“It’s not fair,” she said to me over a plate of calamari, and I had to agree.  My mind drifted back to all the times I’ve thought that in my life.  Too many to count.  All the times The Dad told me that while I was growing up, the wisdom imparted by someone who’s lived long enough to know: life’s not fair. But that doesn’t soften the blow, does it?

We went back and forth, naming all the celebrities who have recently and accidentally become pregnant.  As if a penis is something they just tripped and fell on top of while they were living in a world without contraception.  And then we went back and forth, naming all the friends who have recently discovered their difficulty at achieving what is so accidentally easy for others.  All the wondering, the What Ifs and Is It Something I Dids.  All the needles and exams and tests and waiting rooms and charts reviewed and bad news given.  All the hope trampled and money spent.  “Slow Death of a Lifelong Dream” has no insurance reimbursement code.

This world has way too many examples, prepackaged and readily available, of injustice.  Of loss and pain.  Infertility just happens to be one that has surrounded me lately, in phone calls and emails and secondhand stories and prayer requests. Its shadow looms especially large at my door when I wonder what my own future holds, knowing that for all the ones I love who have known loss–whether through constantly negative tests or through a positive one that melts away like it never happened–why shouldn’t it happen to me?  Why shouldn’t so many things happen to me?

And wouldn’t I have just a bevy of resources to deal with it!  Lover of words that I am, aren’t there just so many waiting to provide comfort for such an occasion?  “Sometimes he calms the storm, and sometimes he calms his child.”  “When he closes a door, he opens a window.”  What about the storms whose rage can’t match my own?  Or the doors and windows that have been battened down for so long they’re sealed shut?  And then, whether it’s through the clouds or underneath the door or just beyond lids that are being gently pried open by love’s refusal to leave, the light breaks through and I realize that were it not for the debris of my own plans, scattered about when everything fell apart, all I would have is cliches.  Words without meaning.  And that is not what I have.

As The Husband and I took our seats on Sunday, we were surrounded by people we barely know but with whose stories we have become familiar because of the vulnerability of true community.  Because of doors and windows–not of opportunity that are opened by a god of cliches–but the ones to the soul that are opened by a God who refuses to deal in anything less than love that will not let me go.

Even when it looks like a complete bleeding mess.

I looked around at these people, the couple two rows ahead of us who have endured surgery after surgery to no avail, who are surrounded by other people’s children.  And they are singing to a God who has not said Yes to their deepest prayer.  I gazed at the child in front of me, who stared me down as I entertained him with faces until I had to stop, and then he turned away in boredom.  I thought about how much like children we all are, demanding God dance for us and play the music we like.  Expecting him to keep the deal we made for the life we wanted, while the whole time he already made a deal–not with us, but for us.  “You broke the deal,” we say with our silence.  “I broke Me,” the response.

Because what if the songs are whispers of a tune too beautiful for our ears?  What if there is a bigger narrative at play than the one we have written?  What if there is something truer than our deepest misery, our most searing loss?  What would that look like?  Would it have any right to look like what we imagined?

I remember how TK always put it, in the only kind of words that ever stick with me during the storm.  The question Sam asks Gandalf: “Is everything sad going to come untrue?”  And that the answer is a resounding yes, though it won’t happen this side of eternity.

I plan to stick around for that–not just because I have questions, but because I believe there are answers.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,

I cannot close my heart to thee;

I trace the rainbow through the rain,

And feel the promise is not vain,

That morn shall tearless be.