When There Are No Answers

I’m a meaning making machine. As a writer, I’ve always wanted to make “sense” of the world, of other people. I want answers. As an orthodox Mormon for many years, I remember thinking that I loved how I could find all the answers to things. Open your scriptures, listen to a sermon, or say a prayer—God knows all and will tell you. I remember thinking sadly of a handful of atheist friends I had who had no access to those answers and who had to find other ways to make decisions about their lives. It looked so much harder if you had to invent everything from scratch.

And then my daughter died at birth. I had no idea the problems this would cause, radiating out from that one moment to this. The main issue was that I lost the belief that the world made sense. Not just my daughter’s death, but everything made no sense. I had no sense of security and was suddenly afraid of a thousand different things that could happen, even if they were unlikely, because they happened to someone somewhere. Why not me?

Other people still seemed to know the answers to why she died, but none of the answers worked for me, at least not anymore. She died because I hadn’t chosen a hospital birth. She died because God needed an angel. She died so that I could learn a lesson that I couldn’t learn in any other way. She died because she would have been disabled and I couldn’t have taken care of her, so it was a blessing.

Sometimes the kinder people would say that I would never understand why she died in this life—but that God would have the answers for me in the next life. I had to have “faith” that eventually, it would all make sense to me, that the world would return to a sense-making machine. I had to accept that my limited mortal mind, my wounded mother soul, would never be given answers that made sense to me, but that there was a higher purpose at work and I would see it later.

There were certainly people I encountered who had accepted answers about the loss of loved ones and they seemed to find a peace in those answers that I never found. Sometimes I envied them. Sometimes I hated myself that I couldn’t find that peace in myself. Sometimes other people told me that there was something deeply wrong with me that I kept refusing to confess the hand of God in all things, especially this one thing.

But there were also people who told me the bare honest truth that I would carry this with me forever and that it would never make sense and never fully heal. One couple were the parents of a disabled son who died in a surgery that they had encouraged him to try. And they felt they would never know the answer as to if they should or shouldn’t have done that. Another was the midwife who came and told me a story about a 90-year-old woman whom she had helped in her dying days, who still spoke about a stillborn child whose death she had never gotten over. At the time, this was the last thing I wanted to hear, that this was a grief that wouldn’t end. I wanted to believe that I just had to “get through” the next year or so, do enough of the proper “grief work,” like writing a journal and training for an Ironman. And then, I’d be done. I’d be myself again. It never really happened.

And now the divorce has brought up all those wounds again. In particular, it has brought up my need to make the pieces all fit together, to find a narrative that clearly explains the answers to all my questions. Why did I marry this person? Why did we stay married for so long? Why did I not see that the divorce was coming clearly enough? Why didn’t I prepare better to take care of myself financially? Why did I stay in a religion for so long that was harming me? Why did I wait until I was fifty to start making decisions to protect myself?

Sometimes I will read a book that seems to offer me the answers to all these questions, as my Mormon religion answered all my questions about death—before it happened to me. But then I put down the book, and the questions swirl back. And the only truth that I can offer myself now is that someday I may find the answers, but that day is not right now. Right now is the time for surviving, for letting go of the bigger picture and focusing on one day, one hour, sometimes one minute at a time. I may or may not go back to faith in God. I may or may not someday find the belief in romantic love again.

But for now, I give myself the grace to not know any of the answers and to be sitting in a mess of puzzle pieces that seem not only not to fit together, but not even to be from the same set.