×
The paragraph of the day, from Aleksandar Hemon's harrowing story (paywalled) in the New Yorkerof his daughter's illness and death from a brain tumor:
One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling -- that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. Isabel's suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world. We learned no lessons worth learning; we acquired no experience that could benefit anyone. And Isabel most certainly did not earn ascension to a better place, as there was no place better for her than at home with her family. Without Isabel, Teri and I were left with oceans of love we could no longer dispense; we found ourselves with an excess of time that we used to devote to her; we had to live in a void that could be filled only by Isabel. Her indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies, whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.Hemon's piece is powerful not only because it is beautifully written, but because it is so different from what we ordinarily see in these kinds of accounts: no wisdom gained, no new appreciation for life's joys, no assurance of a greater purpose to make his family's suffering redemptive. As a non-believer, Hemon can't fall back on the notion that God chose to torture and kill his daughter as part of some beneficent plan. All that remains is sorrow.Even memoirs of disease and death that don't explicitly discuss religion are likely to fit into a comforting narrative, one that says that out of suffering comes something positive. It's what we want, after all -- even if you're not the kind of person thrilled by insipid "true" tales of three-year-olds who visit heaven and meet Jesus riding on his "rainbow horse" (I speak of Heaven Is For Real, the publishing phenomenon of the year, still atop the bestseller lists months after its release), you want to know that you can pull something hopeful out of even the worst of what life can subject you to. And often we can. But not always.
