25th Oct 2007
Pain and Suffering
Some years are just hard. 1992 was one of those years. I’ve written a lot about it, mostly in fiction, and I’m not going to write about it here. It was horrible. How I suffered.
2007 has set itself up similarly to 1992, but with an immensely different outcome that I’m trying to figure out. Work has been deathly slow until recently forcing us to make some hard choices. And then in August, I was hit by a giant pipe while driving down the 405. Then a miscarriage. And then the fires.
Here’s my insight—I may have turned a corner with my own relationship to suffering. All of those incidents hurt in one way or another. Being hit by a pipe was emotionally jolting, mostly. It felt like my own death could have been very close. Having another miscarriage was really disappointing. And the fires were just plain terrifying. But I don’t think I suffered as much as I would have at other points in my life.
I don’t have a conception that God acts personally in my own life. At least not in the sense that God threw a pipe at me to get my attention or took a fetus from me because I was bad or turned the fires away from our home because we prayed enough. I just can’t go that way theologically.
The big difference between 1992 and 2007 (other than 15 years) is that I didn’t expend that much energy wondering why this had happened to me. Why did a pipe hit me and the car next to me? Why did the fetus die? Why did the fires burn right up to our house and then stop? Why? I don’t know. I never will. Taking the why out of the equation seems to have made all the difference in how much I suffered. Not that there wasn’t pain. There was definitely the sensation of pain. But there wasn’t that prolonged excruciating whole body suffering that often accompanies pain.
Resources
One of theCSO’s favorite jokes is:
A bunch of scientists decided to study traffic accidents, so they put black boxes in cars. They were interested to find that in cars in most regions of the country, like in airplanes, people’s last words before an accident occurred were “Oh, shit.”
The one place that was different was the south, where the last words before a traffic accident were most commonly “Hold my beer and watch this!”
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I thought it might be to soon to send that to you when it happened. But I did think of it.
CC
CC
I thought that was a pretty good one, CC.
Being from the south, I would say that that is quite accurate and funny.
Ms. Theologian, I’m sorry for the year 2007 for you. I hope that what you want to happen happens.
And I AM glad the fires stopped before getting your house.
I wish my wishes for goodness could make a difference.
I’m glad you haven’t given up blogging all together.
Elizabeth
HOw odd, Ms. T, that you should mention not asking why things happened to you. After my dad was murdered in 1997, I found that when I stopped asking why, the pain shifted to something more bearable, more tolerable, more…doable. Why things happen is pretty useless. Why only helps if you really really could have done something about it, and often times we humans are faced with the reality that we could not have done anything. Life is pretty random sometimes, and that scares us, so we keep asking why, hoping for a different answer, like returning to the refrigerator over and over in the same night, hoping that something decent to snack on has materialized itself on a shelf by the ketchup. On of my favorite comic strips is a Hagar the Horrible in which he’s standing on his boat in the middle of a huge storm and shouting at the sky, “Why?” and a voice from the heavens shouts back, “Why not?!”
Thanks, Elizabeth.
And, how awful, Mile High Pixie that your father was murdered. My God.
And on a much lighter note, I too search for that snack in the fridge.