Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved

by Kate Bowler

I became certain that when I died some beautiful moron would tell my husband that “God needed an angel,” because God is sadistic like that.

Her child is dying and suddenly, so is the whole world.

I thought this life was only getting started, but now I am supposed to contemplate its sudden conclusion.

In a spiritual world in which healing is a divine right, illness is a symptom of unconfessed sin—a symptom of a lack of forgiveness, unfaithfulness, unexamined

A suffering believer is a puzzle to be solved. What had caused this to happen?

But when, week after week, I returned with the same droop in my arms and weakness in my hands, I thought I saw their lips close and their arms cross, and I felt like faithlessness personified.

I was sad and angry in equal measure most of the time.

Wasn’t I better than this? “I used to be shiny,”

What if rich did not have to mean wealthy, and whole did not have to mean healed? What if being people of “the gospel” meant that we are simply people with good news? God is here. We are loved. It is enough.

Chelsea and I have spent most of our lives together, and she set in stone for me what it means to feel loved and understood.

I reminded myself to pull out the statement “I’m sooooooooo happy for you.” It was deliciously insincere, but only Chelsea knew that, and it was a balm to my soul. I was surrounded by the world’s luckiest people in a culture that doesn’t believe in luck.

The pain was a dull roar.

The way that doctors are delicately picking up and handling the words “Stage Four” suggests that I am a spaghetti bowl of cancer.

They want to hear that I will fight and pull myself back from the edge. I want to hear that it is settled that my life and my love will not undo each other.

Later, just knowing that he is happy—that people I adore can restart their lives—glues something inside of me back together.

All these words I am tripping over are benedictions.

I don’t know how to die, but I know how to press this crushing grief into hope, hope for them. It doesn’t sound much like goodbye. It sounds more like this: Fare thee well, my loves.

People come to my bedside in the hospital, but then they go, and the beep, beep, beep of the heart rate monitor remains. This is the most alone I’ve ever been.

But the part I miss right now is how wonderful they are at suffering together.

I am starting to worry that I will die here, apart,

I keep thinking about this boy I heard about, a teenage boy in his final days of dying from cancer. He kept choking until his doctor finally figured out what he wanted. He wanted one last, hard cry, but his lungs were so filled with fluid that he couldn’t catch his breath.

So the nurses were called and they managed to slowly drain his

lungs so the boy could sob until that one horrible and sa...

I 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.

The promise of heaven to me is this: someday I will get a new set of lungs and I will swim away. But first I will drown.

I’m trying to decide what I can read in the time I have left.

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.

In a theological universe in which everything you do comes back to you like a boomerang—for good or for ill—those who die young become hypocrites or failures. Those loved and lost are just that, those who have lost the test of faith.

But mostly I see people who refuse to allow their loved ones to grow weary. In the waiting room, a daughter asks her elderly mother to put on her lipstick and smile before seeing the doctor. A man I know wants to call it quits on his painful gauntlet of medical treatments, but he can’t bear the disappointment of his family. My nurse keeps saying, “But at least you’re here now!” when reviewing the boxes I have checked on the form she has given me: Fatigue. Insomnia. Pain. Depression. There are no words that don’t sound like surrender.

There must be rhythms to grief, but I do not know them.

And I have certainly never told them what to say when they visit someone who is dying and how not to sit on her couch, mouth full of cookies, and ask endless questions about how cancer treatment works.

I did not tell them how few of their words are needed but how much their hands are wanted, a hand on my back as I tear up,

There are a few rows of practical items to make me feel useful—bottled water, light hand weights, and a stack of the latest American religious-history titles.

I’m still real, aren’t I?

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.

Buried in all their concern is the unspoken question: Do I have any control?

Instead, that helplessness has only thickened my resolve to salvage what I can from the wreckage.

If I never nap. If I never complain. If I stifle my sharp intake of breath when I feel the pain. If I hide the reality, then maybe I’m not sick.

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.

“So, I either maybe live, die almost immediately, or have some kind of magic cancer that gets special treatments?” I ask.

Liminality

But all I can see is cancer turning everyone upside down and shaking the pennies out of their pockets. Cancer wants to take it all.

I feel like an anvil dropped, crushing everything on its

way down.

They will carry my death in their checkbooks, vacations deferred, sleepless nights, and the silence of Sunday morning prayers when there is no daughter left to pray for. I am the death of their daughter. I am the death of his wife. I am the end of his mother. 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.”

She prayed in the long night of Advent that her waiting would end with a better angle of vision on the baby born to die.

Cancer clinics try to be places of encouragement, and for that we can offer them a slow hand clap. But mostly they are encounters with death set to the tune of a young volunteer on the lobby’s baby grand piano and the muffled sounds of someone yelling, “Mr. Smith! It’s your turn for blood work!” When I heard a harp player in the foyer, I immediately turned to my dad and said: “Is it really that bad?”

Me at tbe JHH

inchoate

I’m an alien who crash-landed on a planet of the carefree and healthy.

couldn’t stand that people might see through me—that they might know I was only another tired cancer patient with a creeping sense of hopelessness and the glorious