When you experience a traumatic loss like the one we did, everyone tells you to expect people to say stupid things to you. Just to steel yourself for it. I generally have a pretty thick skin, and not a lot of (intended) condolences actually came across as “insensitive”. One passing comment, though, made by an old friend, did stick with me. It grated and niggled and made me uncomfortable and hasn’t really left my consciousness. Shortly after Evan died, she said something to the effect of “I always thought you lived a charmed life. Now you get to experience what it’s like on the other side.”
I was slightly offended — though I couldn’t really tell you why. I had never thought of my life as “charmed” but I realize now that staying relatively unscathed by tragedy up till my mid-forties was in fact a kind of “charm”. I still haven’t figured out why the comment stung, but the theme of a generally related and very brazen question has been haunting me: “What makes you so special?” What makes me so special to assume that I should be one of the few humans to escape bad things?
Why do I assume that I have “main character” energy? Why, also, do I assume that I am the hero of the story? Why was I surprised when the worst possible thing that could happen, happened to me?
My brother’s therapist friend commented to me recently that none of us are immune from loss. She was deeply empathic, and lovely to converse with. “This won’t be the first time that you lose something,” she cautioned. Somehow I always knew that on a cerebral level. My grandfather died. My grandmother-in-law died. My friend died. My body was aging. I had lost relationships with my foster children…I knew loss. But now I know it. My son has died and I know loss. I know it in my bones and in my heart.
The pain is, of course, relentless. It hits in unexpected moments, but there are also plenty of periods of reprieve in between the suffering. I have railed against the pain, and clawed at it, and screamed at it and flung at it every piece of emotional energy that I have. I have worked so so so hard at staving it off but it is relentless. It collapses my lungs and it pierces my soul. And part of learning to carry it, I think, is mulling over this one question. Am I special?
Christianity places believers in the center of a narrative because of a completely non-plausible idea that the God of the universe would send his son to redeem those who would choose to reclaim their centrality. It’s a bold thesis. You have to dare to believe that you are indeed special and that there is a good, big, and wonderful God who would want you through no special merit of your own other than your humanity. It takes both extreme courage and extreme humility to be able to claim such a kind of centrality of the believer. And again, I think it’s very easy to mistake that centrality for immunity from pain. Even if cerebrally we know we aren’t immune, in our hearts we still think we can get away with escaping the human condition. We know we aren’t that special but deep down inside we feel that we really really really are. In other words, I am both special and not special.
My son’s death spawned a very loud challenge to my faith. A few months ago, as I was wading through shards of anger and doubt, another friend of mine opened up about her own grief journey. Her father had died suddenly when she was in college, and she recalled to me her anger towards God and the violence of her grief. She said somehow, one day, it dawned on her that her grief was selfish. She wasn’t the only one who had lost a father. That her mother had lost a husband, and her siblings had lost a father.
Her sharing threatened to offend me and become one of those unhelpful condolences…. “What now, are you calling my grief selfish? Are you calling me selfish?” ….but by God’s sovereignty, her sharing was well-timed. I had actually just begun to experience a curious new layer to my grief, one where I had begun to weep on behalf of my husband and my daughter. I began to cry for their losses rather than crying mine. (Yes. It took me almost a year to arrive there. So intense was my focus on motherhood.)
My friend’s grief-sharing also resonated because I had been thinking about the integrity of my faith. I had been considering the idea that before tragedy hit me in such a visceral and personal way, I had been okay with the existence of tragedy. I had always known that tragedy existed. I had chosen to believe in a good, just and omniscient God, despite my awareness of the holocaust, genocide, rape, plunder, murder. In the face of the existence of such depravity and injustice, I had clung onto a belief in God’s existence. Now that the deepest evil was happening to me, would I suddenly choose not to believe?
Christianity perches on the tension of radical confidence and radical humility. I am more sinful than I ever dared to believe, yet God’s love for me in Christ is far greater than I ever dared to hope. I don’t think I’m providing a pat answer, but a more deeply felt one. I am feeling new contours of a rich faith that can hold all the pain and all the suffering of the world. I have begun to enter into the fellowship of the suffering Christ in a new way and yes, I am incredibly special and also no, I am incredibly not.
What makes me so special? Everything. Nothing. Everything and nothing.
Aside – I just had to post the above photo of naive, beautiful, 32-year old me. Of course my friend thought I led a charmed life. Just look at the glory of that youth! Of course I didn’t know tragedy and loss. I look at that photo now and what wells up is so much disdain for my past self, but also so much compassion for what she has yet to learn and experience. And I realize that 50 and 60 year old me are going to look back at photos of current (40-some) me and say the exact same thing, but hopefully with a bit less of the jealous stepmother vibe and a bit more of the doting grandmother energy?