Some questions have no answers

By Patricia Hunt
Published: April 25, 2008

Sometimes my heart breaks even before my coffee maker has had time to drip down my first morning cup. It happened again this morning. I read in The News Virginian that a local man who suffered from bipolar disorder took his own life while SWAT teams from a 50-mile radius surrounded the farm where he lived. Neighbors were aware that he was mentally ill. His problems were well-known.
I imagined the decades of struggle, treatment, medication, going off medication, family members distraught by his difficulties, hope followed by despair followed by yet another round of hope and despair coming to a sad and violent end. The very best efforts of a lot of people, family and friends, mental-health professionals and who knows who else, were not enough to restore him to health.
Another story told of an honors student in a small South Carolina town who had been arrested for plotting to blow up his high school. His own parents had turned him in to police when a package he had ordered turned out to be chemicals for making a bomb. I could not even begin to imagine what that family has gone through and the devastation they must be experiencing. How do people endure such calamities?
A third story was just the opposite. A woman in Lynchburg found her calling when she took over an old Dunkin’ Donuts shop and turned it into The Bakery. Some Liberty University students discovered her and her doughnuts and ended up helping her pay some medical bills for which she had insufficient funds. Everyone in the story was just crazy about everyone else. They were helping each other, loving each other, trusting God to give their stories happy endings.
People lost and people found, destruction and restoration, abject misery and real joy, all right there in my paper. Why? Why do the lives of some people fall into place and others never do? Why are some people afflicted with wretched mental disorders that torment them while others show remarkable resilience no matter what happens? Why do some people have tragedy while others do not?
I’ve tried out many of the explanations. It is their fault. It is God’s doing. It is not God’s doing. It is Satan’s work. They were bad in their last life. They were born under the wrong sign. They were born with the wrong genes. They were unlucky. None of them seems to explain the magnitude of suffering that goes on. In fact they seem to trivialize it.
A few years ago I met a man whose high school-aged son was autistic. For years no one could tell the family what was wrong with this young man. He would have breakdowns at school. He behaved oddly. His family did not know what to do. Finally his problem was given a name, but still his future was uncertain. He needed constant love and support to function.
The father, a college professor, let me read a religion paper written by one of his students. I liked it fine except the part where he was trying to deal with human suffering. It was clearly written by a person who had never been brought to his knees by his experiences. I will never forget what this professor and father told me, “There are no explanations that help much when tragedy comes your way. When I think of my son, I just sit and cry.”
Today, people in small communities in both Virginia and South Carolina are trying to make sense of what has happened to one of their own. They will be wishing the story had been one of finding a calling, making new friends and having a happy life, but today that will not be. They may try out explanations because that is what we do, but I always remember the warning issued by a preacher friend of mine: don’t second-guess other people’s misery. Sometimes silence and awe are the only responses adequate to the enormity of suffering. And tears.
Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.