderson Cooper. Colbert was talking about losing his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was just ten years old.

A tragedy no one would ever choose.

And yet, he still said: “It’s a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering.”

Let me be clear. This post isn’t about slapping a “gratitude” bumper sticker on the horrible things that happen to us.

It’s about something tougher: learning to live in a world where pain is guaranteed, and still finding a way to let it change you instead of destroy you.

So what do we do with pain that we didn’t ask for?

Pain vs. Suffering

One of the few things almost everyone agrees on about life is that it involves pain.

The key, then, as many philosophers and great thinkers have said, is finding meaning in the pain—using it to discover what matters most to you.

“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”

—Viktor Frankl

Pain is the immediate, honest signal that something hurts or something matters. It can show up as physical sensations like shoulder pain, tightness in the chest, or a pit in your stomach—or as emotional experiences like sadness, grief, or shame.

Suffering, then, is what happens when we keep judging, resisting, or building our identity around that pain.

• “This shouldn’t have happened.”

• “I’ll never recover from this.”

• “This is now who I am.”

Letting pain be pain without turning it into your whole identity is easier said than done. But it’s possible.

I know this because I’ve experienced the profound pain of watching helplessly as my father died from liver and kidney disease at 59 years old. I’ve also dealt with anxiety and depression, conditions I would not wish on anybody.

My journey out of suffering has meant finding meaning in these painful experiences. And what I keep learning is how transformational they can be for my life.

When My Pain Turned Into Suffering

My Dad’s death caused a level of pain I’m still working through in therapy—almost 10 years later. I didn’t know I was capable of feeling this much pain, and for a long time I struggled to come to terms with it.

I don’t talk about my Dad much with people because I will cry. Every. Single. Time.

There was a period when I thought my Dad’s death would be the end of my life. I couldn’t even articulate to myself or others how devastated I was and how unsafe I felt in this world without him.

I routinely drank myself into moods where I felt death would be the only way for me to see him again and feel safe, happy, and whole. I was deeply attached to him as a parent, as a provider, and as a safety net.

That was my suffering: trying to escape the pain by destroying myself.

My Dad had been and always will be my hero.

But his death taught me I needed to take the training wheels off my life and become my own hero. I needed to learn how to feel safe, happy, and whole on my own. And that’s not something I knew how to do.

At 39 years old, I’m still learning how to love myself, be proud of my growth, and feel safe in a world that scares me.

My Dad’s death was extremely painful for me, but it allowed me to grow into the person that I needed to be. I now know that this was his final lesson for me.

These days, when I see a cardinal, I let myself believe it’s my Dad checking in. Not to erase the pain, but to remind me of the gift that comes with it: I’m still here, and I’m still becoming the man he knows I can be.

How to Start Finding Meaning in Your Pain

If you’re in the middle of something brutal right now, you don’t have to pretend it’s a gift.

But here are two small places to start:

1. Give it time: Commit to not forcing a meaning for at least 3–6 months. Your only job is to feel what you feel and take care of yourself.

2. Zoom out: When you’re ready, ask, “If this were a chapter in my story, what might this chapter be about?” Courage? Boundaries? Letting go? Becoming your own safety net? Just naming the theme can create a tiny bit of space between you and the pain.

Pain is awful, and unfortunately, it’s inevitable. But it can be a powerful reminder of how fleeting life can be and how important certain things are to you.

Choosing What to Do With Your Pain

There is an old Buddhist saying that I’ve found helpful:

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

Pain is unavoidable if you’re a human with a beating heart.

Suffering, for me, is what happens when I either fight the pain (“this shouldn’t be happening”) or build my whole identity around it. I stay stuck there, looping the same story, and nothing in my life actually changes.

I don’t think we can snap our fingers and avoid suffering. But I do believe we can suffer less when we’re willing, over time, to ask, “What is this pain trying to show me about what matters?” and actually respond to it.

My pain around my Dad’s death didn’t start to ease until I was able to shift my perspective from “Why him?” to being grateful I had him in my life for 31 years—how truly, truly grateful I was to have him.

My hope for you is that you’re able, in your own time, to find meaning in the pain and suffer a little less.

And even in the middle of it, I hope you can see how beautiful life can still be, and choose, just for today, to look for the good.

You didn’t choose the pain. But you still get to choose what it makes of you.