Meditations

I’ve been reading the book I borrowed from The Compassionate Friend lending library. Meditations for the Bereaved Parent, Copy #3. It has some pretty good stories where parents talk about the screwed-up way they felt after their children died. Yesterday I read one “Meditation” in which a mother whose son died in the 1970’s explained that you will spend a long time thinking and wondering and hoping that your child is well cared-for. Like I have with Sarah. She equated this to the mothering drive in us never really dying.

Of course, as with about half these Meditations, she then went on to say that we should lay these fears to rest because God/Christ was the best babysitter of all and our children are being exquisitely cared for in Heaven. I had no idea that JC was running a babysitting service that had capacity for special needs and/or medically fragile children. Is he on the approved list of caretakers for Maryland Developmental Disabilities Administration? If so, Max and I would have taken more date nights and perhaps gone out to eat more often by ourselves.

I know I am unbearably snarky about these sort of religious platitudes, which seem to comfort a lot of people. I wish sometimes I could just believe that Sarah is an angel in heaven, that “God has a plan for all of us,” that “everything happens for a reason,” but those sorts of homely bits of folk wisdom have never appealed to me. If God is such a great babysitter, where was he the night Sarah died, when I was away from home? Couldn’t he have been more vigilant? I’m definitely leaving him a negative rating on Care.com and I may file a complaint with the DDA.

It would be good to have someone to blame and hold responsible. A target for all our negative feelings and anger. Last night Max and I were watching Breaking Bad again. We are almost at the show’s finale. In the episode we watched, Jesse, who has been depressed, withdrawn, and apathetic for months, finally just explodes and goes and burns Walt’s house down. “There’s the anger behind all that depression” I said to Max. We wondered jokingly whether arson had been tested as a therapy for depression, and laughed about burning down a random house in the neighborhood to make ourselves feel better. Just being silly of course.