The Meaning of a Life (comment)

I actually have a relative who persists in asking me, 3 1/2 years on, why this all happened. What the meaning was behind Kai's death, behind Chip's. What I was meant to learn. And, 3 1/2 years on, it is all I can do to answer her calmly, to say that it doesn't work that way, when what I really want to do is smack her.

I believe that as a culture, we simply suck at the baby loss narrative. What we understand, what we crave, is "It was hard. Then it got better. Now it's fine. " and "It was hard. Then I understood why it happened. And now I am a better person." What is true, at least for me, is "There was no reason. There is no answer. And I have had to learn to live with that and make a life that includes that reality." Since there was no medical explanation for Kai's death and never will be, I had only two choices- to accept a life with no answer, or to accept a life with an explanation that made me the most evil of evil people- someone who killed her own child through her own rottenness. I sat there for years. I can't anymore.

Riffing now: There is an amazing documentary called "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero", in which they interview people about the meaning of faith and religion in their lives before and after 9/11. One rabbi, who officiated at far too many funerals of the lost, said something like "If you are going to tell me that it was part of G-d's plan to save you or your spouse or your child, then you need to be able to look a grieving mother in the face and explain why G-d wanted her child to die that day."

So, yeah, that.

I know I am mixing reason and meaning here. Maybe reason is an explanation, a cause. Meaning is the new knowledge that you take away. So maybe, maybe, I can sit a little better with having made meaning of the life I have stumbled into than I can with the idea that the reason they died is so I could stumble into this life.