It's too much...

Is there such a thing as hope after successive traumas?

My brother-in-law died of cancer on April 14. We had the service for on April 28. Last night, I asked my mother-in-law if I could please take her to the ER for symptoms with her heart.

My husband drove back from a clergy convocation in the middle of the night to take over for his sister, while I tried to sleep. No one is sleeping. My mother-in-law is St. C, a saint to rival every Mary, Maria, and Theresa you know. She doesn’t complain. I try to anticipate her needs because she will too quietly bear under them. If she goes, every heart in our family will risk breaking.

She coded at 5 pm tonight. But she was in the best heart hospital in Indiana. She was joking two hours later, albeit through an oxygen mask and in pain.

Before we knew she was okay, we were driving in silence. Until my husband said, “This is too much.”

It reminds me of Tig Notaro’s comments in her first show after her cancer diagnosis.

Tig Notaro's first show after recovering from C-Diff - her mother having just died and getting a diagnosis of cancer - has often been a ballast of reality for me. At the end of the show she invokes the "God definitely gives us too much sometimes."

It’s too much. So we pray for a miracle. Which feels bougie for me in the West where I have access to all the modern interventions that seem to demystify and control the possibility of good outcomes.

It's made me wrestle more honestly with what the heck a miracle is. When we call something a miracle, that can be a self-serving narrative that wounds others because they didn't experience it, and it's made me more cautious about labeling something positive spiritual but being neutral about the negative. It's measured me.

I still believe in God, still trust God wants a relationship with all Creation, and that God wills goodness. I also believe that other wills clash with that goodness, that nature effs up and goes haywire, that bad things happen to all people. To paraphrase the words of Jesus: It rains on the evil and the good. The sun shines on the righteous and unrighteous.

I don't know that I will ever have an -logy or -ism or statement of purpose about miracles. What I must do now, in this present moment, is make sense of what it means to have a narrative that "it's too much." Is this more than others have born?

I don't live where there's open warfare, where food, land, water, and safety are limited resources, where malaria or TB are rampant. I do live where anger and fear are fueling inane acts of violence and my political leadership will not at least mitigate the disaster by stuffing their poisonous rhetorical tactics back into the box and regulating tools of mass homicide. I do live in a country where maternal and child mortality are stupidly high for a developed nation. I do live in a country where some people do not believe that a home, healthcare, education, and food are human rights. Those trouble me.

I’m going to live my life wrestling with this, but also I ask, what does it mean that people who experience many trials often have more faith in God and miracles than me? Dr. Molly Worthen wrote about this in the NY Times in Dec. 2022 and it was a bit of a 2x4 to my head. - Thank you, Tommy Boy, for that image. - How can I, a believer, reckon with my Western skepticism when those under more duress than me have a more hopeful narrative? They have more sense of the good news than I do. This is a mystery.

I consider the conversations I’ve had with my mother-in-law, whose own mother died when C was a toddler. Her father fought in WWII and she was raised by and doted on by her aunt and uncle. Her cousin was her de facto brother. He was murdered in the early 2000s. C’s husband, our beloved “papaw” died of cancer in 2005. She never remarried. She is of the age where more and more of her family and friends are dying, but losing her oldest child too feels more unjust, unbalanced, cruel. Cancer is cruel. It’s nature gone rogue. Also, none of us escape death. Cruelty comes in the way we die as much as in the fact that we die. In spite of those cruelties, C remains a deep feeler and thinker, albeit quiet in her way. She discerns more deeply than most deep feelers what it means to be at peace and to trust God.

So tonight, as we hope our beloved mother-in-law takes a lickin’ and gets a pacemaker to keep her tickin’, I pray that whatever the outcome, we remember her hope and faith. While it’s okay to admit we are burned down, in the words of the OT prophet, we like the prophets cannot stay in the ashes. May we find a footing again one day, and may we recover hope from devastation.