After Jane died, someone gave me a copy of a book called Why Bad Things Happen To Good People. I had heard of the book but had never read it, so I opened it up and started reading. The author was a minister who cited scripture trying to explain the awful things that happen to people as part of some divine plan.
Maybe those events are part of some plan for the greater good somewhere, but it brings little solace to those to whom the incredibly bad happens. I was reading the book on a plane to visit my family out west. Had I been reading it at home I would have thrown it across the room and screamed my lungs out. Right after Jane died and I had talked to her father and sister, I called my father. We had lost my mother nine months before to Alzheimer’s. He said to me, “And now you know there really is nothing anyone can say to you that is going to make this any better.”
There were two books I found useful in those days. One was a book a friend, Beverly Foote, had written about Lent called A Journey of the Heart: Meditations. It had nothing to do with dealing with death in a traditional sense, but it gave me an anchor in that first month and a quarter because I felt I really was alone in the wilderness.
The second I happened upon in a book store during one of those desperate days when the silence drove me out of the house and convinced me to do things I would not normally do–like look at the self-help rack in a book store. Martha Whitmore Hickman lost her daughter in an accident. Her book, Healing After Loss, did not try to explain why bad things happen to people. She had been where I was and knew that was not what people in grief need.
This week one of my favorite students gave birth to her first child. I read the first bit of the birth announcement with great joy. The baby weighed in at a healthy eight pounds four ounces. But the next part set off alarm bells in my head: “We’re asking everyone to keep her in your prayers.”
Schizenephaly is a brain disorder/birth defect that creates clefts in the brain. Often the child does not survive birth. Depending on the extent of the damage there are developmental issues, seizures and paralysis. We do not know what causes it. We do not have a cure. Her daughter was born with it.
I don’t know what to say to my student. Like my father with me, I have no words that can truly offer solace for what she is going through. I hate the ritual words we all say at times like these because I know just how meaningless they really are–how much they can sting and burn in the mind and in the soul.
She and her daughter and her husband need our love and thoughts and prayers and energy tonight–and every night. It is all we can truly offer anyone who faces this kind of darkness.
