In dark times, it helps to just embrace pain.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

Good Friday brings bad news: My high school cross-country coach is dead at age 80. His daughter calls. Would I be willing to share some thoughts at his funeral?

Honored, I say, but deep down, I don't want the grief.

For a lot of people, myself included, these are dark times. Who wants to make them worse?

I'm already grieved by war. Grieved by photos of wives being handed flags and Iraqi children with no arms. (The necessity of taking military action doesn't lessen the pain that it inevitably causes.)

I'm grieved by the car wrecks that have jolted the Pleasant Hill and North Eugene High communities.

By the victimization of MaryJane Longo's family - how, as one of her sisters told Christian Longo on the witness stand, "when you killed MaryJane you took a piece of my heart."

By the young couple I know whose soup-and-sandwich place - my favorite - succumbed to Eugene's slumping economy.

And by a friend's son who is struggling to find his place in the world.

As I said, I don't want the grief. But after some soul-searching, I realize something: I need it.

Why? Because from struggle comes strength. From remembering comes restoration. From empathy comes comfort.

It's not, I realize, the baby boom way. We were raised with a sense of entitlement, which seemed to include a perpetual feelin'-groovy clause. Alas, it's not to be; one glance at the 50-somethings in the obituaries will tell you that.

Death happens. Struggle happens. Pain happens. And yet all can inspire us to be more than we otherwise might be.

I think of the Longo trial, how the people in Newport reached out to the grieving families, particularly to the family of the man whose heinous acts triggered the painful ordeal in the first place.

You can't reach out to someone unless you're willing to share their pain.

I think of Passover, which many Jews have been commemorating since sundown Wednesday. You can't celebrate the Israelites' exodus from bondage without remembering their slavery, which naturally brings back the Holocaust. I read of a man - a man who understood the power of remembrance - who placed a potato peel on his Seder plate to remind him of the "well-fed" inmates.

I think of Easter, which many Christians celebrate today. You can't appreciate this so-called "new life in Christ" without first acknowledging his gruesome death.

I think of "The Pianist," a movie that moved me deeply. Based on a true story, it's about a Jewish piano player in Nazi-held Warsaw, a man who avoids the death-camp deportations that claim his family. His triumph is noteworthy not only because of his will to live, but because of an unlikely man who dares to feel his pain.

"The art is to ransom sacred moments - the messages of the past - and to deposit them in the bank of eternity," Rabbi Marshall Meyer once said in commemorating the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Sometimes that past pulls us apart; witness the high percentage of marriages that collapse after the death of a child. But I've also seen the past pull people together in those same circumstances - couples drawn closer not because they refused to look back, but because they dared to.

On Monday, I watched the Longo family leave the courthouse and make their way through the rain to a car. How do you drive away from your son, brother and brother-in-law's murder trial and ever hope to find any sense of peace in your life?

How do schools overcome accidents that claim students and faculty?

How do you carry on when you got pink-slipped from a job you'd had for years?

Perhaps it begins by understanding what my cross-country coach liked to remind us - that pain is all part of the process.

"That's what the race is all about," he said. "You gotta go when it hurts."