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

by Kate Bowler

delusion that sheer willpower would make the difference.

I have been all kinds of cheery. But positivity has become a burden. And it’s a burden I assumed when I decided that, in the darkness of Advent, I would save myself.

The void is deep and bottomless.

But most everyone I meet is dying to make me certain.

We are all the choir of the damned.

The first is that I shouldn’t be so upset, because the significance of death is relative. I like to call the people with that message the Minimizers.

The second lesson comes from the Teachers, who focus on how this experience is supposed to be an education in mind, body, and spirit.

The hardest lessons come from the Solutions People, who are already a little disappointed that I am not saving myself.

I am immediately worn out by the tyranny of prescriptive joy.

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.

“Yes, yes, I’m okay. Except for about ten minutes a day, I’m okay.” Anyone else would have left it at that. He looks at me carefully. “What does it look like? Those ten minutes?” he asks.

Time is looped. Start treatment, manage the side effects, recover, start treatment.

wake up at 4:00 a.m. and drive to the airport listening to a radio program about the wonders of the periodic table of elements, and I find myself telling Toban later: “Next week it’s boron!”

Determined to charm the intake nurses, the blood-work nurses, and the enormous entourage of highly trained doctors who are working on this clinical trial, I wear myself out.

By the time I crawl into bed at 1:00 a.m., I am hollow.

I am stuck in present tense. With a scan around every corner, I have lost the ability to make extended plans, to reach into the future and speak its language. I have

It feels impossible to translate the kernel of truth: I’m not dying. I am not terminal. I am keeping vigil in the place of almost death. I stand in the in-between where everyone must pass, but so few can remain.

If she were here, she would understand the cost of living in the in-between.

“But do you think that means that, when I die, I will see things from God’s perspective?” Say it. Just say it. “Do

you think that when I die . . . I won’t have to feel . . . apart?”

must learn to live in ordinary time, but I don’t know how.

These are the hopes that are being ground into dust. And then

When someone is drowning, the only thing worse than failing to throw them a life preserver is handing them a reason.

The truth is that no one knows what to say. It’s awkward. Pain is awkward. Tragedy is awkward. People’s weird, suffering bodies are awkward. But take the advice of one man who wrote to me with his policy: Show

up and shut up.