Metaphor

A note from last year, when Zaynab was kicking about happily inside of me...

God works in mysterious ways. He takes a life and gives another, sometimes in the place of the former.

Or so they say.

Five months ago, soon after my father passed away from cancer, I learned that I was expecting. The initial reactions of my family were…bittersweet. How wonderful that there will soon be a new life; how tragic that this new child will never, in this world, know or be known by his or her maternal grandfather. As they struggled to make sense of their emotional chaos, their thoughts fell into a predictable spiritual pattern: God takes, and He gives. Life and death are in His power. Never despair, for He, in His infinite generosity, will take care of you.

But I'm not one for spiritual clichés. God's profundity spans well beyond such neat little sound bytes, and I'm not sure it even makes rational sense to think that lives are somehow swapped for one another. It seems to me that a truer generosity would supplement, rather than supplant, family members. Maybe it was better to taste the bittersweetness and not try to sugar coat it.

The deeper lessons of life are those that evolve over time, requiring insight, foresight, patience. Their deepness comes from their ability to penetrate beyond all of our psychological barriers. As the time gap between now and my father's passing became wider, a numbness settled in to me. Formerly enthralled by life and the intricate workings of divine interaction, I was now filled with total blankness. It was not a lack of faith, but instead was faith stripped of its drama. It may have been a higher stage in spiritual evolution, but at the time, it was just a place, a plateau, where I had come to rest … and to mourn.

Morning sickness jolted me out of my quietude. In my heaving body and abdominal pain, I seemed to awake. I didn't think of God. I didn't think of my yet-to-be-born child. I just thought about my pain. I felt it and lived it, and in my pain, I found myself connected to my father in a way I had never before been.

In theological discourse, the spiritual and physical realms are often made to seem contradictory. But our bodies are matters of tremendous spiritual reflection, and sometimes we need awareness of that physicality to help us understand greater truths.

In the four months between my dad's diagnosis and his eventual death from primary liver cancer, he had suffered from frequent bouts of vomiting. As the tumor grew larger and pushed down on his portal vein, his abdominal area swelled with fluid. Every time the weight of the water became unbearable, he had to have his water tapped. But even as the tapping drained fluid from around his abdominal area, it brought little relief to his swelled legs and feet, which became increasingly tight with excess water.

I remember taking him to the hospital to have his water tapped. After the procedure, he would slowly change back into his clothes. I remember his skeletal back; I remember the sagging skin and the protruding bones.

It's one thing to see someone else suffer and an entirely other one to live his or her pain. I can't say I have ever suffered his pain, but what little pain I have suffered in the past few months as my belly has grown larger, my legs and feet have swelled with fluid, and the nausea has come and gone, has helped me draw closer to my father and the most tragic experience of his life. In my heaving body and abdominal pain, I remembered him and cried.

How strange that in the greatest miracle of life—the very creation of another human being—we can find the sweetest joys and the most heart rendering sadness. For all my future child has and will give me, she has begun by awaking me to my father's pain. God works in mysterious ways.