The Problem of Evil or the Necessity of Bad Things

I don’t want to make a habit of reproducing the articles I write for Examiner.com in this blog, but I thought this one was appropriate.

Yesterday this writer fielded phone calls and emails from friends and family who wanted to offer her comfort on the second anniversary of her husband’s death. While she was touched by their thoughtfulness, she let them know that yesterday wasn’t any different from any of the 730 days that came before; she grieved his loss on each of them.

Oddly, this writer spent most of the day thinking about how fortunate she was to have a husband whose loss is worth two years of mourning and likely many more. 

Some call cancer an evil, an affliction put here by Satan, who wants God’s children to suffer because he knows that our suffering pains God. Others say we brought cancer on ourselves when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and the human race fell from God’s grace. Those who are most likely to read this column tend to point out that God either has the ability to eliminate evil and won’t (making him evil himself) or cannot eliminate evil (making him not God-like). They see cancer as evidence that there is no deity because a deity could and would eliminate evil.

The world is certainly full of bad things; cancer is only one. What this writer knows is that no deity decided that her husband should develop cancer and no deity could take his cancer away. Cancer just happens to a certain number of people; some die. This writer’s husband, like all of us, was not so special that he could avoid being part of that grim lottery.

For every good thing, there must be a bad thing. This is a concept frequently discussed by philosophers, but no one who lives in this world can doubt that this is true. How can we appreciate a warm, sunny day if there were not cold, rainy days? How can we be grateful for a good night’s sleep if we didn’t occasionally experience insomnia? How can we know how rare and wonderful it is to find the other halves of ourselves if we didn’t realize how easily we can lose them to crime, accident or illness?

This writer prefers not to use the word evil because it’s a religious term; she prefers to talk about bad things. Yes, the world is full of them, but rather than wish we could eliminate them, we should be grateful for them. If not for the bad things, we not only couldn’t appreciate the good things, we wouldn’t even know they were good things.

The message for those who like to ponder the “problem of evil” is this: It’s not evidence that there is no deity, for if there is a deity, then bad things are a gift that deity has given to the world so that we can know what the good things are. However, bad things aren’t evidence that there must be a deity either, because they can be adequately explained and understood as an integral part of life–no deity required.

As to the myth of Adam and Eve and what happened when they ate the forbidden fruit, this writer will let others have the fun of arguing about that. Tomorrow she’s got to get on with the business of learning to live without her other half.

On Health Care Reform

I am for healthcare reform, complete with the public option.  Here’s why:  I like to think that I could get married again.

Right now, that’s impossible.  As the widow of a retired military member, I have free health insurance until I turn 67 and qualify for Medicare.  But that benefit disappears if I get married again, even to another military retiree.  It may not seem like a big deal, since it would be possible for me to be added to whatever group insurance plan my new husband would have, but should my  husband die, I would be dropped from that insurance plan.  Sure, maybe I could stay on the plan for a while after his death (Hal’s employer gave me free health insurance for a year), and maybe I could opt to make COBRA payments after that, but it’s very likely that paying for my own insurance would be more expensive than I could afford.  I’m just too old and have too many pre-existing conditions to think that I could afford to buy my own insurance unless I had a group plan available through an employer–and I hope to continue to be self-employed.

So if I get married, then divorced or widowed again, I could find myself without health insurance at 50 or 60.  And what if, like Hal, I got cancer?  I can’t risk it.

If however, there were a public option that could insure me at a reasonable price, then I might be able to consider it.  So yes, I’m one of those who will be counting on the public option to provide me with insurance when no one else will.  I really hope President Obama doesn’t give in and drop the public option.

I had lunch with Walt today, then met with one of his staff to begin to put together a presentation she can give to bring in clients.  We spent a good deal of time talking about all the things that can go wrong in a person’s life:  cancer, car accident, Alzheimer’s, stroke–the list gets very long.  I have no close friends, no lover, no spouse, no children.  My family is in Texas and Colorado, while I’m in Virginia.  If something bad happens to me, I’ll have to try to cope with it on my own.

My sister keeps telling me that I shouldn’t focus on whether I’m going to find someone to spend the rest of my life with.  I should just be happy being single, she says, and let someone come along in his own time.  That’s easy for her to say–she was last single in her 20s, when she was healthy.  If she ever has to sit in a doctor’s office and hear that she has cancer, she has someone who will be holding her hand.

No amount of Wellbutrin, even the right version, can keep me from going to bed depressed tonight.

I Come Out of the Closet!

Since Hal died I have been a bit more vocal in my agnosticism.  Hal was a defense contractor, which meant that his coworkers and employers tended to be very conservative in their views, and I was concerned about how my nonbelief might affect his job.

When my friend Cindy was in the hospital, I began to have a real problem with staying politely silent around theists.  Although it was determined that her brain had been too badly damaged for her to survive her heart attack, her family and friends prayed fervently for a miracle for almost 2 weeks.  I kept up the vigil with her husband for the first week, until the Jewish sabbath arrived, then suddenly felt very much the outsider.  One woman even made the accusation that my agnosticism was generating bad “vibes” that was preventing Cindy from getting better.  I slunk away before sunset and afterward only went to the hospital when asked.

Earlier this month I began writing a column about brights for examiner.com.  For those readers who don’t know what a bright is, you can learn all about us on Brights’ Net.  I share my columns on Facebook for any of my contacts to see.  Doing this got me thinking about some other writing I’ve been doing lately–keeping this blog.

Since moving, when I’ve felt more isolated than I have since Hal died, and when I’ve been more depressed than in the first weeks after his death, I’ve asked myself how I can get some help and support short of driving myself to a hospital and asking to be admitted.  The problem, I realized, is that I hate to let people know that I’m not doing okay.  I can’t afford to keep up this pretense or I fear that I will end up in a dark place I can’t return from.

So I started letting people know that I’ve been having a difficult time of it since moving.  The other night I screwed up my courage and attached this blog to my Facebook.  That brings me to why I’m making this post now–I mentioned on my Facebook that I feel guilty for not feeling worse yesterday, which would have been my 26th anniversary had Hal not died.  A friend asked why I should feel guilty, which prompted a short discussion about guilt and grief before I decided to cover it at length here.

I feel a lot of guilt about Hal and his death.  I know that I shouldn’t feel guilty about a lot of it–I didn’t give him cancer, and I did my best for him while he was sick–but I do nonetheless.  I feel guilty about not making the doctor’s appointment sooner when he started to complain about heartburn (although he didn’t start to have heartburn until the tumor was very large).  I feel guilty about eating in front of him after his surgery, when he could only have a couple of tablespoons of food at a time (although he said he didn’t mind).  I feel guilty about being repulsed when his skin started sloughing off.  And I feel guilty about every cross or impatient word I ever said to him, every TV show he never got to watch because I wanted to watch something else, every gift I gave him that he wasn’t thrilled with, every time I said no to sex. . . .basically I feel guilty about every single thing I ever did that made his life less than blissful.

None of this compares, though, to my guilt over the chocolate pudding incident.  I can’t think about it without breaking into tears; I’ll never be able to speak about it, and I’ll never be able to forgive myself for it.

It happened on Monday, September 24, 2007, four days before Hal died.  He asked me to make him a bowl of chocolate pudding.  The pudding he wanted was a German brand, requiring me to stand at the stove, constantly stirring the milk so it wouldn’t scorch, and to measure out and add sugar according to instructions that were written in German.   I was very tired that night from caring for Hal (he was too weak to walk by then) and in preparing to go to Texas for my mother’s funeral.  My feet and knees ached, and I just wanted to lie in the recliner and rest.  His sister was arriving on Wednesday, so I asked him to wait until she could make pudding for him.

Hal never got his pudding.  I haven’t eaten pudding since and never will, I suspect.  Even seeing pudding on the shelf at the grocery store makes me want to cry, and as I write about it I’m sobbing.

So here it is, Paul.  Here’s my guilt.  There’s some that I don’t deserve and some that I do.  There’s guilt I will eventually overcome and some that I will never get over.  Here it is, out in the open, out of closet along with my agnosticism, my grief, my depression, my fear and my hopelessness.

Not to worry, though.  There’s still a couple of things that are still safely in the closet, in dusty boxes way in the back, where it’s nice and dark.  Everyone needs a couple of secrets, right?

A Grim Milepost

Yesterday it was four weeks since Hal’s death, and I’ve started to get phone calls and emails asking how I’m doing.  “I’m doing okay,” I say, knowing that my friends and family are relieved to hear it.  And the truth is, I am doing okay, but I feel guilty about it.

It seems to me that I shouldn’t be doing okay.  I was with Hal for more than 25 years, married to him for 24.  We were happy. How is it that I can be doing okay?

On the other hand, little things are hard.  Last week I decided to finally finish eating the loaf of rye bread Hal bought but never got a chance to enjoy.  I bought the makings for reubens and grimly ate the sandwiches, thinking about how much Hal and I had enjoyed making them together, how much he enjoyed eating sauerkraut in general and how I used to make it for him when he’d come home from a trip.

On Wednesday I sold Hal’s truck.  As the new owner drove away with it, I remembered when he bought it and how excited he was because it was his first new car.  I thought it would be harder to watch it go, but I was still groggy from an emergency root canal that morning.

When I realized that the surgery Hal would have to remove the tumor in his stomach was essentially the same as a gastric bypass, I decided to get a gastric band.  I’d been reluctant to get one although I weighed more than 350 pounds, but I suddenly decided I wanted one.  I wanted to be on the same diet as Hal, eating the same tiny meals.  It was more than a year before I could get on the schedule and have the surgery.

Hal got to see me lose about 30 pound before he died.  He was so excited for me.  We talked about all the things we would do together after he recovered from cancer and I had lost 200 pounds.

Now, with every pound I lose, I think about the fact that Hal will never see me looking and feeling better.  I so wanted to look good for him.  I wonder now what the point of it is, and I worry about how the timing looks to Hal’s friends.  They must think that I didn’t bother getting a gastric band until it was clear that I would soon be single again.

Going On Alone

It’s Sunday night, and I’ve put my father and sister on a plane to return home.  I’m now alone, truly alone for the first time since Hal died.  I must face a future without him.

I must also go on without my mother.

Mom died after a fall in her bathroom.  While she, my father, and the fire department struggled to get her up and out of the small space, she had a heart attack.  It was about 8 in the morning on September 24.

Hal was very sick with stomach cancer, which he had been fighting for about 18 months.  He couldn’t be left alone and couldn’t travel with me to Texas, so I called his sister in Peoria to come stay with him while I attended my mother’s memorial service.  She was due to come in on September 26 and I was to leave the next morning.  However, on the evening of September 25, Hal told me that he would not live through the weekend.  He asked me to call an ambulance to take him to the hospital.

I spent the night with Hal in the emergency room Tuesday night.  I left briefly to run an errand, and when I returned to his side, it seemed that he’d had a stroke.  He couldn’t focus his eyes and he was mumbling incoherently.  So I called my father to say I couldn’t leave my husband’s side; he understood.

It turned out that Hal’s blood sugar had dropped to 39–a very dangerous level.  He was admitted, and I arranged for a friend to pick his sister up at the airport.  She spent Wednesday night with him, and I returned to the hospital early on Thursday to catch his oncologist on rounds.  We learned that Hal was terminal and would not live more than a few more weeks.

The cancer, which we thought he nearly had beat, had moved into his liver, and the tumors had destroyed it.  There was no hope of recovery.

I arranged to bring Hal home to hospice care.  Once we started this process, he was in a hurry to leave the hospital.  He came home about 5 in the afternoon on Thursday, September 27.  He ate dinner, watched TV from his rented hospital bed, and visited with his sister.  That night I slept beside his bed in a recliner.

When I woke the next morning at 6, Hal was in a coma.  For almost 4 hours Gloria and I held his hand and talked to him as his breathing became agonal.  The hospice nurse arrived to meet him and do an intake into their service, but instead she sat with us while his breathing became more and more shallow.  I was holding his hand when he stopped breathing, and I watched and waited until his heart stopped.  It was 9:42 in the morning.

He left home for the last time just before noon.

Gloria and I made arrangements for his cremation and memorial the same day and afterward simply sat together remembering him until she left on Sunday morning.

My father, sister and my mother’s sisters arrived on Wednesday and Thursday.  I hadn’t seen my sister Larraine or my aunts in a few years.  My sister Twila, who has three children and a business to run, couldn’t come out from Colorado.  Gloria couldn’t make it either, but I assured her that she had been present when it counted.

Hal’s service was on Friday, October 5 at the chapel where he and I were married 24 years earlier.  He had military honors.  Many of his coworkers and soccer friends were in attendance.  After the service we gathered in the annex for food and to watch a Powerpoint presentation his best friend Dennis and I put together of pictures of Hal throughout the years.  We played Kitaro’s “Light of the Spirit.”

My aunts left on Saturday morning, but Dad and Larraine stayed an extra day.  Despite the grim circumstances, I had enjoyed visiting with them.  However, it was a relief to send them home so I could be alone with my grief.

If my mother hadn’t died on Monday, Gloria would not have come out that week and would not have been able to say goodbye.  Dad had the chance to think about me for a few days, a good distraction, I think, from his own grief over losing his wife of 47 years.

I have to try to go on alone, now.

Hal’s Obituary

Harold R. Braun
YORKTOWN – Harold R. Braun, 54, died Friday, Sept. 28, 2007, at his home with his wife and sister by his side. Born Aug. 23, 1953, in Wiesbaden, Germany, he was the son of the late Kurt and Margarete Braun. He retired from the U.S. Air Force and was a Communications Engineer with Northrop Grumman. Mr. Braun had a passion for soccer and was a player, coach and referee during his life. He is survived by his loving wife of 24 years, Dorene Braun; sister, Gloria Alexander of Peoria, Ill.; brother, Kurt Braun of Wiesbaden, Germany; sister-in-law, Twila Alexander, husband, Rick and their three children, Will, Margaret and Ellen Alexander; and nephew Michael Braun. He will be greatly missed by his family and friends. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 5, 2007, at the Langley Air Force Base Chapel. Those who plan to attend must contact the Cremation Society of Virginia, Newport News, 643-8945, by 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, to have their name placed on the access list. In lieu of flowers, contributions in Harold’s memory may be made to the York County Dept. of Fire & Life Safety, P.O. Box 532, Yorktown, VA 23690.Published in the Daily Press on 10/3/2007.