What's the right word for this?

[AG31]

Today my 88 year old hubby asked me if there was a word to describe a feeling of depression associated with a feeling of relief. He'd just finished scything our back field and had decided that he wasn't going to do it any more in future years. He was depressed and relieved. I think there ought to be a word for this.

I fussed around in my mind about whether to post this in AH, since it doesn't have anything at all to do with erotica. But it does have to do with language and the kind of challenge authors encounter all the time. So I'm launching this thread for people who are trying to come up with a word. I'll bump it every few months for visibility.

 

[SyleusSnow]

Bittersweet would be one.

 

[alohadave]

Ambivalent

 

[mildlyaroused]

If there was a word for everything, language would be a lot less beautiful. Maybe this is one of those emotions that won't be done justice by a single word. It's more interesting (and more accurate) to describe. I agree, in any case, that bittersweet feels like the closest you'll get.

 

[MrPixel]

Wistful. Melancholy.

Know it firsthand. I'm having to give up on many DIY activities I was so proud of because I just can't muster the energy and endurance any longer.

 

[XerXesXu]

resigned

 

[NotWise]

I don't know if I'd apply a single word to it. To my thinking, one may be the result of looking back (depressed by needing the change), and the other the result of looking forward (relief that it won't happen again).

 

[ElectricBlue]

Google:

Ambivalence, nostalgic, bittersweet, wistful, tragicomic, rueful, melancholy, saudade, conflicted, and reflective are all synonyms for feeling happy and sad at the same time.

 

[XerXesXu]

I don't know if I'd apply a single word to it. To my thinking, one may be the result of looking back (depressed by needing the change), and the other the result of looking forward (relief that it won't happen again).

If one is 'resigned', one loses the struggle but one doesn't have to struggle anymore. I'm resigned to the reality that soon I'll no longer be able to continue with the routine of everyday maintenance and everything will turn to ratshit, but I'll no longer have to rise at first light. Mr AG1 seems to be in a similar position. He's done well continue the struggle to age 88.

 

[AlinaX]

Ambivalent loss or ambivalent grief are the closest I can find.

 

[Dearelliot]

I'm 90 and if I at the age off 88 could have scythed a field the word I'd use is Lucky!

 

[SimonDoom]

There's got to be a German word for this. It's exactly the kind of thing the Germans would know how to express by pushing a couple of words together.

I did a little research (keep in mind I don't speak German at all).

"Weltschmertz" is a hard to translate word often used to capture the disillusionment that comes with age and experience. Not exactly on point. But I'd suggest looking for a good German word for this.

 

[TheLobster]

"Weltschmertz" is a hard to translate word often used to capture the disillusionment that comes with age and experience

Literal translation is "anguish at the world." It's a kind of general existential malaise. Often brought up when discussing Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther so it's not necessarily associated with age.

 

[AG31]

Google:

Ambivalence, nostalgic, bittersweet, wistful, tragicomic, rueful, melancholy, saudade, conflicted, and reflective are all synonyms for feeling happy and sad at the same time.

Thanks!
What, exactly, did you give to Google? I didn't get a list of synonyms when I put in "feeling happy and sad at the same time."

 

[MillieDynamite]

Depressareliefism Syndrome. A great sense of depression for not being physically capable of doing or enjoying something any longer which is accompanied by a relief of not having to do the thing.

 

[Voboy]

He wishes he still wanted to be the man he was.

German probably has a word for it. And that might be how I'd describe it in a story: that it was difficult to describe how he felt, and that it was probably the kind of emotion only German has a word for. As a reader, I'd "get" that immediately.

 

[MajorRewrite]

Acceptance?

Reluctantly admitting your physical limitations but with the relief that you won’t push yourself beyond your capabilities anymore.

Sometimes teenage boys have the same feelings. They are depressed/discouraged that they aren’t going to make the high school football team, but are also relieved that they won’t have to struggle through two-a-day practices anymore.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Thanks!
What, exactly, did you give to Google? I didn't get a list of synonyms when I put in "feeling happy and sad at the same time."

https://www.google.com/search?

"word meaning simultaneous sadness and relief"

 

[Kadyia]

I can't think of a single English word that fits the kind of bittersweet relief you're describing. The Portuguese word Saudade flirts with concept. Maybe Weltschmerz in German, world pain, comes closest.

 

[Reenigam]

Satisfucktion...

 

[Britva415]

Today my 88 year old hubby asked me if there was a word to describe a feeling of depression associated with a feeling of relief. He'd just finished scything our back field and had decided that he wasn't going to do it any more in future years. He was depressed and relieved. I think there ought to be a word for this.

I fussed around in my mind about whether to post this in AH, since it doesn't have anything at all to do with erotica. But it does have to do with language and the kind of challenge authors encounter all the time. So I'm launching this thread for people who are trying to come up with a word. I'll bump it every few months for visibility.

He's "conflicted." On one hand he's free of a burden but on the other hand he's old enough to have been beaten by it. I guess "conflicted" can be a feeling, but the crux of the matter here is that what he's experiencing is not one feeling, it's two conflicting feelings.

 

[AG31]

He's "conflicted." On one hand he's free of a burden but on the other hand he's old enough to have been beaten by it. I guess "conflicted" can be a feeling, but the crux of the matter here is that what he's experiencing is not one feeling, it's two conflicting feelings.

Thanks to all in the thread. He picked "rueful."

 

[nice90sguy]

Eva Hoffman, in her incredible story "Lost in Translation" (same title as, but not the one made into a movie), uses the "untranslatable" Polish word tesknota , which loosely translates as "nostalgia", but is, as the story title indicates, actually untranslatable into English.

Although it's not quite the word to describe the O.P's relief mixed with a wistful feeling that part of his life irretrievably lost, tesknota captures in a single word something which most of us have certainly felt at one time or another, perhaps as a child:

I can best describe it as a yearning sense of a life we "almost had", a "memory" of a "home" we never knew. I think Paul McCartney's The "Long and Winding Road" captures the essence of tesknota perfectly.

 

[AG31]

So I'm launching this thread for people who are trying to come up with a word. I'll bump it every few months for visibility.

It's only been two weeks, not two months, but I keep thinking about this: What are good words for different kinds of pain? Somewhere I read recently that it's a real problem in some contexts for people not to be able to describe their pain. There's sharp, dull, pulsating, steady, but no words I can think of to describe the discomfort in my right knee and left hip that I'm beginning to wonder might be arthritis. I don't know what arthritis pain feels like. Suggestions for a pain lexicon beyond "on a scale of 1 to 10..."?

 

[MillieDynamite]

My father describes his arthritis as a pain that communicates his age to him. It is an ache that is never absent but sometimes somewhat silent. Then, in a flash, his fingers trying to open a bottle or jar, a hard step, the pain is an insistent scream through joints. But whether it is a good day or a bad one, it's always there, either murmuring or screeching. You're old, old man.

It's only been two weeks, not two months, but I keep thinking about this: What are good words for different kinds of pain? Somewhere I read recently that it's a real problem in some contexts for people not to be able to describe their pain. There's sharp, dull, pulsating, steady, but no words I can think of to describe the discomfort in my right knee and left hip that I'm beginning to wonder might be arthritis. I don't know what arthritis pain feels like. Suggestions for a pain lexicon beyond "on a scale of 1 to 10..."?