‘Joyful, Anyway’

Sometimes it was a story told by my nana, who set sail to Canada at the age of fourteen to hunt down the father who abandoned her in search of Yukon gold, only to discover he had drowned in the MacKenzie river as a drunk and a fool.

Other times it is the best guess why the melodic abomination of Mannheim Steamroller found its way into the Christmas traditions of families the world over.

But I remember it most as a reason handed to me to explain my father.

It was as if someone had said, simply, every house has a basement. This man has a basement.

It began when I was very young, the way he would find the quiet and the dark, and stay there. When he was not reading or sitting at the computer, he was sleeping or napping or dozing, and each state of these required a kind of silence that dampened every room. The phone would ring. A friend might want to stop by. The first few lines of another argument might break out among us. But nothing could last because your father is sleeping.

My mother might have said: Your father is deeply disappointed with his life. A psychologist might have observed: Your father is clinically depressed. And a priest would have known that the soul forgets its own immeasurable worth.

Underneath every attempt at building a life and career and relationships lies another layer. And there, every kind of hidden thing can do its own work. Jung called this the shadow side, “the thing a person has no wish to be.” And this shadow impressed itself upon my father, so much so that the landscape of his life — an airport gate, a grocery store line, a friend’s kitchen — would paint itself in greys and blacks. Later, much later, he would say that almost nothing about his mid-life years rises to memory except the glimmers of his girls growing, shrieking, singing, rousing him from the dark.

This is the way I came to understand the feeling of ache and the sense that we are all strangers from each other — that all of us live inside of struggles that no one can entirely understand. Some people get iron in their souls. That’s how the author Thomas Hardy characterized it. A deposit of iron. And it pulls us down, down, down.

When I took my first psychology class in college, I was very interested to learn that people who study happiness have a basic theory about “set points.” The theory is that half of your happiness (or sadness) is hardwired. Your levels of satisfaction with your life won’t go up or down much regardless of whether you win the lottery or suffer a tragic accident. You will likely return to your baseline happiness level.

It all sounds very reasonable. Except if your set point pulls you into the basement.

If you ever wondered whether it requires herculean efforts for some people to live each day, I would sing you a ridiculous song. It was the 1990s and even Canadians were in the throes of Jerry Springer, where the shouts of “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” would reveal the results of yet another paternity test. So that chant started as something of a joke in my house, which became a refrain, which can still bring tears to my eyes.

The house would be utterly still except the sound of my father snoring down the hall. My mom and two sisters — so many little women — would tip-toe around, washing and putting away dishes quietly, arguing over homework or clothes or who called dibs on the hallway phone. We became fragile and resentful in the dark with his absence and presence all around us. But with my homework on the kitchen table, the light scribbling of my pen in an open notebook, I could almost always hear it. He had a song for everything: crossing the street quickly, showering in a hurry, and a very annoying use of hand trumpets to wake me up in the morning. But this was my favorite — the soft daily cheer of his own name.

“Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!”

Which meant, today, he would get up. He would pop his head out of his soul’s basement. He would try again. Sometimes, the beauty of watching someone try is astonishing.

But for the most part, the house remained quiet and all of us scuttled around in the dark. What happens, happened. And there would be no apology.

Excerpted from “Joyful, Anyway” by Kate Bowler. Copyright © 2026 by Kate Bowler. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher, The Dial Press.