麻豆社

Good morning.

It鈥檚 not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It鈥檚 the hope I can鈥檛 stand.

Our daughter has been agonisingly ill for over two thirds of her life. I have a wonderfully supportive prayer group I email with her news, and have lost count of how often I鈥檝e wanted to quote those words of John Cleese, from Clockwise, on hopefulness and despair. Each new breakthrough brings fresh pain and disappointment. Thus the recent mention of the suspect for the murder of Madeleine McCann filled me with desperately sad relief: spelling possible closure on her family鈥檚 excruciating hope.

For Grief Awareness Week, we heard from the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a hugely helpful interview yesterday with the Chief Rabbi who also lost a child, that we should never say: I know how you feel. Nor: it will end. We don鈥檛: and it won鈥檛. I used to think my father unusual in mourning his mother even in old age鈥� till my own mother died. The loss grows with the years and I miss her more each day. And the wounds of the families whose children鈥檚 identities were so cruelly stolen by under-cover police perhaps seem more raw now, even than when they lost them long ago.

Don鈥檛 come talking to me about the consolations of religion, wrote CS Lewis in his searingly honest, A Grief Observed. A vicar I know thought Lewis should never have written the book: he seems so angry with God. Well, yes. Whom else can you blame when the love of your life dies of cancer?

That same clergyman corresponded with my father after both men lost their wives. It was no surprise to me that his saccharine answers 鈥� we should have been 鈥渞ejoicing鈥� for my mother鈥檚 sake 鈥� proved more distressing than Job鈥檚 own comforters. What did take me aback was nine decades of unwavering faith, in the parent whose love for Christ inspired mine since I was a tiny child, seeming to seep away in the savagery of his suffering.

It was a bitter winter, the year we buried my mother. I鈥檝e always kept her warm and safe, my father wept. Now I can鈥檛 even keep the rain from soaking her through and through. That鈥檚 mad, someone commented. Of course: my father鈥檚 heart was breaking.

I looked it up: The Bible on grief. I was offered coping and consolation and comfort. Where was King David, locking himself away for a week to beg God for the life of his newborn? Or Job鈥檚 raging demands as to why God treated him so?

The real danger, Lewis continues, is not concluding there is no God; but coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.

Our daughter blames herself so harshly for her illness that I tentatively wondered recently whether she鈥檇 tried asking God's forgiveness. Instead she said, I would like you to pray for me, yes. But rather, that I find it in my heart to forgive Him.

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