Parents, Spouses, Children

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, in which twenty children died.

Over the last ten months I have thought a lot about this question: what is worse, losing a child, spouse, or parent?

Of course it’s a silly question. All death is hard. There are no easy partings from a loved one. Plus, all deaths are different: the death of a parent when you’re 15 would be different from the death of your parent when you’re 70.

I had a conversation with a friend via email about this. She’d sent me an article that said a year was the normal grieving time for adults (for any kind of death) and it was normal for a child to grieve for six months. But, we both agreed, the nature of the relationship would have a great deal to do with the length of grieving. For example, if it was an abusive, alcoholic father who you hadn’t spoken to in years who had died, that’s going to be a very different period of grieving than for a gentle, loving father with whom you had dinner once a week for years. Or in the case of the death of a spouse, those who had an intensely close 34-year relationship like Arthur and me will have a grief very different from a couple who had grown indifferent after seven years and were thinking of divorce before one of them died.

Both of my parents are still alive. I didn’t have any children. So my only experience is with the loss of a spouse. But in my imagining, it seems to me that losing a child must be the hardest grief of all. 

Theodicy

Another mass shooting has occurred; this time at an elementary school in Newton, Connecticut. Twenty children—all six and seven years old—and six adult teachers and staff, dead. I didn’t watch the televised memorial services. Personally I don’t care for the media frenzy that follows these events; I find it unseemly, to put it mildly. But I did hear a little bit of a speech made by a minister, and he seemed to be struggling to express himself. I think his problem was that he was paralyzed by a basic problem of most theologies, what is known in philosophy as “theodicy”: how can you reconcile a loving God with human suffering?

I love this word, theodicy, because to me it sounds like the combination of “theology” and “idiocy”; many religious people come across as idiotic when they try to explain how God could allow something horrible to happen, like last week’s senseless slaughter of children.

Twenty years ago, my husband Arthur and I published a book called The Game of God. Theodicy is the starting point; the book’s introduction begins with this passage:

A friend recently told us that, of all the funerals he had ever attended, he had yet to hear a minister satisfactorily answer the question, “Why did God create death?” He went on to say that, in fact, he had yet to hear a minister (priest, rabbi, etc.) make any sense of why God had created anything at all. Our friend concluded that the most sensible explanation for this dangerous and mysterious universe is simply that there is no God.

We live on a tiny planet lost in a huge and seemingly indifferent universe. Life is a continuous struggle which inevitably ends with death. Life is a terminal disease.

What kind of universe is this anyway? Does life have any meaning or purpose? If there is a “God,” why did God create the universe?

Many religions have tried to explain God’s motives for creating the universe—a universe filled with suffering and death—but these theologies are often illogical and filled with contradictions, and thus fail to provide comfort when a true test arises: when real disaster strikes.

A minister once told us that, in his experience, the death of a child was particularly difficult to “explain,” and has often resulted in expressions of hatred for God by the parents, and even the abandonment of their faith.