Pain is not a "gift", but it can be fertile ground.
The first of three essays on traumatic loss and the meaning we make of it.
When my great-grandmother boarded the bus to carry her son’s body home, she held him the same way she had the day they'd left home: across her lap, in the crook of her arm. Only now he was cold as creek stone. His name was Harold, and he was not yet five. A few days earlier he had choked on a peanut, likely one grown in his own family’s field, and what the choking started, the pneumonia finished.
They lived in a rural town in lower Alabama, and while there were country doctors, and even a hospital, of sorts, downtown, they could not treat much beyond bone resets and straightforward births. So my great-grandmother, desperate to save her child, took the bus north toward Birmingham, a grueling eight-to-twelve-hour ride back then, with Harold across her lap, his feverish head in the crook of her arm.
Some days later, after every effort was spent, she took that same bus home with him again in her lap, but this time gone.
When well-meaning people tell me pain is secretly a gift, I think about her, and about Harold. We’ve all heard it, in different seasons and different mouths. Sometimes it’s your cousin in the kitchen, pulling the CorningWare from the oven after the funeral: everything happens for a reason. Or it’s the neighbor beside you in a pew who whispers after the convocation: God doesn’t give you more than you can handle, honey. Or it’s your best friend popping the cork on a bottle too expensive for a Tuesday because your husband just ran off with the secretary, so, fuck it. As P!NK said, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, yea?
I understand the reach. It’s unbearable to watch someone you love in agony and have nothing to offer but words, wine, or a heaping scoop of chicken n’ broccoli casserole. So we grasp for the thing that makes the suffering mean something, and for many, that thing is faith. I don’t say that with a sneer either. I’m a person of deep conviction myself, though more mystic than Sunday-morning regular. Even so, I'm no stranger to the need to hold onto something beyond the wreckage until you can catch your breath and swim for shore.
But this essay is for the rest of us: the ones wrestling with the hard parts of being human outside the mainframe of organized religion; those who can’t quite concede that a peanut, a bus ticket, and a boy who couldn’t breathe were part of a plan, let alone a gift. For us — or I should say for me — Harold’s death was random, senseless, pure chance, the Universe's favorite currency. Or, looked at through a mythological lens, it was nothing more than the Fates measuring out their woolen thread and cutting it short. And the evidence that this was a terrible, senseless thing is that terrible, senseless things happen to good, kind, bad, young, old, deserving, and not-deserving people all the time. For us — or, I should say, me again — better an empty sky than a God who would draw up these particular plans.
And yet, even outside the frame of faith, a senseless thing can still be meaningful, so long as you don’t confuse the gift with fertile ground.
Let's break down the difference. A gift is authored by someone else. It is handed to you for a reason; its meaning decided before you ever arrive. Your only task is to receive it with gratitude. Within the Christian and broader Abrahamic frame, this holds together on its own terms. Before an omnipotent and perfect God, fallen creatures are in no position to audit the ledger, and even suffering is received as something to be thanked for. But from where we stand, what you're really asking is for a grieving mother to thank the giver for the taking.
Fertile ground is a different posture to loss, and it asks for none of that. It names no giver and demands no gratitude. It makes a smaller, harder, and — I’d argue — more dignified claim: that no one wrote a purpose into what happened to you, which means no one but you gets to decide what grows from it. The gift asks you to receive and accept and be grateful. Kinda like a kid getting socks for Christmas. Fertile ground lets you author. And that authorship — the meaning you make from the pain — is the one thing a loss (no matter whether it simply arrived or was bestowed) can never reclaim.
My great-grandmother would not have thought much of my argument. She was a Christian, deep and unwavering in her belief. Where I see indifferent chance, she would have seen a plan. Where I refuse the gift, she would have gladly received it, trusting that Harold was wanted elsewhere, that she would hold him again when her own turn came to travel there, that a reason existed even if it stayed hidden from her for the rest of her earthly life. And though this might surprise you, I find her conviction stunningly beautiful.
And yet our disagreement changes nothing about what came next. Because whatever she believed about the why of her son’s sudden death, she still had to do the work of making a life on the other side of it. Her faith may have told her that God gave her the strength, but she was still the one who had to expend that strength to survive. It may have promised her new seeds would grow, but she was still the one who had to plant them into that hard, cold ground, and wait out every season of the rest of her life without her boy.
Funny, how grace (as in the unearned favor from God) and chance leave you standing in the same field, holding the same shovel. The story you tell about how the ground got there changes nothing about the fact that only with your shoulder to the plow will something good ever grow out of that broken ground.
So tell me, dear reader: what broken ground were you handed, and what have you managed to grow there?
Comment below. I read every one.
Next in this series: if meaning can be made, the philosophers spent a century arguing over whether we invent it or discover it. I’ve come to think they were fighting about the wrong thing.