Bethany, May Light Perpetual Shine Upon Her

Today would be my friend Bethany’s 34th day, but she didn’t get to celebrate it. She  died yesterday of cancer.

God-forsaken, motherfucking cancer.

Bethany – kind, generous, funny, loving, Bethany – is gone. As with Juliet, “death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field.” It is so WRONG that such a bright, wonderful woman should be gone so soon. 

I long ago put aside the just world fallacy – the idea that bad things only happen to people who have done something to “deserve” it. Evil shit happens to truly good people without rhyme or reason. Cancer happens to good people.  I’ve had other loved ones, who were good people and who deserved to live, die as young and leave anguished families behind. My mother’s youngest sister, one of the most decent humans and best parents to have ever lived, lost her only child in a car accident in October of 1995. My uncle’s wife died of cancer more than 20 years ago, leaving behind two devastated little girls and grieving husband who has never remarried. Check out the news and you can read of disasters wiping out entire families, and thousands are lost in natural (or unnatural) disasters.  Life is cruel and random and death is an sadistic, whimsical asshole. I know that. Nonetheless, I still rage against the unfairness of lives cut short, of good people no longer within reach, of undeserved and unmerited sorrow.

I am so pissed off that Bethany is dead. I am so pissed that death doesn’t play nice. I am enraged that parents have to suffer the loss of children, that children have to suffer the loss of parents, that spouses have to suffer the loss of their loves. It is just so terribly shitty, and I can do nothing to rectify it or fight it. 

One of the reasons I hold on so hard to the Anglican faith, a faith I share with Bethany and her bereft husband, is that I need to think there is justice somewhere. That at least in an afterlife we will finally get the Disney ending, where the good win and the bad are punished. I cling to the hope that death is not as cruel as we think, because loss is ephemeral agony resolved when we are reunited with those we love. I also want – I need – the hope that people don’t just snuff out like candles, leaving nothing but memories and a hole in our hearts.

I need Bethany to still exist. I need the people I have loved and who have died to still exist. I need some sort of cosmic justice in the end. It’s the only thing that keeps me from going stark, raving, mad from the irrational viciousness of it all.

One of the weird ways I comfort myself is with research … such as it is. Although most near death experiences can be explained away, there’s a little more data on other types of continuation.  So I read the works of Dr Ian Stevenson and Dr Jim B. Tucker, who have both spent decades gathering corroboration of past life details given by children under the age of three. Their data provides compelling circumstantial evidence of the continued existence of the soul. I read books by skeptics – such as Indianapolis police homicide commander Robert Snow – who inadvertently found proof of a past life even though they didn’t believe in such New Age crap. There is a lot of hokum out there, but I search for bits of gold in the dross. I also dig around in quantum physics research, trying to use spooky action at a distance and the quantum mind the holographic theory as an internal rationale for the concept of a soul/personality that can continue after death. All this helps keep me from screaming and pulling out my hair in despair.

Yet even with all the hope, and all the research I can find on life after death and consciousness, I cannot do anything about my grief. I can’t stop missing Bethany. I cannot do anything about the sadness death brings to those who survive.

Goodbye Bethany … hopefully I’ll see you again one day. Until then, may you be at peace, and may light perpetual shine upon you. With any luck, there are penguins in heaven with you and you are having a fabulous time.