Five tiny coffins, no answers

The Boston Herald

Cain killed Abel, and Eve buried one son and said goodbye to another. This was paradise lost, not the expulsion from the Garden. Yet I've never heard anyone, not even clergy, talk about Adam and Eve's sorrow at the loss of their sons. 'Adam and his wife had another son. She said, 'God has given me a son to replace Abel, whom Cain killed.'' This is all the Bible says. 

But there had to have been more. Parents don't replace dead children with other children. Children are not interchangeable. A child's death is the worst thing that can happen to a parent. And yet it happens, time and time again. We don't discuss it, though. We pretend it can't happen, won't happen. We think we can will it not to happen.

And when it does, we don't know how to act, what to say, what to do, how to grieve, how to comfort. We don't know where to turn.

I remember seeing the movie 'The Fighting Sullivans' when I was just a child and knowing, even then, that nothing could be worse than the death of these five brothers, all killed on a warship during World War II. 

'Which one?' their parents asked when a Navy official appeared at their door.

'All five,' he told them.

All five.

At the funeral of his son who was killed in a car accident, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin said that when you lose your parents you lose the past, but when you lose your children, you lose the future.

It's even worse than this. When you lose your children you lose the past and the future. The past is too sore to touch, the future too barren to anticipate. All that remains is the unbearable, interminable now.

A child hears that five children died in a fire this -- week, all the children in one family, and asks, 'Why does God let this happen?'

And a parent says, 'God didn't do this. It was a faulty wire. It was an old building. It was an accident.' But inside, even the most devout ask why?

'Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you yet they belong not to you,' wrote Kahil Gibran in 'The Prophet.’

The language is poetic, the sentiment profound. Our children are on loan from God. In theory this is comforting. But next to the reality of five empty beds, five empty places at the table, five white coffins, five extinguished lives, these are just fancy words.

Only one thing makes any sense and that's the belief that death is a part of life, the next step in a journey we do not and cannot understand.

When I drive to and from the airport I am always aware that on the way into and out of the tunnel I can hear the radio clearly. But as I drive deeper in, the music disappears. If I had to live the rest of my life inside the tunnel I know I would stop believing in the music outside. There would be no proof that it exists; in time I would forget that it ever was.

Maybe life is nothing more than a tunnel. We hear the music before we enter, before we are born and, for a while, in the beginning, we may even remember it. But then all the while we're here there are other distracting sounds. And on the radio is only static and a sense that somewhere beyond here and now, the music we ache for plays.

'Why?' a mother sobs, a father cries. Why does God give, only to take away?

Maybe away is only back home. Maybe death leads back to life. I don't know. I'm stuck in the tunnel. I see the caskets and feel hollow. I can't hear the music.

I only remember its sound