Sick Unto Life 6 comments

By Tony Woodlief

My nine year-old’s fever has spiked at 103, and I am 1,500 miles away. I call home and talk to each boy in turn, but it is Eli for whom my heart aches most this night, because when my children are sick I want to hold them close to me, let their fevers burn my skin, their barks rattle my chest, their shivers shake my soul, for they are flesh of my flesh.

Someone takes the phone to him. He whispers, in a quavering voice, “Dad?”

He must know it’s me, because they must have told him it is me, but still he asks. He asks because nothing is sure in our home right now, and I am absent more than present, and when you are a child and you are sick the world feels like a place where you do not belong.

I do my best to soothe him. I tell him the antibiotics are even now fighting bacteria inside his body, that there is a war within him, that the medicine will win. He tells me how his head hurts, and I tell him soon it will not hurt, that he will close his eyes and fall asleep and when he wakes he will feel so very much better.

I pray for him, putting out of my mind that once you have prayed for your child who did not get better, every other prayer you will ever whisper over the others feels false. He only has strep throat, and since he lives in America in the twenty-first century, he will be healed.

I am feeling stingy and resentful these days. My child who is gone, over whose body I prayed without solace, she leaves me wondering sometimes if any prayer is answered, or if we are simply in the habit of crediting God with the good outcomes.

The man who is washed to safety thanks God for providence in the midst of the tsunami. The man who watches each of his children dragged screaming and choking beneath the rushing water, before he is himself devoured—he cannot serve as a counterpoint, can he? He can’t step forward during the church service and denounce God.

We hear only praise because the dead cannot cry out. If neither merit nor mercy seem to govern God’s response, then how can I discern his decisions from caprice?

And still I pray, perhaps only to build Eli’s faith, so that when he is healed he will remember I prayed and one day he may believe in all his heart, the way I cannot, that God protects us.

I cannot rise to the level of sympathy for the people of Japan, even those among them who are parents. Michael Novak calls sympathy “a high moral art,” and distinguishes it from empathy, which is self-centered.

There is no high moral art at which I am skilled, and I am perhaps the most self-centered person I know, and so the best I can muster is some approximate imagination. I confess my first prayer, after hearing of the world-shaking earthquake, and the thirteen-foot high wave, and now the impending nuclear meltdown, was: Thank you sweet Christ that my babies are safe.

Maybe I have this kind of prayer, more often than I want to admit, because in my dark heart of hearts I believe suffering is the order of this and every day, and the only question is who will be its next victim. You, or me. Your child, or mine.

I confess I would have it fall on you. On your child.

I had four months to ready myself for my daughter’s death; many parents in Japan saw their children perish in an instant. Her agony—the tumor at the base of her brain a slow-exploding violation—lasted weeks; theirs was much shorter. But then I had time to say goodbye; many Japanese did not.

Which would I trade, in the hungering dark that devours us in an instant? Which would you trade? Would you spare someone you love her pain, if it meant you could not tell her how much, how desperately much, you love her, how she has made you better than you ever thought you might be? Or would you let her go in the eye’s blinking, a moment or minute of terror her burden to be borne, and this followed by your lifetime of silent spaces?

We none of us get to choose, and I suppose like anyone else I prefer to pretend my home, my life, every heart to which I am bound, will not be erased like misspelled words, stricken, if not from God’s book, then from the book of my life.

I cannot hear the dead, yet the teaching of my faith is that they stand before God, that the martyrs hacked and burned and flayed and eaten stand praising their creator, the author of this world gone awry.

And so it comes to this, as it always does—faith that a world crafted in love will be redeemed in love, that these present sufferings will disappear as quickly as this life itself vanishes, and in their place will come peace. The dead cannot cry out, but we the living so often do.

Would that God might hear.