Elliot stayed in intensive care, hooked up to oxygen and intravenous medicines, drifting in and out of a morphine haze. After several tense days, a nurse named Lisa pulled me aside.
“The only way Elliot will find peace,” she said, “is through God.”
That stung. I resented her assumption he needed to find faith if he was going to have comfort. We wanted to put our trust in doctors, not help from above. Surely she shouldn’t have said such a thing. Even in a Catholic hospital, staff was supposed to respect everyone’s point of view. I wondered if I should report Lisa’s transgression to her boss.
Her prescription haunted me. We weren’t religious, and I couldn’t help thinking that if I had been, seeing Elliot suffer this way would have shattered my faith altogether. If there was a God, I told myself, he was doing a shitty job and I wanted nothing to do with him.
Of course it wasn’t necessary to go through a personal medical crisis to see injustice on the alleged Almighty’s watch. Every day the newspaper displayed the slaughter of innocents through wars, fires and earthquakes, but seeing Elliot’s pain up close brought the issue to the forefront for me. I wanted to understand what support people got from religion, and how they could keep their convictions under such duress. It occurred to me I had never really talked with my friends about faith. Like sex lives and bank accounts, it was something personal that we just didn’t probe in detail.
And so, for the first time in my life, I began to ask. Some people told me they found God an indispensable pillar during an illness. Some experienced a spiritual awakening. A few gave up on faith altogether, while others fought to keep it alive. I was a bit jealous of those who believed in heaven; the idea you could rejoin your soul mate in an eternal afterlife certainly made death seem less daunting. I didn’t believe I’d have that chance. In my view, we had only the here and now, and had to make the very best of it. Religion came into my life only as an excuse for warm family meals at Christmas, Easter, Rosh Hashana and Passover.
I contacted the pastoral care department at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, where Elliot was, as he put it, “incarcerated.” Sister Lois Jablonski said some patients became so furious at God that they kicked her out of the room. A few were tortured by the terrifying idea they got sick as retribution for their sins. She said God didn’t punish that way.
“There’s no answer to the question, ‘Why did I get cancer?’” she said simply. “I just try to stay with the person and listen to him vent his feelings and not make any judgments.”
To me that wasn’t a very satisfying response. I found myself bristling at the fact that some people gave God credit for the good in the world but didn’t hold him responsible for the bad. They said God didn’t micromanage. Then why pray for specifics, like recovery or a new job or a baby?
The whole issue made me cranky. Once a priest on the pastoral care team stopped by Elliot’s room to see if there was anything he could do to help.
“Sure,” I snapped. “Can you turn up the heat?”
I knew I was being peevish and unfair. Yes, the perversion of religion had fueled terrorists and other crazies, but I had also witnessed its benevolence. As a reporter I had met dozens of foster parents. Most of the best ones were devout Christians whose faith inspired amazing self-sacrifice.
One day, as Elliot and I were taking one of his first tentative strolls around the hallways of the Teaneck hospital to rebuild his strength, we heard a bunch of giggles in the stairwell. Out popped a half a dozen teenage boys in yarmulkes. They looked around a bit and came up to us.
“Mr. Pinsley?” one asked timidly.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Good Shabbas!” they said in cheerful cacophony. Then they ran off.
Elliot got a huge kick out of that. Apparently he was a stop on their “mitzvah” tour of good deeds. He must have checked off the Jewish box when he was admitted.
“They knew who I was by my nose,” he said.
I was grateful those boys gave Elliot a laugh, a welcome feeling of fellowship and a funny story to tell. I had deep respect for the community service mission of many faiths. Nevertheless, I couldn’t understand religious explanations for sufferings that are blatantly unfair.
As I asked around, people kept telling me to check out a book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Somehow everybody seemed to have read it.
The author, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, wrote it to make sense of the devastating loss of his son, Aaron, who was only fourteen when he died of a rare genetic disorder. At first the rabbi expresses outrage at a God who allows terrible accidents and disease to strike the undeserving. He questions whether he can keep teaching that a merciful God watches over the world. Ultimately he concludes that God doesn’t cause tragedies, but can provide the tools people need to persevere.
“The ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to enable us to live fully, bravely and meaningfully in this less-than-perfect world,” he writes.
Well, okay, forgiveness and love were values I could subscribe to. I just didn’t need the God part.
While I didn’t want anyone to tell me what to believe, it always touched me when friends told us we were in their prayers. I understood that was their way of expressing they cared. One thoughtful stranger who heard about Elliot’s condition even sent me a hand-crocheted “prayer shawl.” I never used it for worship, but her generosity moved me. There was so much compassion around us. That was something I could believe in. Human kindness helped me keep going.
By the end of Elliot’s ten days in the hospital, I decided not to file a complaint about the nurse who sent me on these philosophical wanderings because she did such a great job with her professional duties. She was attentive and exacting.
At one point she handed Elliot a clear plastic toy with a little blue ball inside. He was supposed to exercise his lungs by blowing into it to make the ball rise as high as possible. The sheer effort hurt so much he grimaced. He kept pressing the red button that dosed him with morphine.
“Blow into the toy ten times every hour,” Lisa said. “And try to lay off the pain medicine. You’re using quite a lot.”
She meant business. Elliot blew into that toy every few minutes. He never pushed that morphine button again. His discipline amazed me. He was putting himself through hell in hopes he could heal faster and come home.
Watching him gave me more strength than a prayer ever could. If he could endure this torture, I thought, I could hang in there with him. He called me his “ER angel.”
I kept that toy as a reminder of his determination to do everything in his power to do something as simple as breathe. Now the toy is dusty and cracked, but to me it is a symbol of grace.