In the years since that counseling visit, I’d worked a hundred homicides, give or take a dozen—none as brutal as Satterfield’s misogynistic butcherings—and that particular “why?” had drifted into one of the distant, dusty corners of my mind, displaced by other questions that were less rhetorical and more immediate, as well as more answerable: “Doc, what made that checkerboard crosshatching on that punched-in circle of skull?” (Answer: The milled head of a framing hammer.) “Doc, how come them maggots to look burnt?” (Answer: Because the killer left the body in the woods for a week, then came back and torched it.) “Doc, did that dude get blowed up by a bellyful of dynamite?” (Answer: No, the abdomen burst from the buildup of decomposition gases in the gut.)
This time, sitting in the pastor’s study, I asked a question not on behalf of countless suffering women, but on behalf of just one woman. How could an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent God, I asked—the kind of God we heard about again and again in the stained-glass sanctuary of this majestic church—allow health-conscious, humanity-helping Kathleen Brockton to be stricken down, in the prime of life, with an aggressive, untreatable cancer?
The right reverend sat silent, his eyes on me—not looking at me so much as looking toward me, somehow, his gaze seeming to send compassion in my direction. Kathleen and I had known him, and had liked him, ever since he’d arrived at Second Presbyterian fresh from seminary, as an energetic young assistant pastor. After a long while, he gave a sorrowful shake of his head. “I won’t pretend I have a good answer for you,” he said. “This is one of the toughest questions of all. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow suffering—undeserved suffering, in particular? Why do some people—even terrible people—lead charmed lives, while others—including wonderful people like Kathleen—get dealt brutally bad cards? That’s the central question, as you probably know, of the Book of Job.”
I made a face. “I don’t buy it. Job.”
“How do you mean?”
I told him how I’d sought solace in the story of Job, and how unsatisfying and infuriating I had found it. I also confessed my two sacrilegious dreams about Job: Good-Boy Job and Game-Show-Winner Job.
Instead of looking shocked, he actually smiled slightly. “That’s an interesting spin on it,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve come across that in any of my Old Testament textbooks. I might just use that in a sermon someday, if I really want to rile people up.”
“Be my guest,” I said. “While you’re at it, tell folks how offensive it is to say things like ‘Everything happens for a reason’ or ‘His will be done.’ Kathleen’s secretary actually said that to me when I went in to clean out her office. I had to walk away to keep from hitting her.”
He winced. “My secret name for that is the ‘God’s Perverse Plan’ doctrine. If you take it to its logical extreme, you end up arguing that God planned the pain of every battered woman, every molested child, every black man strung up by a lynch mob, every Jew sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.” He clasped his hands, his fingers interlaced and his index fingers extended, and I couldn’t help thinking of the nursery rhyme Here is the church, and here is the steeple . . . “A poet I like a lot once put it this way: ‘If God is God, he is not good; if God is good, he is not God.’ Strong words, but they do get at the heart of the problem.”
“I’m not sure I follow. I never was good with poetry.”
“He’s saying that if God’s omnipotent, he must be a jerk, to allow so much innocent suffering. And if God’s not a jerk, then he must not be all-powerful, because if he were, he’d protect people.”
Amen, brother, I caught myself thinking.
DOES SUICIDE RUN IN FAMILIES? THAT WAS THE question I found myself pondering after I had left Rev. Mike’s study and returned to my empty, echoing house.
The answer, I well knew, was of course it does. Over the years, I’d read scores of books and articles about suicide; its dark causes, and the long shadow it could cast on the lives of the loved ones left to clean up the mess, literally and figuratively. I also, though, knew the answer in a deeper, darker way: I had felt its tug on occasion, during my adolescence; had heard its sinister siren song, calling me toward the rocks of doom. But adulthood—the twin rudders of a career and a family—had steered me into safer waters.
Until now.
In the blink of an eye—the catch in a throat—my mind traveled back almost half a century. I was four years old. I was trundling up the stairs to my father’s law office, a few steps ahead of my mother, who climbed slowly so that I could be the one to burst through the door crowing, “Daddy, Daddy, we came to s’prise you!” Only we were the ones, she and I, who were surprised: surprised by the figure slumped sideways in his swivel chair, the eyes vacant and clouding; surprised by the dark splotches and smears fanning across the wall behind him; surprised by the odors of brimstone and blood and bleakness in the air.
We never spoke of it, my mother and I—not once in the next forty years; not once before her own death. And so, because it was never spoken of, it was never really laid to rest.