“Why didn’t the thousands of prayers offered by people from all over the country keep my husband from dying?” “Why did my son die? He was a wonderful young man who seemed to just want to help others and yet he died. I see so many kids his age who seem to be wasting their lives and yet they live and my son is dead.” “In my service as a minister, I have told people that we have angels watching over us keeping us in their care. Where was the angel the night my daughter was killed?”
The most basic response to any death is “Why”. Why did this happen to them and not someone else? Why now? I have heard those kind of words come after the death of someone far too young to die, and have heard the same words at the death of a mother in her nineties. “Why” seems to whelm up from deep in our souls and accompanies our tears as a natural way of responding to the pain. “Why” can become the first hurdle we face in the grief journey. Often, we cannot make any progress through our grief until we confront and deal with the why. I have companioned people whose struggle with “why” seemed to last forever. They could not find a way past the question and seemed to lock up in their grief right at that point. I have walked with others who found a way around the question and continued in the journey.
“Around” the question is probably the best way to say it. There are no answers. Why do bad things happen to good people has been the one great unanswerable question of history. The most ancient writings available to us are full of philosophers trying to answer that question. The prophets in the Bible railed at God asking, “Why do the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer?”
I could give a thousand philosophic answers, but none would ever really answer the question. General statements do not fit the individual life we are asking the question about. Everyone in grief will be bombarded with these kinds of answers from people who mean well but think all we need is a new way to think about the loss and the pain will go away. So we humor them and pretend to listen, but no answer really fits.
To make it even harder, we feel like an answer is what we really need. One mother kept saying over and over, “If someone would just tell me why my son died I could understand.” I told her there was no way that could happen, but even if it could happen. Even if I had an iron clad answer straight from God and she believed it with all of her heart, she would still hurt. The pain she was feeling did not come from not having an answer. The pain came from the fact that her son was dead and she was crushed by that loss. Answers would not, and could not, heal that pain.
Sometimes folks find answers on their own that seem to give them comfort. Over the years I have learned that these answers do not have to be logical to anyone else. I have also learned the answers will not fit other people. I remember one man who said he finally asked himself the question, “If you knew when your daughter was born that you would only have her for sixteen years and then would suffer the pain of loosing her, would you still have wanted her to be born?” He said yes, he would and somehow that gave him great comfort. I picked that answer up and used it in a compassionate friends meeting and they looked at me like I had lost my mind. That was his answer, not theirs.
There are no set answers but we need to keep asking the question. It is how we express the deep feelings inside of us in a safe and appropriate way. We cannot always say what we really want to say in the language we really feel like using, but we can say why even in front of the clergy. Unfortunately, that opens us up for a lot of answers that do not answer but at least we got to express our grief out loud. It also helps to write out these feelings. Writing orders the mind and helps us find some kind of way to think about the loss and almost find an answer. Almost.
Copyright Doug Manning of In-Sight Books, Inc. Doug’s books, CDs and DVDs are available at www.insightbooks.com. Post originally published on Doug’s Blog at The Care Community www.thecarecommunity.com.
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