Sigh

They say people deal with loss and mourning in different ways. When my grandfather died from a heart attack at age 48, his immigrant mother tried to console my grandmother by telling her it was all "part of God's plan".

"How can you say that?" she cried. "What kind of God would leave me a widow with two young children and no way to support them?"

Great-grandma had no response.

When my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor (benign and more-or-less easily removable, thank God) a week before my seventeenth birthday, I called a close friend. He was the first one I told. He also told me that "everything happens for a reason." I nearly hung up on him.

In the many years since then, I have looked back and realized that, if the tumor (which had been growing for years and was then the size of an orange) had to be discovered and removed, my junior year was the best time for it to happen. But I do not see a plan there, only "happy" coincidence. I do not have a conception of God who makes such plans. My mother has greatly recovered, but will never be the same (you don't slice things out of the brain without consequences or side effects). There is no plan in that, only the best outcome of a horrible situation.

I can appreciate the desire to view horrible things as part of a divine scheme, though I cannot buy into it. And yet, at the moment when a loved one dies, or a friend is suffering, what can you say? Is it ethical to give pat answers that may comfort them? And if you know it will only make things worse? During the year when my mother was recovering (including several return trips to the hospital to address hemorrhaging and Grand Mal Seizures), we often received what my brother and I referred to as "pity calls". I observed then that the vast majority of the callers seemed to be calling more for themselves than for us- every card, every conversation, seemed to be more about them unloading their feelings onto us, treating us as their therapists, than asking us how we were doing. It was particularly ironic, given the fact that my mother works in Mental Health and many of her friends and colleagues are psychiatrists.

When I had friends who lost parents, I did the only thing I could- I tried to be honest. I didn't tell them it would be ok. I didn't tell them "they're in a better place", or that "it's for the best", or any such horsecrap. I also didn't try to tell them I knew how they felt- I didn't. My mother hadn't died. We got to take her home, not bury her. All I could do was tell them I was there and that we could talk if they wanted to. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But that was the only thing I could do that I could honestly say I would have wanted someone else to say to me.

So watching this, what can I say? My heart breaks. I think it's the biggest crock ever, and part of me wants to scream at this man's friends, to ask how they can do this, trying to explain this death away, making up a fantastical story about prophecies and allusions and gematria. I don't think this way, my brain and heart don't operate this way, and my God, if he exists, doesn't do the things theirs does. I can't accept this.

But I also know that they're crying on the inside, and that this is their way of dealing with their grief, and trying to honor their friend.

And so I can say nothing.