theodicy for a young woman in pain

People are the best wonderers in the world. We wonder why the sun rises and why the rain falls, we wonder why bad things happen and we wonder what we could have done to make things happen differently than they did. This capacity can - at once - be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.

Some of the questions we ask are easy. The Sun rises because the Earth rotates constantly and changes how it faces the sun. Most every rock in the universe does this unerringly so it wasn't all that hard to figure out. So too have we figured out the rain, winds, tides, fire, atomic theory, relativity, ecologies, and parasites. All of these are pretty great accomplishments which resulted from asking why and then watching the world for its patterns and regularities. It is not enough to ask why, we also have to add causation to our explanations for them to be useful. The Sun rises because the Earth rotates, the tides ebb because the Moon tugs on the Earth.


People are so good at finding the patterns and the causes in the world that we have come to expect that most everything that we do wonder can be answered. And this is where where we meet our unhappy surprise, not everything that happens does so for an understandable reason, or a good reason. Sometimes bad things happen which defy our ability to explain. A loved one may die, far, far too young. Is there any reason for this? Sometimes we know the cause, some part of the loved one's body stopped working as it should, and we may know exactly what part and what caused it to fail. But we are still left unsatisfied: even though we can know all the causes, there is no reason that it happened, it just does.

It has been said that "life is a continual struggle against the forces of the universe that act to make you one with it". Physically speaking we know this to be true. There is one aspect that tells us without a doubt that a thing is alive: it actively works to keep itself distinct from its surroundings. We can see these processes everywhere we look from bacteria to elephants, yeasts to sequoias. When the tree falls in forest and stops being alive we no longer see it working to keep itself distinct; and in a matter of years, it may be hard to tell that there ever was a tree there because it has become one with its surroundings. So it is with all things that have ever been alive including people.

Did the tree fall for a reason? Well it had a cause (wind, rot, erosion, etc.) but we don't find that a fully satisfying answer. Was there some purpose to the tree falling? No. Did it fall in order to allow something else to happen? Again, no. To the best of our understanding, it fell because it fell and there is no better explanation to be had no matter how hard we try to find one.

Normally, we don't fret much about a random tree falling in some random place where we may never know it was to begin with. We may walk past a fallen tree in the woods, but accept it as something that happens all over the world. We don't mourn that particular tree, in part because it had no significance to us.

As do trees, people fall too. And in the time that you've been reading this, countless people and trees have fallen all over the world but you don't know them. When a loved one falls, you do care, and you do mourn. And then you start asking why. But as with the tree, although we may know the causes, there is no reason to it, it just happened because it happened. But we find that answer terribly unsatisfying and may spend years looking for the reason which just isn't there to be found. And this hurts.

In the romantic fantasy film The Princess Bride, the protagonist says to the princess:

Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. 

There are many people who would like to disagree with that statement, because if true it paints a world that not many would choose to live in. Unfortunately we don't get to choose the world we live in. We are stuck in this one with all its pains, sicknesses, sorrows, losses, and unanswerable questions. There have been some thinkers who have remarked that we have the capacity to be happy at all is wholly accidental. And for most creatures on most of the earth for most of time, happiness may truly not exist.

But isn't your pain unique in all the world, and burns with an intensity that no one else has ever felt? For you it is. The pain that you feel will always be greater than the pain that others experience because your pain belongs to you and other people's doesn't. From this you should not conclude that your pain is trivial or ordinary or cliché. Your pain is what it is to you and you cannot hope to communicate how bad it feels to another so that they feel it as intensely as you do.

It is this seemingly unbearable pain of being human that has driven a large part of the arts. Artists have struggled mightily to use their craft to communicate their pain and perhaps by doing so obtain some solace. Some people use poetry, others music. One can easily point to Mozart's Requiem Mass in D minor as a very famous example of the use of music to come to terms with unbearable loss. I prefer to point to a more recent composition intended to express the inexpressible.

In his song What's Good, Lou Reed sings:

Life's like forever becoming
But life's forever dealing in hurt
Now life's like death without living
That's what life's like without you

What good is seeing eye chocolate?
What good's a computerized nose?
And what good was cancer in April?
Why no good - no good at all.

This song appears on Reed's album Magic and Loss and was his attempt to cope with the deaths of two close friends. It is a sincere album. I don't know if it made him feel any better, but I know it has made me feel better at times. How could hearing Lou sing about his losses help me? First, he is a skilled artist who if he couldn't make me feel his loss directly certainly gave me a taste of it. Knowing that you aren't the only one to grieve like you do can be surprisingly helpful. Another way  this work makes me feel better is built into the album's title and woven throughout the songs. It isn't titled simply Loss but also refers to Magic. The magic is nothing more than the joy that these friends had brought into his life while they were alive. If there hadn't been that magic, their loss would be unnoticed and meaningless.

If you never cared, you wouldn't hurt like you do, you wouldn't feel the loss. One way that some people chose to cure themselves of the pain is to convince themselves that they didn't care or that they don't care - but self-deception almost always fails. Sometimes people let their pain convince them that they should never care again so that they will never have to experience such pain again. If people could actually numb themselves in this way, would you really give up all the magic to spare yourself the loss? There are people that have been hurt so badly that they try desperately to never feel again but - because they are human - mostly fail at that too.

This may not make sense to you right now, or even some years from now, but that doesn't make it false: be glad that you hurt. Be glad that you mourn your loss because the alternative would be to say that the loss doesn't matter. That would be a lie and a discourtesy to your memory of the loved one. You feel the loss because you once felt the magic. And there will be other magics and other losses, such is the price of life. You may feel that you have spent most of your life trying to get over this one hurt, and that's close to the truth. But what you cannot see from where you sit is that it will get better in time, I promise you that, for it always does. And until it does, follow in the footsteps of Mozart and Reed and Joni Mitchell and countless artists and musicians before them and express your pain. Because in all of human history, we've not found a better way than that to ease the pain that is our birthright along with the bits of magic.