Did you hear about the man who died in the Nutty Putty caves this week?
I've been thinking a lot about that and similar things. Basically, why do bad things happen to good people? Why do bad things happen at all?
This guy was a second-year medical student in Virginia, married with a child already, and they were only in Utah for the Thanksgiving holiday and to tell their families that they were expecting another baby.
He wasn't stupid, he was an experienced caver, loved the outdoors, all that. This must've been some sort of freak accident--the first death in these caves ever.
I just think about his widow, this woman who is expecting and just lost her husband. How do you carry on? How do you keep going? How do you still find joy in life, purpose in life, a reason to be alive?
I don't know how well I would handle it. I would be so angry, so broken. I would be angry at God. I wouldn't understand.
But then I was thinking, maybe it's because I am focusing too much on the here, on the now, on how everything in this life is awful and it hurts too much. But if I think about the afterlife, about being with him again, with my family all together again, the fact that he's not really gone but just for awhile, then maybe it wouldn't be as hard, maybe I would be able to pull through. But goodness that is hard to do. It's so hard to put this reality into perspective and truly understand what forever means, how short this life is in comparison. Because this is all we know, and it's easy to get so caught up in it and see it as the only.
Then I started thinking about how the only way to hurt this badly, is to have something to lose. If I never get married or have kids, I'll never know the hurt of losing him or my children. There are a lot of different kinds of hurt in the world, the hurt of never knowing love, and the hurt of knowing love and losing it. Which is worse? Maybe there is no worse. But either way, how paradoxical and strange it is. I don't like it, ha.
It's hard to reconcile these types of contradicting thoughts in my head.
1 comment:
Jean, I know exactly what you mean. What a horribly tragic story. Poor wife. I don't know what I would do without Peter. For real. I think the heartache would kill me.
I also think it's super gross that they had to leave his body in the cave and seal it up-GROSS.
Also, Nutty Putty is the stupidest name in the entire world, and I had a really hard time not laughing when I first heard the name (this was before he died, of course).
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