The number you have reached has been changed or is no longer in service. . .
I was thinking back years ago, one Thursday afternoon when I received an email from a friend. The first line read; “I have some sad news” and while reading those five words my vision seemed to blur and a kind of numbness set in, preparing for what “sad news” might be delivered. A dear friend’s daughter had passed away. A bad cold that went into pneumonia, then complications set in and that was that.
I find myself thinking how life always has a way of feeling so permanent, like nothing will ever change, and when it does, as it always does, we seem so surprised and even shocked. Something we never get used to.
Danielle was 25 years old. She was a great friend of my daughters from elementary school. They actually were best friends until the usual grade school rivalries occur, best friend one day, new best friend the next. School is hard. Friendship is hard. Life is hard, and hearing about someone dying is hard.
I’ll never forget that afternoon — the girls were in the 6th grade. I was in the shower washing my hair when my daughter came running into the bathroom. “Mommy, Cindy’s on the phone, Danielle has a brain tumor!!” I couldn’t fathom that statement or what my daughter, Olivia, was trying to get across to me. I thought she must have misunderstood. “Tell her I’ll call her back in a few minutes.” I jumped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around my wet hair and made that call that changed everything, that old “what a difference a day makes” never rang so true.
Out of the blue, Danielle, who seemed to be the picture of perfect health, strong and athletic, in one day was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
She was a crossing guard after school and apparently became dizzy and fainted. They rushed her to the ER. Just like that, in a matter of minutes, life would never be the same for her or her family. Watching this little girl optimistically fight the fight, watching her family battle with and get the crap kicked out of them by the insurance companies, only to go broke and continue trying any and everything possible, holding out for that miracle that would save their daughter’s life. The years went by, Danielle survived the brain tumor by staying alive, but the tumor took away her ability to walk, to speak clearly, to see, to live a life that she so deserved to live.
Why would such a remarkable little person who was so kind and had a great future ahead of her have to face this hell, this impossible mountain to climb? There are no explanations. You can’t scream at God, “Why her?” — well, in fact, you can, but you won’t get an answer and when you look around there aren’t many reasonable answers for questions like this. You get some bullshit remark like “God only gives us as much as we can handle” — To hell with that lame answer. “Please please God, make her well, please don’t let her be sick.” And you have to wonder why God would do this favor for you when half the world is starving, dying, being tortured, so why would you get special treatment?
I remember on Larry King when he interviewed Elizabeth Edwards, who not too long after that interview, died from her long battle with breast cancer. She talked about losing her teenage son in a car accident and having to live with the pain and suffering resulting from a husband who not only had an affair but fathered a child with another. She spoke about praying to God to make things okay. To bring her son back, to make her healthy. She said she finally realized that the God she wanted and the God that she had were two different things. Elizabeth said, “The God I wanted was going to intervene. He was going to turn time back. The God I wanted was — I was going to pray for good health and he was going to give it to me” she said. “Why in this complicated world, with so much grief and pain around us throughout the world, I could still believe that, I don’t know. But I did.”
I think about that on occasion. That rare occasion where I decide to say a prayer.
I am usually lying in bed closing my eyes, starting to plead my case. And it always occurs to me right in the middle of it, “is anyone really listening?” Then I envision these millions of little babies, dying of AIDS or some other horrendous disease, flies covering their little naked bodies, their mothers with sunken cheeks and bones protruding and I think, “is anyone listening to them?” If God won’t help them, can I really expect my prayer of something relatively minor to be answered?
I remember when I was in elementary school I went to Catechism, I even thought at one time I wanted to be a nun. It must have been the fabulous “habits” they wore, or the fact that when they walked into a room I thought it was God herself. But that’s getting off track. I remember once when the class was told by the nun that we before we would be allowed into the kingdom of heaven we had to accept Jesus Christ as our lord and savior. Even as a little girl I knew there was something wrong with that. The God I wanted wouldn’t be that unfair.
So I asked, “Well Sister, what about all of those little babies in other countries that don’t know about Jesus?” Her reply to me was, “Everyone has had the opportunity to accept Jesus Christ as their savior. We are everywhere. We have sent people around the world to spread the word of God.” I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now.
This wasn’t meant to be a religion bashing blog or the unfairness of it all. I really meant to write to say goodbye to someone who I adored and who for whatever reason, didn’t get the chance that lots of us do. She wasn’t given the time to grow up, to have a family, a career (her obituary said “Danielle enjoyed making money at her job shredding paper.”) Life isn’t fair. That’s a fact. No rhyme or reason. And then there are so many of us that get this incredible opportunity to LIVE and we just squander it away, like we have an endless supply of life in our pocket.
Life is tough. And you only can hope that there are enough good times and enough love in your life to balance out all the negatives. But it is up to us to make those happy and wonderful times happen. Because this little sliver of life really doesn’t last that long. One of my favorite quotes is from the movie Annie Hall, where Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer says:
There’s an old joke — um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”
Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life — full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.
