There’s just no damn doubt about it comrades, in this life there will be a whole series of devastating losses. To use the cliché “shit happens,” and for many people it hits the fan big time, regularly.
Speaking to a very dear friend who lost her husband, my oldest pal, to cancer, during the covid lock down in the UK late last year. I asked her how my old friend’s mother was doing in her grief? She observed that his mother, now in her 90s, was of the stoic generation and that she was coping well, all things considered.
Like most people of her great age, who have lived long enough to tell the tale. My friend’s mother is no stranger to tragedy. This was not her first brush with the loss of a child. Women and men of her generation have generally survived all manner of hardship, war, depression, illness and yes, the death of children and loved ones. Those who haven’t been driven to permanent despair in the process, have the kind of empathic wisdom that only such suffering can to produce. They have the potential to become the special carriers of empathy and compassion who ease the suffering of others, like no one else can.
One of my favorite quotes from the oft quoted Sufi mystic Rumi, is,
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” Rumi
I am convinced that if there is any meaning to be found in suffering, it is in this space, where it equips the sufferer to walk in solidarity with fellow sufferers.
In the hit Broadway play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the American playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis trots out this cherished line, “No parent should have to bury a child. No mother should have to bury a son.”1 This is the nightmare suffering scenario that lurks amongst the deepest fears of any parent. Obviously, most folks would rather face anything other than that.
As Mary-Beth Cichocki herself, a grieving mother writes,
“Mothers are not supposed to bury their children. It goes against nature. When a mother loses her young, the world slips off its axis and spins out of control. The universe mourns knowing it has gone against the circle of life…”
If you read Cichocki’s article, from which this quote comes, two things are paramount. First, it is just drenched with empathy, the sort of compassion that simply cannot be mustered by anyone who has not walked in the same suffering shoes. Second, what becomes clear, is her own child’s death propelled her into a quest of assisting other mothers. Mothers who, like herself, suffer the terrible pain of watching powerlessly as their children succumb to addiction. If indeed the world slips off its axis every time such suffering occurs, then it’s had plenty of reasons for axis slipping.
Suffering of course has many hats, and most of us sooner or later get to reluctantly wear one or more of them. Given the random nature and apparent meaninglessness of such heartache, it’s hardly surprising that many people simply never recover from its ravaging.
I recently watched a movie about Cameron Todd Willingham, an American man who was convicted and eventually executed in 2004 for the murder of his three young children by arson. The movie takes the position now shared by many, that the trial of Willingham was a travesty of justice and in all likelihood, he was an innocent man. His suffering must have been especially acute as he waited for years on death row for the lethal injection that would eventually take his own life. All the while grieving the loss of his daughters and the horrendous injustice that life had bestowed on his poor shoulders. In one scene, he is depicted as saying that he had found much solace in reading Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning.”2
This is entirely believable, because few people have ever been better equipped to provide comfort in torment, then Frankl. His work, based on his own horrific experience in Auschwitz, is likely the most outstanding treatise ever written on finding meaning and purpose as in the midst of suffering. Meaning and purpose that could not be gained without experiencing some of the worst sort of misery that this axis slipping universe can throw up.
Maybe just maybe comrades? Suffering has a way, if properly conceived, of providing the bedrock for the rarest and most precious human gem, the jewel of compassion. The ability to suffer with the others for the others. If not that, then suffering is indeed most surely meaningless.
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