The Pursuit of Suffering

I watched the grainy, blocky video in silence. My friend was singing “Land ­slide” and I felt a cer ­tain taut ­ness in my eye ­brows and a pecu ­liar heavi ­ness in the cor ­ners of my mouth. By now it had become a famil ­iar feel ­ing, this phys ­i ­cal expres ­sion of  sorrow.

Can the child within my heart rise above
Can I sail through the chang ­ing ocean tides
Can I han ­dle the sea ­sons of my  life?”

~Fleet ­wood Mac, “Land ­slide,” The Dance, 1997

Sonia Lee ’06, whose mel ­low and res ­o ­nant voice was cap ­tured in that video, passed away in 2007, during my second year of medical school. For most of our mutual friends at our college Christian fellowship, her pass ­ing became our first encounter with the death of a friend. In many ways, it chal ­lenged my most deeply held con ­vic ­tions about the way the world works. I went to med ­ical school with the grow ­ing con ­vic ­tion that my call ­ing was to deal with death and suf ­fer ­ing on the pro ­fes ­sional level, but this experience —so unex ­pected, tragic, and ter ­ri ­fy ­ingly personal —cast every ­thing under a dif ­fer ­ent  pall.

Sonia had acute myeloid leukemia. The onset was rapid and com ­pletely unex ­pected by friends and fam ­ily alike. I can still remem ­ber the dread of the moment I first found out: a string of e-mails with the titles “Urgent prayer for Sonia’” wait ­ing qui ­etly in my inbox. Sonia and I had been good friends dur ­ing our under ­grad ­u ­ate years but had fallen out of touch since my grad ­u ­a ­tion two years prior and I had not heard much from her since then, which made the sud ­den ­ness and feroc ­ity of the dis ­ease all the more shock ­ing. A full year in med ­ical school did noth ­ing to pre ­pare me for the daily anx ­i ­ety of open ­ing my e-mail in antic ­i ­pa ­tion of an update from the fam ­ily on her con ­di ­tion. I still have all those e-mails: seventy-seven mes ­sages with head ­ings rang ­ing from “A pos ­i ­tive turn for Sonia!” to “Sonia —Chemotherapy day 3” and “Emer ­gency request for  platelets.”

I received those updates nearly every day for sev ­eral months, track ­ing her progress through the end of the sum ­mer and into the begin ­ning of the school year. It was a try ­ing time for our com ­mu ­nity of mutual col ­lege friends. We prayed together, planned gifts for her together, and waited together every day for those e-mails with hope and  fear.

I remem ­ber the tight ­ness in my gut dur ­ing my first med ­ical lec ­ture on leukemia, try ­ing to sup ­press my emo ­tional con ­fu ­sion as the pro ­fes ­sor raced through hun ­dreds of slides. I remem ­ber lis ­ten ­ing to the com ­plaints of class ­mates about how “over ­whelm ­ing” the lec ­ture was and nod ­ding my agree ­ment as I headed over to a com ­puter clus ­ter, dizzy and ambiva ­lent and anx ­ious to check my e-mail. By that week Sonia had been doing much bet ­ter and was sim ­ply wait ­ing for a bone mar ­row trans ­plant donor. Her fam ­ily hadn’t been able to match but, by some mir ­a ­cle, had been able to get her story pub ­lished on the front page of a big South Korean news ­pa ­per ask ­ing peo ­ple to test for match ­ing. Her pic ­ture in that arti ­cle was the only one I saw taken of her dur ­ing that time and it did not show the smil ­ing, radi ­ant friend I had  known.

The seventy-third e-mail on the sub ­ject, received only a few days later, car ­ried the head ­ing, “Bad News.” The seventy-seventh e-mail was entitled, “Memo ­r ­ial Gath ­er ­ing for Sonia K. Lee  ’06.”

I often find myself dwelling frequently on that time. After those events, friends I talked to in med ­ical school or in church —those whom I had expected to under ­stand my strug ­gle and accom ­pany me through it —said that such a fix ­a ­tion on death and suf ­fer ­ing was unhealthy and perhaps even patho ­logic: “It’s over now; she’s in a bet ­ter place,” “Everything’s going to be alright,” “Life just goes on.” I couldn’t under ­stand why words like those hurt. They were true, but I resisted them fiercely and was even irri ­tated and angered by them. “There is no pur ­pose behind death,” one friend sim ­ply replied, “We just say things like that to make our ­selves feel  better.”

On hear ­ing that, my ambigu ­ous sen ­ti ­ments and ten ­sions revealed them ­selves for what they were: fear. Crip ­pling, dis ­abling, and ter ­ri ­fy ­ing fear. Toni Mor ­ri ­son once said that humans react to fear by nam ­ing it, attempt ­ing to feel as if we have some under ­stand ­ing and there ­fore some con ­trol over it. We name our dis ­eases and our dis ­or ­ders and our bogey ­men. We name our fail ­ures and our ene ­mies and the secret long ­ings of our hearts. But in the end, a name is all we have. A name is not  much.

I named my fear The Grav ­ity of a Moment. For me, the death of a friend is the lost oppor ­tu ­nity to sing in har ­mony, to shout at, to laugh with, to cry on each other. It is shock ­ing in its final ­ity and irre ­versibly strips my future moments of some ­thing pre ­cious, the weight of which I can ­not mea ­sure. How many more moments will lose grav ­ity and appear a lit ­tle thin ­ner and gaunt? Will I ever real ­ize the mag ­ni ­tude of what has been —and will con ­tinue to  be —lost?

Shortly after the death, a close friend of Sonia’s told me, “I don’t under ­stand why peo ­ple didn’t want to come to the funeral or the memo ­r ­ial service ’ maybe they didn’t feel ready, but some ­how it feels like they’re just try ­ing to move on. At the funeral, her par ­ents told me, ‘Don’t for ­get her,’ but I feel like that’s what we’re doing . . . for ­get ­ting and mov ­ing on.” When I heard that I felt guilty because, deep down inside, I wanted to move on too but sim ­ply couldn’t. I wanted to find a tidy clo ­sure and a proper per ­spec ­tive from which to define the expe ­ri ­ence. I didn’t want to forget, but I didn’t want the remem ­ber ­ing to be so painful either.

Henri Nouwen once  wrote:

We tend, how ­ever, to divide our past into good things to remem ­ber with grat ­i ­tude and painful things to accept or forget. This way of think ­ing, which at first glance seems quite nat ­ural, pre ­vents us from allow ­ing our whole past to be the source from which we live our future. It locks us into a self-involved focus on our gain or com ­fort. It becomes a way to cat ­e ­go ­rize, and in a way, con ­trol. Such an out ­look becomes another attempt to avoid fac ­ing our suf ­fer ­ing. Once we accept this divi ­sion, we develop a men ­tal ­ity in which we hope to col ­lect more good mem ­o ­ries than bad mem ­o ­ries, more things to be glad about than things to be resent ­ful about, more things to cel ­e ­brate than to com ­plain  about.

Grat ­i ­tude in its deep ­est sense means to live life as a gift to be received thank ­fully. And true grat ­i ­tude embraces all of life: the good and the bad, the joy ­ful and the painful, the holy and the not-so-holy. We do this because we become aware of God’s life, God’s pres ­ence in the mid ­dle of all that  happens.

Is this pos ­si ­ble in a soci ­ety where joy and sor ­row remain rad ­i ­cally sep ­a ­rated? Where com ­fort is some ­thing we not only expect, but are told to demand? Adver ­tise ­ments tell us that we can ­not expe ­ri ­ence joy in the midst of sad ­ness. “Buy this,” they say, “do that, go there, and you will have a moment of hap ­pi ­ness dur ­ing which you will for ­get your sor ­row.” But is it not pos ­si ­ble to embrace with grat ­i ­tude all of our life and not just the good things we like to remember?*

Suf ­fer ­ing is and must remain an inte ­gral part of our human expe ­ri ­ence. It can ­not sim ­ply be a byline in our pur ­suit of hap ­pi ­ness, for if we fail to embrace suf ­fer ­ing, we fail to embrace Christ him ­self. As Philip Bliss wrote, “Man of sor ­rows! What a name for the Son of God who came, ruined sin ­ners to reclaim.” Paul, in describ ­ing suf ­fer ­ing as the loss of things he once con ­sid ­ered prof ­itable, wrote with para ­dox ­i ­cal con ­vic ­tion and mys ­ti ­cism, “I want to know Christ and the power of his res ­ur ­rec ­tion and the fel ­low ­ship of shar ­ing in his suf ­fer ­ings, becom ­ing like him in his death, and so, some ­how to attain to the res ­ur ­rec ­tion from the dead” (Philip ­pi ­ans 3:10–11).

I write about death because it rep ­re ­sents one extreme in our human expe ­ri ­ences with suf ­fer ­ing and, for bet ­ter or for worse, reveals the raw power of our reac ­tions to pain. It exposes our ten ­den ­cies to sen ­ti ­men ­tal ­ize it, to avoid it, to explain it away, to do every ­thing except embrace it. We may refuse to acknowl ­edge suf ­fer ­ing but in doing so we elim ­i ­nate an oppor ­tu ­nity to expe ­ri ­ence the true and pierc ­ing pres ­ence of God. If we cannot expe ­ri ­ence pain, how can we under ­stand the com ­fort of heal ­ing? If we do not under ­stand death, how can we com ­pre ­hend the vic ­tory of res ­ur ­rec ­tion? And so, while we ought not to idol ­ize suf ­fer ­ing or inten ­tion ­ally inflict it, we can ­not ignore its cen ­tral ­ity in our jour ­neys toward the  divine.

The last post of Sonia’s weblog is a quote from the movie,  You’ve Got Mail: “Some ­times I won ­der about my life. I lead a small life. Well, valuable, but small. And some ­times I won ­der, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave?” In the small ­ness and short ­ness of our mor ­tal ­ity, do we dare to embrace every moment of it? Do I have the brav ­ery to love each painful and plea ­sur ­able instance so bit ­terly inter ­mingled in its brief  course?

I can ­not help but won ­der if some ­where beyond the pall the grav ­ity which I thought was lost has sim ­ply become a part of some ­thing greater, some ­thing that draws me to it a lit ­tle more closely and tugs at my soul a lit ­tle more sharply. Per ­haps all the moments that are torn from this life are really just being trans ­ported, in the twin ­kling of an eye, to a place where the weight of the world becomes the weight of Glory and every ­thing I thought I lost will be found in even greater mea ­sure than  before.

If there is one reflex in my soul stronger than all the rest, it is the long ­ing for that  day.

Lis ­ten, I tell you a mys ­tery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed– in a flash, in the twin ­kling of an eye, at the last trum ­pet. For the trum ­pet will sound, the dead will be raised imper ­ish ­able, and we will be changed. For the per ­ish ­able must clothe itself with the imper ­ish ­able, and the mor ­tal with immor ­tal ­ity. When the per ­ish ­able has been clothed with the imper ­ish ­able, and the mor ­tal with immor ­tal ­ity, then the say ­ing that is writ ­ten will come true: ‘Death has been swal ­lowed up in  victory.’

‘Where, O death, is your vic ­tory? Where, O death, is your  sting?’”

~1 Corinthi ­ans 15:51–55

*Nouwen, Henri.  Turn ­ing My Mourn ­ing Into Danc ­ing: Find ­ing Hope in Hard Times  (Nashville: W Pub ­lish ­ing Group, 2001), 17–18.

[ Orig ­i ­nally pub ­lished in 2008. This January marked Sonia’s 29^th  birth ­day.  Happy birth ­day, Sonia; we miss you.]