Resilience (10 page)

I wrote, after Wade died, trying to sort it out: “I haven't the will to be angry with God. I don't understand, and all my efforts at understanding are thwarted, paths into brambles, paths into deserts. And yet, I cannot be angry. I know I want something of God. I want to be beside my son, and if I am to hope for this, He is my only way. Where would anger bring me? Further and farther from my boy? What use is that, save the satisfaction of it? The only satisfaction I crave is the warmth of my boy's touch and the sound of his voice. I need that hope. It sustains me.” But the search for hope was hard, and that path to God's grace was difficult to find. The map I knew did not comport with the ground on which I was walking.

The God to whom I prayed daily for Wade's eternal soul had to be another god than the one I had imagined. I had to reconsider what I had been
taught. My God, my new understanding of God is that he does not promise us protection and intervention. He promises only salvation and enlightenment. This is our world, a gift from God, and we make it what it is. If it is unjust, we have made it so. If there is boundless misery, we have permitted it. If there is suffering, it came from man's own action or inaction. Abel killed Cain; God did not. Wade's death didn't belong to God. It belonged to this earth. I could still pray for Wade's eternal soul because I no longer had to blame that same God to whom I prayed unsuccessfully for his return to life.

The journey to my new understanding of God made me also understand and sympathize with the doubt of others. And among those who grieved, at my face-to-face grief groups and particularly on the Internet, doubt was a well-known companion. So many of us grew up in religious households or found the society around us organized along certain religious assumptions that few of us came to death entirely from an atheistic or agnostic position. When death or disease struck those we loved, we looked for something to make it make sense, even to make it not really so. We prayed that diseases would be cured and bones healed. We looked to religion; it is
where we were taught to look; it is where our faith drove us. Our death rituals are built around religion; our funerals are largely in places of worship; the headstones near our loved ones espouse it. So here we were, grappling with God. Some good and righteous mourners found what was needed; some good and righteous mourners did not.

Part of the appeal of religion, viewed dispassionately (which is not, I know, the right or proper way to consider faith, and I mean no disparagement whatever by it), is that religion provides a way to believe that our loved ones have not really died. Their bodies have died, their spirit lives. The thought is more than comforting. Not only have they not ceased to exist, reunion is possible. Where does the atheist or the agnostic go for that same degree of comfort? There is no place, for I do not think there is the same degree of comfort elsewhere. I do think there are things one can do to help the spirit of those whom we love live on after their deaths, ways in which we can translate their spirit into tangible things or activities that represent their spirit. We can build statues, and we do. We can write books, and we do. We can find ways in which we can translate what is temporal—life on earth—into something
permanent. None of these require faith. And the permanence they provide is real. How many religions have come and gone or changed since Ovid wrote
Metamorphoses
, in which he described the endurance of literature in the epilogue?

And I am reading the words, so maybe Ovid is right. And then again, he is not living; the making of statues, the writing of words are not the answer I need, however comforting they are in the here and now, because the existence of other roads to an enduring presence, to “living, always” does not, unfortunately, diminish the need for a spiritual answer.
What I needed was not Wade's eternal memory; I needed his eternal life, a life greater than sixteen short years, and I needed the hope of reunion.

Until my own heart could settle on a way to make life and death and hope as much a part of our being as breath, the platitudes and parables, religious or not, did not help me. So I read, and I prayed for my son's eternal protection and for faith for myself to believe in that protection. And I prayed for answers, answers that my faith would never provide. Faith would one day provide a credo for the rest of life without my child, but like the statues and poems and physical memorials, it could not answer the question I ask every day after a loss or an injustice or any suffering: It cannot tell me why.

How rare it must be for someone to say, “I deserve this cancer; it is a proper punishment for my sins,” or even more unlikely, “God was right to take my child, for I am not pious.” We all have to redraw lines and rearrange our expectations of faith in these moments, and it is understandable that we do not come to rest with precisely the same understanding. In my online grief groups, there were Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists, and there were many with no faith at all. We had talked about
graves and headstones and cremation and every manner of thing, and so we felt secure enough in this group to talk about this, the most important of things, the likelihood of eternal life and ultimate reunion. But those who needed, understandably, to believe that eternal life was absolutely assured perhaps by some ritual in which their child had engaged surely hurt, by their strident insistence on the importance of these rituals, those whose children did not so confirm their faith. So arguments began among people who had previously understood the rules of the group to be that we would, at all costs, protect one another. I had to wonder, as it happened, what God, looking down on His creation, would think of us. He would, I imagined, be perplexed that we understood so little of what He wanted from us.

But now it was more about what we wanted from Him.

If you are able, like Job, to place yourself firmly in the hands of your god, you have, in my view, a greater gift than resilience. You do not have to come to terms with a new reality of a child in a grave or with a disease silently ravaging your body. This is not a new reality; this is what your god has ordained for you, handing you the suffering in one hand and
the faith with which to come to terms with it in the other. Some who are not fully satisfied with God's arms or God's answers looked elsewhere. I will not judge them, for what they got is what they needed. I wanted a god, but I needed a different understanding of my God than the one in which I had believed before the wind swept Wade from the road.

I listened as there were discussions of mysticism and after-death communications and other places I was not willing to go. I would not then and do not now condemn that search. What do we know, really? We are all on a journey to understanding, and we cannot know the end or scope of it, and even in the most mundane ways, we can hardly come close. I was—and still am—completely amazed by telephones: that I might dial a set of digits here in North Carolina, and my sister might answer the telephone more than a thousand miles away in Florida, and that I speak and she recognizes my voice. What happened to my voice? It must have been taken apart and sent in waves to the sky and back to someplace on earth where it knew it was meant for her and was sent only to her, and the voice that was waves was put back together and became again a
voice, incredibly, that she could recognize. And what is more, we can talk, even talk right over one another, so it seems all the taking apart and sending and putting back together happens at once. I remember talking to my father overseas one time when I was a girl. His voice was almost his voice, but it would crackle and fall apart, and there would be pauses, the last words echoing while I waited my turn to speak back. I know that the old almost-voices and the new perfect-voices are only physics, but it is a wonder. A wonder that seemed like a trick, then seemed imperfect, and then became what we know and accept: That is my sister's voice, and this is mine. What other rough edges and crackles will we smooth so that what seems a difficult or impossible communication—even communication across the barrier of life—is clear, is commonplace? About much more important things, I am not vain enough to think I know at all. You do not have to believe in order to believe that you do not know.

We came to understand doubt expressed rawly or expressed in searches for answers elsewhere as but a search for meaning, reassurance, hope. We came to understand that religious vehicles that had
for millennia encapsulated our spiritual expectations may, nonetheless, be insufficient for some to explain the terrible briefness of the life of one child. We tried to make life and death, and hope, as much a part of our beings as the air we breathed at their graves, and until we managed that, the platitudes and parables of others were meaningless. So we read, and we prayed, and, frankly, many of us wandered. And wondered. I still wonder what it was I was looking forward to. I wanted to embrace the image of some eternity, but I could not quite make it form. What was the heaven for which I pined? There, if I longed to touch him, would I feel his cheek? Or would I simply be freed of my longing to feel his cheek?

As I have felt further, less devastating blows in the years after Wade's death, I cannot understand how I merited these blows. What did I do? Even though I think I know better, I still continue to ask and I continue to wonder. And then I remind myself: This is the world we made; its flaws are our flaws; its shortcomings are our shortcomings; and the degree to which there is injustice or unprovoked suffering is just a reflection of our failures. But because, in order to reach this point, I have to accept a
God who does not intervene, I have to accept that I cannot expect intervention now. I do not pray for my health. God gave me this world, and He gave me free will. It is my world, and now, if I am able, I have to fix it.

nother city, another town hall, another morning shower. The moments that will change our lives are often not in the monumental events writ large on our calendars. My husband was running for vice president of the United States, and certainly the next monumental moment in our lives would be on November 3, 2004, election day. But sometimes the critical moments are hidden in an ordinary day. My life changed on October 21 as I showered. Standing in a hotel bathroom in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I felt a lump, fat and smooth, like a slice of plum midway between my armpit and nipple. I convinced myself that it was just a cyst. Allowing myself to think that it could be a cyst allowed me to dress that day, to lead the town hall, and then to campaign for another week before a mammogram and ultrasound took away such foolish illusions. Maybe not so foolish: No women in my family had had breast cancer
save my father's sister. On my mother's side, the side important for breast cancer, I thought, there was nothing. And this was, I believed, nothing but a cyst. Since it was the size of a generous slice of plum, though, I would have it checked when I could. But it was eleven days before election day, and I had a full schedule. I couldn't get it checked for a few days without canceling events and alerting the press. And I couldn't tell the press because they would say the threat of cancer was a play for sympathy, and I didn't tell John because these days leading up to the election might be the most life-changing days of his life, and my plum shouldn't be on his mind unless it needed to be. So far, it was just a cyst-plum, and it didn't need to be.

A week later, after a secret mammogram and biopsy while I was home in Raleigh to vote early, it was clear it was not just a cyst. Watching the radiologist read the ultrasound monitor, I knew it could not be something benign like a cyst. The plum was likely to be cancer, and I had to tell John. He jumped into action. He arranged for a biopsy in Boston the day after the election, and we barreled through the final days of the campaign as if that sword were not dangling over our heads. In truth, the campaign
gave us each a respite from letting ourselves go where we knew we would likely have to go after the biopsy the next week: The test was likely to confirm I had cancer, we were certain. And a week later, the day after the 2004 presidential election that did not alter John's life (or mine) in any significant way, we drove from somber words of the concession speeches at Faneuil Hall in Boston to Massachusetts General Hospital and the somber words we knew were coming.

I cannot tell you whether knowing the words “you have cancer” are coming makes it easier, since I did not get to do it two ways. I did it one way, and although that was bad enough, I suspect that it was easier getting used to the idea of cancer over a period of a couple of weeks, getting a chance to tell my family in little pieces rather than having to hear it one day and having everyone sitting at my knees in tears all at once after that. So my husband, my oldest daughter and I stood erect and took with resignation the words:
You have cancer.
It had been a life-changing day after all. We would have to adjust our lives to the disease.