Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [69]
While we were adjusting to our lives without Wade and praying for more children, we clung, too, to the things we had always done together. Cate and I went to Quail Ridge, our bookstore. I was looking at the new Southern fiction, and she was looking for books from her freshman list to read. She came back to me holding Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale. Mark Helprin was no older than thirty-three when he wrote “The Schreuderspitze,” a short story of grief and redemption that only an old man should have been able to write. “It’s long,” she said, “but my teacher said it was good. Can I get it?” I asked if she was sure she wasn’t supposed to get Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. She said she had read a little of this while standing there, and this is what she wanted. When we got home, she did start instead with Death of a Salesman, considerably more manageable in size and bearing the endorsement of Wade. I got the Helprin first. Mark Helprin had also written the foreword to my friend Gordon Livingston’s book, Only Spring, a book and a foreword to which I turned often. “The cruelties of the world are often associated with sin, but this cruelty was visited solely by nature, which, by nature, is itself without sin,” Helprin wrote of Lucas’ death. “What kind of God would allow the world He created to act so coldly upon the most innocent and vulnerable…? The answer is a God who, in ravishing you, eviscerates your faith and trust in him while at the same time leaving you with nothing but the hope that He exists and will in another world extend to you the missing pieces in His puzzle of mercy.” Yes, I would read the Helprin first.
The words of Mark Helprin touched precisely the weakness in my online family—our differing views of a God who did not prevent the deaths of our children. Those differences, our religious differences, tore at ASG and at grief-parents, at the wretched souls seeking solace from one another, and for a time there was no solace there.
Most of the groups’ active participants were Christian, as I am, but among our number there were differences of belief and hope concerning whether God would or could protect our children, concerning so many things about their eternal condition. And there were also plenty of active participants, and presumably some silent ones too, who weren’t Christian, some who were surely hurt by well-meaning mourners who celebrated—who needed desperately to celebrate—that their family’s particular religious practices were their children’s passport to heaven. From any distance—and understand we had none—it is easy to understand how difficult this issue would be. Christians, non-Christians, doubters, all hurting just as much, all wanting just as much, all hoping just as much for a reunion somehow, did not want to hear that their child might not have followed the right set of rules. Some people, people of sensitivity and integrity, spoke their hearts and unwittingly stabbed other parents at the same time. Others fought back, and what had been a place of solace was now a place of war. People about whom I cared were in palpable pain. It was too cruel, for absolutely everyone.
My God was a benevolent and humble God, I knew that, and I couldn’t accept, still cannot accept, that He would deny glory to those children who lived by his creed but had not learned His name. I had grown up watching the grace and forgiveness of the dance teacher Toshiko, and I knew my God would smile on her. It was fine to share Biblical passages and spiritual experiences. We all wished we had even more of those to share. We just had to be careful not to hurt others by suggesting that the children outside this experience were also outside God’s grace.
As the debate went on, the community we desperately