God gives us room to be human

I cried like a baby yesterday (20 July). I was in the hospital. I was with a young mother; holding her hands, we wept together. On the hospital bed lies her 10 year old son, still and frozen. Her son met with a serious accident a year ago and was then discharged after many months of intensive care. He suffered from a serious brain injury. Now, he has returned to the hospital to treat a sudden infection.

What a beautiful boy, i thought to myself. His eyes were big. His smile was sweet. That cherubic face could melt any heart. But the accident has taken everything away. He is basically bedridden. He needs external aid to breathe. He is fed through the nostril. He can only take liquids. Over the one year, he has also visibly shrunk.

He is a mere shadow of his original bubbly self. All he could do now is to muster a smile whenever his mother strains a smile at him. I guess he must be wondering, "why is mommy crying?" I guess he's too young to take it all in.

I have three children of my own and I can feel how she felt; to a rough extent I guess. She shared with me that her life was over the day of the accident. She was then the sole-bread winner before she remarried recently. But still she could not afford the lifetime medical bills. She said that her only communication with her son now is through a machine, "beeping" now and then, but never ceasing, to tell her that she needs to replace a new syringe for her son.  

She has resigned to her fate and is prepared to be her son's personal nurse for the rest of either his or her life, whichever comes first.

We are all fractured beings. We are broken in some ways or another. Some of us thought our lives was perfect until something tragic happens like a death, accident or a terminal illness. Others experience it less abruptly but still no less painful. Take this lady Anna for example. Her pain is recounted in the book "Yearning" by Rabbi Irwin Kula.

Anna married an older man. A few years later, her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer. His condition deteriorated fast and soon he could barely speak. He also could not recognize her. Once emotionally intimate and physically close, her husband was reduced to a patient to be taken care of.

Painful as it is, Anna's dilemma is of another nature. Recently she met a man whom she felt she could love. He was aware of her situation and had promised her that he would be understanding.

But, being a committed Jew and also conservative, she could not see herself committing an extramarital affair. Somehow, she felt really guilty and was petrified by the thought that her affection for her husband would change for the worst if she let go and give herself to her new lover.

Anna was a victim of own passion, straitjacketed by her religious conviction, torn by choices she cannot make, and groping for answers she cannot find. Indeed, all of us are fractured into many pieces and the sum of it all is somehow always less than its parts.

A philosopher once wrote, "Life is a succession of leaps into pathlessness." No matter how much we try to control our circumstances, sometimes, they just stubbornly defy our wishes. At times, they even determine our fate and we have no choice but to adapt and adjust our life around it. In other words, they become the millstone that we carry around our neck for most part of our life.

And in this enduring journey, this long unbeaten path to our mortal end, they become the burden that we bear in our conscience and we cannot but remain unchanged by them. This is the pathlessness of life, the risk we take for being born.

I believe that God gives us room to be human. And to be human is to fail occasionally, to experience pain and sorrows, to be vulnerable to temptations, and to break down in tears when our world caves in on us.

Let me end with this practical advice in the book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" by Rabbi Harold S Kushner:

"People who pray for miracles usually don't get miracles, any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or boyfriends get them as a result of praying. But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayers answered. They discover that they have more strength, more courage than they ever knew themselves to have."