Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved

by Kate Bowler

They are teaching me the first lesson of my new cancer life—the first thing to go is pride.

keep having the same unkind thought—I am preparing for death and everyone else is on Instagram. I know that’s not fair—that life is hard for everyone—but I sometimes feel like I’m the only one in the world who is dying.

Ever since the diagnosis there has been a moment, in the minute between sleeping and waking, when I forget, when I have only a lingering sense that there is something I am supposed to remember. In the warmth of my bed, I am caught in webs of dreams. And then there is the flood. I am dying. I am dying. I am my son’s first goodbye. I am not the start of a great new day. I am a bright sunset.

I used to think that grief was about looking backward, old men saddled with regrets or young ones pondering should-haves. I see now that it is about eyes squinting through tears into an unbearable future. The world cannot be remade by the sheer force of love. A brutal world demands capitulation to what seems impossible—separation. Brokenness. An end without an ending.

It is an easy lie that has wormed its way into my mind: I am the center that must hold. It is a thought I picked up so early on in my life that I can’t bring myself to question it. It is something closer to a reflex. Life is unstable because it is life. But I am steady.

Control is a drug, and we are all hooked, whether or not we believe in the prosperity gospel’s assurance that we can master the future with our words and attitudes. I can barely admit to myself that I have almost no choice but to surrender, but neither can those around

St. Teresa of Avila once said: “We can only learn to know ourselves and do what we can—namely, surrender our will and fulfill God’s will in us.” For Christians not of the prosperity persuasion, surrender is a virtue; the writings of the saints are full of commands to “let go” and to submit yourself to what seems to be the will of the Almighty. All of American culture and pop psychology scream against that. Never give up on your dreams! Just keep knocking, that door is about to open! Think positively! Self-improvement guaranteed!! The entire motivational-speaking industry rests on the assumption that you can have what you want, you can be what you want. Just do it. When prosperity believers live out their daily struggles with smiles on their faces, sometimes I want to applaud. They confront the impossible and joyfully insist that God make a way. They obediently put miracle oil on their failing bodies. They give large offerings to the church and expect great things. They stubbornly get out of their hospital beds and declare themselves healed, and every now and then, it works. They are addicted to self-rule, and so am I.

I am the life interrupted. Amen.

“I have known Christ in so many good times,” she said, sincerely and directly. “And now I will know Him better in His sufferings.”

Carol surely wanted healing and more years with her husband and an escape from the creeping death that is multiplying cells and the fading powers of chemotherapy drugs.

who pretended she wasn’t on the edge of dying.

insurance debacle or create the biology to have “magic cancer,” I

There is an inchoate sadness in the pit of my stomach, hard to express. I try to focus on the more superficial things that are out of my control. I feel sick when I look at the crisscrossing scars on my stomach. I hate running my fingers through my hair because I can feel the light tearing

that they might know I was only another tired cancer patient with a creeping sense of hopelessness and the glorious delusion that sheer willpower would make the difference.

These letters sing with unspeakable love in the face of the Great Separation. Don’t go, don’t go, you anchor my life.

young man writes: “I guess I was hoping that God would make something of this. But it has come to nothing.” The void is deep and bottomless. And it is an unmerciful

The world is a place of suffering, they write, a garden full of weeds that we tend as best we can.

But most everyone I meet is dying to make me certain. They want me to know, without a doubt, that there is a hidden logic to this seeming chaos. Even when I was still in the hospital, a neighbor came to the door and told my husband that everything happens for a reason. “I’d love to hear it,” he replied. “Pardon?” she said, startled.

If you inspire people while dying, the plan for your life was that you would become an example to others. If you don’t and you die kicking and screaming, the plan was that you discover some important divine lessons. Either way, learn to accept God’s plan.

tragedies and find no evidence that God was ever there. The world, it seems, is also filled with fathers and mothers begging for their children’s lives and hearing nothing but silence. And, ever after, every church service that sings that God is good rattles like tin in their ears. There can be only one reasonable conclusion, says a father whose children have all been cut down by disease: no one is listening.

The spring is trying to make everything new, but my world feels increasingly dark.

We are all the choir of the damned.

We look at each other with the shared weariness of people tired at the oars.

“The question of ‘What the f**k?’ is pretty much on target every day.”

I think the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.

I read an article about how people in grief swear because they feel the English language has reached its limit in a time of inarticulate sorrow.

Pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris. From dust you came, and to dust you will return.

We are solid flesh, and we are ashes. Pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

I am marching toward the edge of a precipice, trusting that, by the time I get there, a bridge will have been built. Chemotherapy. Immunotherapy. Divine healing. Something needs to happen before I get there. Lord, build me a bridge.

We would need to prepare to think beyond “cured” and “dying” and think, instead, about how to get me from one good outcome to another. The longer he talked the more I came to recognize the look on my parents’ faces. Hope.

“Does it hurt to die?” I ask. “In the hospital, I mean.”