25

The midwife’s forehead wrinkled in concern. From my vantage point lying back on the table, I watched her lean forward and peer down my right leg. She paused, then pressed her finger into the back of my calf. “Does it hurt there?”

“Nope.”

“How about here?” she asked.

“No.”

She moved to the end of the exam table. Tension tightened her face as she approached my right foot, then slowly pushed it back toward my body. She looked at me expectantly.

“Doesn’t hurt,” I reported.

She let out a loud sigh. “Thank God. It’s not a DVT.” Her face relaxed, though it still showed concern. “I can tell you now, I was really freaked out when you first described your symptoms.”

I had called the birthing center that morning because I could no longer walk more than a couple steps at a time. When I told the midwife that it seemed to have something to do with my veins, she told me to come in right away. She wanted to make sure that I didn’t have a deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot in a major vein.

“I still think you should go to the ER, just to be safe,” she said as she helped me off the exam table.

“Is that really necessary?” I asked. As the working mom of a toddler, the last thing I had time for was sitting in a hospital.

She addressed me as if speaking to a child who’d been caught playing with matches. “I don’t think you understand how serious this is. DVTs are a top cause of death for pregnant women. If you have a large clot and it breaks free, it will go to your lungs. At that point you’ve got less than an hour until you die.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Oh.”

“That’s why we’re not going to take a risk here.” She grabbed a business card from the counter and wrote down the address of the nearest hospital on the back. “Go to this emergency room and tell them to take an ultrasound of your leg.” She paused, then wrote down another number. “This is my cell phone. Call me if they find anything.”

The ER was chaos. From behind the drapes that enclosed my makeshift room I heard the squeaking of rubber-soled shoes mingled with hushed conversations. Doctors and nurses called questions like, “Have you checked on the laceration in three?” and whispered in impromptu hallway conferences, where words like “not stabilizing” or “he’s upset” filtered out.

A doctor in pale blue scrubs pulled the drapes open and entered the room. We went over my symptoms, he pushed my foot back like the nurse had done, and he told me they’d need to take an ultrasound of my leg. Before he disappeared through the curtains, he warned me that I might be waiting a few hours, because they only had one ultrasound machine and it was already in use.

I’d called my mom on the way to the ER, and she assured me that she could take over with Donald if Irma needed to leave, so I decided to relax and think of this as a mini vacation. I moved my slouchy beige canvas purse from the chair next to me and picked up the stack of papers beneath it. Ever since I’d begun researching Catholicism, I always had a book or a printout on hand. I couldn’t stand the thought of missing opportunities to read when I was in the midwife’s waiting room or in between jobs at the office, so I kept reading material on me at all times.

Today I had Salvifici Doloris, Pope John Paul II’s letter about suffering. It was what they called an “apostolic letter”, meaning that it fell into the category of statements that God supposedly protected from error. If the pope were at a restaurant and declared that cilantro was the most vile food known to mankind, he would be right, but it would not be considered an infallible statement handed down by God. That only happened when he exercised the authority given to Peter and his successors by Jesus—sort of like how the writers of the Bible were not necessarily inspired by God when writing personal letters to friends.

Since the Church claimed that God made sure that nothing in letters like this one would be wrong, at least when it came to issues of faith and morality, I was eager to see what this pope had to say about the great question of human suffering. For two thousand years, documents like this one had been circulated by popes to the clergy to be read and explained to the people at church services. Now, in a modern turn of events, they were also available on the Vatican website, which is where I’d printed my copy. With the sounds of the downtown emergency room beeping and clattering all around me, I began reading Salvifici Doloris, which had been translated into English as, On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering.

Pope John Paul II used the letter to summarize what has been revealed to us about suffering: God doesn’t want it and came to fix it; it is ultimately caused by evil; and it is not to be assumed as a punishment for wrongdoing. But then, at the close of the letter, he said, “Suffering is certainly part of the mystery of man . . . an especially impenetrable one.”

Mystery. Impenetrable. There was a self-assuredness in the statement, an utterly unself-conscious willingness to say, “I’m just taking dictation here, and that’s all I was told.” If this Church were indeed run by a bunch of power-hungry guys who made up doctrines and wanted to seem omnipotent, I would have expected to see an effort to explain everything with perfect clarity. I could understand the religious sects that gained traction by preaching that suffering was divine punishment for people God didn’t like; as abhorrent as the thought was, at least it was a tidy solution. In contrast, this encyclical delivered the message, with hope and peace, that “we have not been given all the answers.”

Over and over again, John Paul simply pointed to the cross. He would talk about esoteric concepts like the paradox of weakness and strength and the possibility of channeling suffering, through Christ, to make it a victory over evil. But there were never more than two or three paragraphs of that before he took it back to God as a man who was nailed to a piece of wood.

I plunged my hand into my purse, digging around until I felt hard, pea-sized balls of plastic. I pulled out a pink Rosary, which had been sent to me by a blog reader. I fed the beads through my fingertips until I held only the pewter crucifix. There was the familiar figure of Jesus, bleeding and dying. This image supposedly answered the question of human suffering. I just didn’t understand how.

I set the Rosary aside and got back to the encyclical. The ultrasound machine became available just as I finished the last page, and I put the papers back under my purse to focus on the appointment. After a technician moved a wand slowly down my leg, pausing to push it deep into my flesh every few inches, the doctor came in to tell me that I was all clear. There were some clots in superficial veins, but no DVT.

When I got home, I had to call my mom from the driveway to ask her to help me inside. Irma hustled out the door alongside her. I put my right arm across Irma’s shoulder, my left arm across my mom’s, and together we lumbered into the house. They hoisted me onto the roomy living room couch, where I flopped down with great relief.

Donald bounced over and climbed into my lap, and I tried not to let him see that I was still in pain. “Mommy home!” he exclaimed, his bright blue eyes radiating pure joy. “You go doctor?” he asked, his expression turning to concern.

He was an incredible talker for being four months shy of his second birthday, and it was one of my life’s greatest pleasures to be able to hear him express the thoughts that went through his head. “Yes, mommy went to the doctor today. What did you do?”

“I play with Miss Irma! We eat galletitas,” he said, pronouncing the last word with a flawless Spanish accent.

My mom offered to take Irma home, and Donald scrambled off my lap and announced that he wanted to go with them. “Car goes vrrrrooooom!” he said before they walked out the door. His little voice was so innocent it hurt my heart.

When I heard the final screech of the garage door coming to a close, it occurred to me that I should have asked my mom to bring me something: a book, the TV remote control, anything. The ultrasound had caused the pain in my leg to reach a level that I had not previously experienced, and walking more than one step was now out of the question. The only things within my reach were one of Donald’s toy tractors and a jumble of months-old gossip rags on the coffee table. I had given up those kinds of magazines as part of the seeking goodness experiment, and I didn’t find pushing a tractor across the floor while making loud grumbling noises to be half as entertaining as Donald did. That left me stranded on a couch in a silent living room.

The ER doctor’s diagnosis was almost worse than if it had been a deep vein thrombosis. I knew I should have been relieved to hear that there was no DVT, but at least that diagnosis would have given me a plan of attack.

I sank back into the deep couch cushion, dropping my head against a pillow. I tried to reconcile this with what John Paul II said when he remarked that “the mystery of the Redemption of the world is in an amazing way rooted in suffering.”

As I did my couch philosophizing, I unconsciously scanned the fireplace mantle in front of me. There was the silver-framed picture of Donald standing in tiny overalls, eagerly pointing at something out of the shot. The hand-painted wooden block that said Love Is Being a Grandparent, the empty iron candlesticks, and then a picture of . . . no. I really did not want to think about that right now.

I tried to turn my attention elsewhere. I looked around again for the TV remote. I even picked up Donald’s tractor, but that only reminded me of the little boy in the picture, so I tossed it across the room.

The picture was a small, black-and-white portrait of my mom’s parents and their first child, taken in the 1940s. My grandmother beamed in a stylish dress, standing proudly next to my grandfather, who wore his formal Army uniform. Between them was their son Tommy, his face frozen in a giggle he’d let loose just as the camera snapped. He bore a striking resemblance to Donald and was Donald’s age—to the month—when the picture was taken.

The portrait revealed a young couple in love with one another and with their child, a feisty happiness radiating from their images. They could never have imagined what was about to happen to them.

One morning in April of 1945, while my grandfather was off fighting in World War II, my grandmother, her mother, and Tommy drove through their home town of Carteret, New Jersey. It was a Sunday, so maybe they were going to or from church. But none of us ever heard why they were out, because what happened next erased all the moments that had come before it.

The driver of a large truck ran a stop sign and slammed into my grandmother’s car. My grandmother was five months pregnant and was thrown from the vehicle. Her mother was killed instantly. Tommy survived, but was trapped in the car, which burst into flames. When they dragged him from the vehicle, he had been burned severely. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, my grandmother stared at his fingers, whose melted flesh had been webbed together by the flames.

After suffering through the night, Tommy died the next day. My grandmother buried her first child and her mother next to one another, the dates of death on their tombstones one day apart. Her husband was still off at war. She returned to an empty house.

I shook my head violently, as if I could expel the images from my brain if I just put enough effort into it. Everything I had read that day about redemption and victory in the midst of suffering was demolished by my outrage, like trees flattened by the force of a volcano. If God had appeared to me in the flesh, I probably would have slugged him. “You are supposed to be good! You’re supposed to be Love itself! And you let kids burn to death? What in the hell is that?” I shouted out loud, my eyes brimming with tears. “You’re supposed to be good!”

I pushed down on the couch, testing the possibility of getting to my feet. Pushing through the surge of pain, I pulled myself to a standing position, knowing that the brunt of it was yet to come. I was able to take one long step before the usual agony radiated down my leg. I steadied myself on the couch, determined to accomplish this small mission. I wasn’t going to be able to take much more, so I lurched forward quickly. Now I was only feet from the fireplace. I could almost reach it.

Three more steps, and I couldn’t do it anymore. The pain made me instinctively raise my leg up, which threw me off balance. I knew I was about to fall, but in the final seconds I was able to accomplish my mission. Before I stumbled to the floor, I grabbed the picture and slammed it facedown.