imagination and suffering

Albert always sat in the same place—in a chair at the head of the bed, between Ada and the window. He alternated between looking into her eyes, holding a spoonful of melted ice cream to her lips, patting her sunken cheeks, and staring out the window. I always sat across from him, on the other side, his still-beautiful wife between us.

Ada was completely nonverbal when I met her, and her muscles were so painfully contracted that her fingers curled into themselves and clawed at the skin of her own palms. She had not moved in years, except to clench tighter and tighter into a ball. So it was her husband, Albert, that I got to know.

Every time I visited, Albert told the same story. He told it dozens of times. He told it the same exact way each time, using the same words and the same gestures.

“He loved those turkey feet. Oh, he thought they were so funny. He pretended he was the turkey and we all laughed. He pretended to scratch me with them. But he was the one who got scratched.”

Every time Albert told the story, he held his hands up in front of his face, hands taut and fingers half curled, like claws, like the talons of the turkey that his son had played with, the talons with which the boy had chased his father around and around the kitchen, the night before he died of meningitis on Thanksgiving Day. He was four years old. I can close my eyes and see Albert in front of me, making the same movements, over and over.

“His fever got so high, before we even knew it was happening. There was nothing they could do. All because we let him play with the turkey. He loved those turkeys. He used to laugh and laugh.”

He stared into space, dumbfounded, mouth agape, and shook his head. Just as he did every time he finished the story.

Albert believed that the boy had gotten sick because he scratched himself with the turkey feet, and no nurse or doctor had ever been able to convince him otherwise. He knew it was meningitis, but he also knew it was the turkey feet. The turkey he’d raised and his wife had cleaned, the turkey they had let their son play with, because it made him laugh so hard.

Albert blamed himself. He should have known better.

“What can you do? What can you do? What can you do?” he repeated as he patted his wife’s cheeks. It always ended this way.

•   •   •

WHEN THE STORY never changes—when someone tells the same story the same way, over and over, I get nervous as a chaplain. When my questions elicit no new answers, when my prayer seems to bring no comfort, when there are never new connections with other things the speaker has seen or learned or thought or experienced, when there is never any reflection about what happened, when the person does not even seem to know I’m there as he tells the story again and again, the same way each and every time—that means that the story is stuck, and the suffering is immobile. It means that there is no meaning to the loss. And if that loss is the story that defines your life, it can mean there is no meaning to life.

It might seem strange to think that grief has a life, but it does. It develops and grows, like an organism. Sometimes it undergoes a quick and startling metamorphosis. Empty sadness can turn into burning rage overnight. Stoic denial can crumble into hyperventilation in a moment. Sometimes grief changes slowly, almost imperceptibly, and one can see the changes only looking back twenty years, thirty years.

But one always hopes that it changes. When grief develops and grows, the suffering at the heart of it changes, too. It becomes less acute, less raw and fiery. I’m not sure it diminishes, but it somehow becomes diffused across the memories that surround the loss at the heart of it. It seems less concentrated, and therefore more bearable.

But some suffering seems frozen in time, like Ada, with her fingers clenched into claws that dig into her hands, and Albert, with his fingers clenched into claws that dig into the air.

•   •   •

“EVERYBODY HATES CHANGE,” Rose declared, many years after I met Albert and Ada. “Nobody likes it. But I’ll tell you the real truth: Change is a gift from God. We should get down on our knees and thank God every day that he made it so everything is always changing. That’s how I look at it.”

I had just told Rose that I’d no longer be visiting her because I was moving to South Carolina. I was sad to be leaving my friends and job and home. This wasn’t the reaction I was expecting.

“Everybody only thinks about the good things changing, that’s the problem,” Rose continued. “But if the good things didn’t change, then neither would the bad things. And thank God the bad things change. No matter how bad something is, it’ll change, too. We’d go crazy if nothing ever changed.”

That boy in the hospital, who’d been shot and paralyzed from the neck down for his sneakers—the boy whose anguish I’d fled from, unable to make myself return—this is why he’d overwhelmed me so. I’d looked at him and his future and I could not see change. All I saw was a never-ending sameness. He would remain paralyzed. His unchanging words, repeated over and over again, drove home the point.

But the spiritual paralysis was mine. I looked only at his physical condition. I didn’t consider that his spiritual and emotional life was not paralyzed like his body was. I didn’t imagine the infinite ways someone with quadriplegia could lead a happy and meaning-filled life. I didn’t imagine how I might create a sacred space in which he could grieve his losses, and in which his mind and soul could start to move beyond its present anguish.

My imagination failed him.

Rose’s words are true, of course. Everything in this world changes eventually, though sometimes when we are in the midst of suffering we cannot imagine it.

•   •   •

WHEN SOMEONE TELLS YOU the story of their suffering, they are probably still suffering in some way. No one else gets to decide what that suffering means, or if it has any meaning at all. And we sure as hell don’t get to tell someone that God never gives anybody more than they can handle or that God has a plan. We do not get to cut off someone’s suffering at the pass by telling them it has some greater purpose. Only they get to decide if that’s true. All we can do is sit and listen to them tell their stories, if they want to tell them. And if they don’t, we can sit with them in silence.

When people tell their stories again and again, turning them over and over, they’re trying to make or find meaning in them. That meaning is something they have to discover for themselves. As painful as the process might be, there is no circumnavigating it, either with the most thoughtful ideas you can offer or with the most hackneyed clichés. The meaning a person finds will almost never be the same one you can come up with. It will always be richer, more nuanced, more surprising.

•   •   •

I HAD A PATIENT ONCE, a woman in her forties, who was dying of leukemia. She told me how she had prayed, so long and so hard. She wanted to get better, and she wanted to be able to mother her children again. Certainly she didn’t want her children to grow up witnessing her pain. She had prayed and prayed, but she just got sicker and sicker, and the pain got worse and worse, no matter how much morphine she was on. Now death loomed, within weeks. She was going to die, and no matter how hard she prayed, nothing would change that. She had been despondent.

But on one of my visits, she told me with wonder, she’d realized that God actually was going to answer her prayers after all. “Everything fell away,” she said, “and I understood, finally, that dying IS the answer.”

I’m usually pretty good about keeping a calm demeanor with patients, but I could feel the shock cross my face. She smiled.

“Don’t you see? Dying is what will take away the pain. It’s the only way the pain is going to end, and the only way that my kids won’t see me suffer anymore. You see what I mean? The only way the suffering is going to end is me dying. And I can teach my children how to die without fear. That’s what they’ll learn from me. That’s how I’ll be their mother.” She paused, perhaps waiting for me to respond. I didn’t know what to say.

“There’s always a solution, I see that now,” she said. “I just didn’t understand it at first. It’s not the solution I wanted. But there’s always a solution. It’s just not the one I assumed it would be.”

She would teach her children how to die. That was the meaning and purpose she found in her illness and death.

I say it sometimes to my daughter, who feels things so deeply. “There’s always a solution, sweetheart. You just haven’t imagined it yet.” I don’t know why I say it, because it has never comforted her.

“You always say that, but in this case, THERE IS NOT!” she replies. I guess I want it to seep in somewhere deep in her subconscious, so that someday, when she is up against something truly awful, when the rug is pulled out from under her, some part of her will remember: that there is always a solution, that suffering is not forever, that some meaning can be found in even the direst of situations.

I also understand her knee-jerk reaction, her instinctive rejection of that idea. It’s a tough idea to swallow in the midst of suffering, maybe an impossible one even to contemplate. That’s the nature of suffering—whether you are sufferer or witness, it makes it hard to imagine change.

But everything does change.

I’m not trying to glorify death, I’m really not. I’m just retelling the stories my patients wanted me to share, the ideas they had and the insights they gained, as best I can. I don’t get to decide what those are. Some of them are strange and uncomfortable and even alienating when you first hear them. But as someone who has had the privilege of listening in on the insights of the dying, I can say that sometimes they are also radically liberating and breathtakingly creative. Patients find meaning in places where my own spiritual imagination fails me, meaning that is always so much more astonishing than anything I’ve imagined. That’s why you have to let people find their own meaning: They will always do it far better than you.

•   •   •

BUT SOMETIMES—sometimes—there is no meaning to find, no meaning to make. Sometimes in this world there is pain so great that all one can do is carry it. Carry it for a lifetime, with a story that never changes. Sometimes, there are just those absurd turkey feet, forever scratching the air.

In those cases, all that there is to be done is to listen. Sometimes, when I was overtired, or had just come from another patient with a hard story, or just the way the story struck me that day, familiar though the story was, I couldn’t keep my own tears in as Albert cried for his son who had died too soon, and for his wife who had lived too long.

I’d try to wipe the tears away surreptitiously, try to remind myself that the little boy he wept for was not my child, that Albert was not my grandfather. Usually this worked, because he was so absorbed in his grief. But he saw me once.

“Oh God, I made you cry.” His voice cracked and broke.

“No, no, it’s okay,” I replied.

“Thank you for crying for my son. No one ever cries for him anymore, except me. And when I die, no one will cry for him ever again.”

He paused and sighed heavily, all the air leaving his chest. “And maybe that will be a blessing. ’Cause we’ll finally all be together. I won’t need to cry no more.”