Tomorrow it will be five years since my brave and amazing nineteen year old daughter
was killed while walking to the store by a driver who wasn’t watching where she
was going. She suffered front and back
multiple skull fractures, a broken neck, a broken arm, and two broken
hips. She was knocked out of her
shoes. When I got them back, they were
still tied. They sit now in a drawer near my bed, along with her belt, and the frames of her eyeglasses. As I have shared many times,
I arrived on the scene before the rescue workers. No one would let me near her, and although I
didn’t go to church actively at that time, I cried out for God to save her. Of course I did. I prayed because that is what my parents had
taught me to do since I was a small child. But I felt nothing on that road.
There was no presence that I sensed.
There was no divine intervention. There was a firefighter who
reluctantly spoke six words to me that I will hear in my head until the day I
die. The hot pavement underneath my
knees when I fell to the ground, by contrast, was very real.
In my flashbacks, I can still feel it. I can smell it. When told this life-altering news, I automatically turned my head
upwards to the sky as I screamed as if someone up there should be able to
negate the entire event. But that never
happened.
Months later, maybe even a year or more, I went to each of my parents individually to
ask them how they were able to reconcile this loss with their faith. I was beginning to discover that my anger as
part of the grieving process was deepening into a fundamental questioning of
the existence of God.
My father, although he cried as he spoke, told me he was a mere man and
God was all knowing. He told me that God
had known the date of my daughter’s death and the way she would die since the
day she was born. He said he did not
like it, and it hurt him horribly, but it was not his place to question the
will of God. He said he liked to think
that God was protecting her from some deeper hurt in the future, but it was not
for him to know. It was for him to trust
in God’s plan. I love my father far too
deeply to argue with him. Instead I cried across from him in his living room, humbled at the sight of him weeping openly and the slump in his posture that I couldn't recall before he'd buried a grandchild. I think I first remember seeing it on the road that day. He had reached over to pick up Cory's shoe and an officer had yelled sharply at him to drop it, that it was evidence. He had obeyed, dropping it back where it had lain far from her sheet covered body, and then straightened up, walking away, but his shoulders had remained rounded in a way I had never noticed before. My father is a private person, and whatever overwhelming thoughts he'd had in response to the horror we encountered that day, I have never fully known, but they'd shown in his walk. That day at my parent's house, as we discussed how it could be that God had allowed such a thing to happen, I was struck by fierce love for him and a lump formed in my throat upon hearing the shrill tone his voice took when defending his belief system. I left his house, respecting him as I always have for his deep commitment to his faith and that
he could continue believing despite his incredible suffering.
My mother, also, has never strayed from her faith. It was a few days after my daughter
was buried before she felt strong enough to enter the house of God again, but she
returned and praised him as she always had, with love, devotion, and reverence. When I caught her alone to ask her how she could do this (because if
there was anyone who loved my daughter nearly as much as I did, it was my
mother), she said she could not understand why this had happened, but that it was the first
question she plans to ask. She told me,
also with tears streaming down her face, that she will continue to serve God
because that is her faith, and it is the only way she can bear this horrible thing- the most horrible thing that has ever happened to her, and at that point she had already buried most of her immediate family- but that when she stands before His throne, she plans
to ask Him just why Cory could not be spared. She wanted and needed to know.
I respect each of them immensely for the unfaltering
devotion to their beliefs. Sometimes, I
wish I could share it. I suppose if I did, I would at least have the comfort of believing I will see my child again
someday.
Not too long after, a young man in town got into a horrible car accident. He had to be cut out of the car and was in a
coma for months. He awoke and struggled to resume his daily activities, but he lived. He has since married and has a child.
He is a husband and a father. He eats and talks and
laughs and cries. He breathes. To this day when I think about how I have
come to be agnostic after years of careful training from babyhood to be a
Christian… I sometimes see that young man’s face
in my mind. I think of how his parents
witnessed joyfully ( as anyone would) to everyone about how blessed they were to have received such a
miracle and then I wonder how God could
choose to spare their child, but not mine. Was she not deserving of a miracle? Was she not worthy? Was she not worth the effort to make the break happen somewhere other than the C4 vertebrae? My daughter was a believer. She went to church. She did everything she was asked. How am I to think there is a God who looked down at Cory...Cory...the dear, sweet, long suffering, brave warrior that she was...and decided not to spare her, but to instead allow her to lie broken and bleeding on the street for the passersby to see as they drove by? To die alone?
So powerful.
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