Everything happens for a reason? No, it doesn't, you arse-clown!

By far the most insulting platitude to receive when you are the mother of a dead child is the easy-to-give, but not easy-to-forget 'everything happens for a reason'. I've heard it more times than I care to remember, even from close friends.

I've spent a countless amount of time trying to understand where the desire to impart this piece of false and offensive wisdom comes from, and as is usually the case, it seems as if it is designed more to comfort the giver of the perceived 'wisdom' than it is the receiver.

It seems to be too much to bear for people to even think about, let alone humbly accept, that the universe is not concerned with our individual protection; that it will just as well cast us off to the biting winds to wither and die as it would go about serendipitously arranging our perfect destiny. The offer me this faux-spiritual response as a way of maintaining belief in their own immunity from fatal misfortune. People will protect this belief with everything they have, even if that means turning away from the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that is right in front of them - my face.

I am a walking, breathing piece of evidence that terrible things happen to good people. That being 'deserving' of good fortune is no guarantee of receiving it. That wanting something badly enough is never powerful enough to manifest it. That praying, wishing, or begging, with all of one's heart, will not magically change one's destiny. That any of us, with every minute that passes, are just as likely one step closer to the tragedy that will define or destroy our lives as we are to our life's joy and fulfilment.

And so, they tell me 'everything happens for a reason', perhaps just so they have a string of words with which to distance me while they desperately enact an escape from the very sight of me, who has had no such chance to avert my eyes from the ugly, impossible truth.

It is to mock and belittle all I have learned, and all I must live with, to tell me that my poor innocent baby's death was a part of our, and his, destiny. That it was foretold by some kind of ancient fathers. That some good, somewhere, sometime, will come from this experience and reveal the meaning and resonance of it in some kind of spectacular spiritual dénouement complete with a flourish of the heavenly magician's hand, a drum roll, and a crash of the cymbals.

If you say this to me, what do you say to an orphaned child whose whole family has been raped, shot dead or decapitated in a Syrian village? What do you say to a mother whose child is dying of starvation or preventable disease in a developing country just outside our fortunate shores? For your logic that you get what you deserve, and that what you don't deserve later reveals itself to bear wisdom and meaning after all, applies only to those of us who are already privileged enough to have escaped a meeting with the manifold horrors life has to offer. In other words, the only way you can possibly believe that everything happens for a reason, is to be lucky enough not to have encountered something yet that shows you, undeniably, otherwise.

I may have once thought this myself, of course. Perhaps I didn't get one job I desperately wanted because the job the universe really intended for me to flourish in was just around the corner. What a laugh to look upon this in retrospect! That the universe, which is erstwhile inflicting savagery upon millions of equally undeserving human beings in the other three corners of the globe should use even a millisecond of its celestial energy to line me up the perfect job, or the perfect date! Oh, if the universe really did have a plan, how it would chuckle at our attempts to define it!

Seems a silly and rather unsophisticated thought when you put it that way, doesn't it?

I didn't have an appropriate response for people who said this to me, until I saw this video, which I shall save on my phone so as to replay to the next offender. Please, don't let it be you!

Everything Happens For a Reason
by: d2bmum