Asking the Great Cosmic Why

This week marks the sixth anniversary of my sister’s passing from cancer. She died a mere seven days after her 65^thbirthday.  Her influence remains strong over my life as I will share with you at the end of this post.

Last February, I marked the second anniversary of my oldest brother’s passing due to complications from kidney disease and Parkinson’s. He was a few months shy of his 71^st birthday. Like my sister, he was an equally positive influence in my life. I will also share a few comments about him in an upcoming post.

This September there will be another week of contemplation that marks my oldest son’s date of death just three weeks shy of his third birthday. He would have been 21 this year but was taken due to complications from Hemophilia.

Maybe I should apologize for the melancholy introduction, but I have merely stated some facts of personal loss. I am not unique. If you are reading this, then you have also suffered loss, as all people have. What matters is how we respond.

The reactions to life’s tragic events are as varied as the individuals that experience them, but one question remains common to all – to ask why. Not the specific why of cause and effect but the Great Cosmic Why that stems from taking it personally. Why has God, Providence, or Fate allowed this to happen to me? Or is my life just a mix of personal ambition, chaos, and luck with myself and family losing at the roulette table of genetic health? For me, I expected that the answer would be silence, at least in this life.

How then should I respond to the silence, to the not knowing the Great Cosmic Why of chronic disease’s slow burn or death’s sudden sharp cut?  For me, there are three possible responses that are not mutually exclusive or in any particular order. (Fair warning: I tried to think up clever names for the responses, but no dice.) These responses are deterministic resignation, intellectual rationalization, or positive questioning. There are other options such as Absurdism but that way madness lies.

My initial response to tragedy falls squarely into the deterministic resignation category that resembles a Christian-coated stoicism. I come by my reaction honestly. My family were colonial Virginians who moved into the Blue Ridge Mountains in the early 1700’s and never escaped. It was in those mountains that my family picked up the Scotch-Irish trait of Calvinistic clannishness or more aptly put – a tendency to feud with conviction. We also picked up a deterministic attitude, the idea that everything is pre-ordained by Providence, that binds Calvinism and Stoicism.

In spite of my faith, I sometimes feel, to paraphrase Walker Percy, like the man who stepped through the front door of Christianity but kept looking back at Pericles and Hector or when faced with doom, would have had a copy of Epictetus in his pocket rather than the Psalms.

My Christianized Stoicism took command after the death of my oldest son. People commented on how well my wife and I reacted to his sudden passing. They mistook deterministic resignation for blind faith. Maybe it was both for there is just a faint line between the two. I will reserve commenting on the events of that terrible weekend - my personal 9/11 - to a forthcoming post.

In the ensuing weeks, several well-intentioned people gave us a number of grief books that tried to answer the Great Cosmic Why. Some books said that my son’s death was God’s will and that we should not question it. A couple of books implied that his death was God’s judgment on us and that we needed to repent. (I am not kidding).

Other books left God out of it and attempted to rationalize his death as a medical event or an act of nature – nothing more, nothing less. The intellectual rationalization of death, especially using statistics, does not bring comfort.

The one book that spoke to me, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler, was written by Rev. John Claypool before and after his young daughter’s death from leukemia. He divides his short book into four chapters. The first three record his thoughts and feelings from her diagnosis, through her remission, and then her death. The final chapter, written 3 ½ years after her death introduced me to the concept of positive questioning.

The idea that I could be grateful for my son’s life while still questioning God about the Great Cosmic Why of his death was a significant departure from my muted Christianized Stoicism. It required me to change my way of thinking. It refocused me from dwelling on his final two days to appreciating the three years of joy that he brought into my life. Understanding that my son’s life was complete protected me from resentment. Changing the tone of my questions opened the possibility of having my questions answered with gratitude rather than silence.

Learning to be grateful about life’s tragedies was not immediate. The lessons started with my son’s passing and continues everyday with Parkinson’s being my constant tutor.

My sister’s late cancer diagnosis was the first major test of my ability to be grateful since my son’s passing. She had only a short time to live. I had a choice. I could resent her pending death or I could be grateful for her life. I chose life.

I wrote the following reflections about her life before she passed.

An Unvanquished Idealism

This reflection was originally published June 2, 2017.

Some years after my mother’s passing, I went through a box of faded newspaper clippings, the kind that mothers keep of their children’s successes, no matter how minor. Mixed in with the wedding announcements and school awards was a letter written to the editor of The Greenville News. The letter, penned by my sister in early 1969 when she was a junior at Blue Ridge High School, praised incoming President Richard Nixon for having Rev. Billy Graham pray at his Inauguration and preach at the White House. She went on to encourage Nixon to keep Graham close by for counsel and prayer as our country went through difficult times. She closed by affirming her love of God and country.

My sister’s idealism was not typical of teenagers during the late 1960's or at least not typical of the drug-fueled kind portrayed later as the Woodstock Generation. While talking with her about the letter, I discovered that her idealism was typical of her classmates at Blue Ridge. She described her lunch table where a student was free to sit only if the student was prepared to discuss the important issues of the day – issues like civil rights, Viet Nam, assassinations or other revolutions of the street. I later found a photo of her in a Blue Ridge High classroom from that same school year. She sat in front of a bulletin board boasting a picture of Hemingway and a list of the Ten Commandments as she talked to the class about some subject not noted on the photo’s proof label – maybe it was a lesson on Nixon’s misunderstanding of the Ten Commandments. She went on to become an excellent high school English teacher. A career choice that would carry her to teach my future 11th grade class.

Being fourteen years younger than her, my sister profoundly shaped my worldview. She did so by including me in her own interests. I remember watching her create the vivid geometric designs on her abstract paintings, hearing the quiet notes of Beethoven’s Fur Elise from her piano, flipping through the many books lying about – Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen to name a few favorite writers - that she eventually taught me to read. Playing with the treasures brought back from her recent tour of Europe. A green colored glass dachshund with needle nose and tail, a chalet inspired Swiss music box and a sleek black Venetian gondola comes to mind. I don't have a Swiss chalet or a gondola, but dachshunds have been my constant companions ever since. Her photos of Switzerland, France, Italy showed me that the Alps are a long way from the Blue Ridge. She opened my mind to vast possibilities.

Later on she would take me to see my first Shakespeare production (we discussed recently whether it was A Midsummer’s Night Dream or Much Ado About Nothing) and my first opera (Faust, we think). Later on I would study Kit Marlowe's Dr. Faustus in a graduate school Renaissance drama class. Just last year my son had a part in his school's production of A Midsummer's Night Dream. With him, my sister's influence became generational in my own very slender branch of the family tree.

If The Greenville News were to run her Nixon letter today, she would be ridiculed for her seeming naiveté. The online trolls would not understand that she knew Nixon had the same temptations of political greed and ambition common to all men. When my sister praised Nixon, she had already read Macbeth. She understood that the ideal must be stated if only to stand as a beacon when the electorate has to avert their eyes from the bloodstained digital chalk line of the latest fallen politician.

My sister has been my most stalwart encourager during my time in the South Carolina House. Her continued idealism, not just in politics, but in how to live and treat others frames my thoughts and my votes. Even today as she faces her life’s final battle, her idealism – Christian faith is a better description in this case - remains strong and her treatment of her family, friends, my son and myself filled with heaven bound loving-kindness.