Annie: Tragedy, Hope & Heaven
Tragedy, Hope, and Heaven… and the Futility of Unbelief
A Story from 1988 with an Epilogue
There are those who cannot read about the death of a child. I’m a little that way myself. I tend to pass over those articles. Sometimes a long ago pain that we don’t want to deal with again; for others it’s just fear. But events don’t cooperate. I never wanted to have to write about something like this, but at least my own girls are safe. Not that it’s any easier when it was Annie. This was just too close to home. She was Claire’s best friend, and she was only six years old.
Nobody is closer to us than Newlin and Robin, not even Ron and Nancy and their girls. We have all been marching along together for so long now: single in the 70’s, married with young families in the 80’s, our girls paired off, three and three. Girls, girls, girls… Newlin and I were wondering when it would ever stop. We never anticipated something like this.
Just getting things under control it seems, and suddenly there is this big hole. And I was the one who had to go out and face the TV cameras in front of their house. Better me than Newlin, but even I had problems keeping my composure in front of the cameras. I never appreciated the shortest verse in the Bible before, you know, “Jesus wept,” just two words. He was thinking about his dead friend Lazarus. But in these past few days there have been plenty of grown men cry. After all, she was only six years old.
Sometimes things seem to concentrate, to cluster. These have been days like that. It was only August that Robin stayed at our house, taking care of the kids while Karen had her cancer operation. Thank goodness they think they got it all, you never know for sure, but now all the chemotherapy. We’ve been the one’s receiving other people’s kindness. Then all of a sudden the call from the hospital about poor Bill Barron: lung and liver cancer, acute. He never told anybody, gutting it out it seems, and there I am, next to his deathbed, marveling at the insidious nature of cancer as it literally devours the life of the body. I have been thinking about serious things for the past few months. And how serious the doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital took the matter of death, even in the case of a man so emancipated and so obviously beyond hope as Bill. But he was 60 years old and had no wife or children; little Annie was only six. At least it wasn’t cancer with her, not that that would have been any better. With her it was so fast, over in an instant it would seem; with Bill we at least had a week to prepare for it. But she was so young. With Bill we were truly sad, but with Annie we’ve tasted the real depths of grief.
There are phone calls that you will never forget, not for the rest of your life. I didn’t even recognize Newlin’s voice, and we talk every day. Ironically I had just finished a meeting about Bill’s estate, seen the antique dealer to the elevator, and then there is Newlin’s calling from the emergency room: “Ken, Annie may be dead.” What? This can not be! What? How? She had been playing on the sliding board in the playroom at home. A very childproof playroom. Somehow she tangled herself up in a jump rope, tripped, fell off the slide, caught her neck. Robin and her sister are both nurses. They administered CPR. The hospital has been working on her for 45 minutes now, but it doesn’t look good. I’m on my way, praying hard.
Newlin had always told me that I should learn CPR. He’s the conscientious one. I’m going to learn it now. By all rights I’m the one who deserves this, not Newlin and Robin. We live so close to the edge, all of us. Like the time last Fall when the door fell on our little Julie. She put her head right through the glass quarter pane. It was me that had left it standing off its’ hinges while we did the carpets. She could have cut her throat if her grandpa hadn’t been there, not lifted it off so carefully. And now Annie, and it does not look good at all.
I had assumed that the stranger in the room was a hospital chaplain, but no, he was a psychiatrist, trying to help with the grief. They had not been able to save her. There is no describing How we all feel, but I am glad that I’m here rather than standing outside. For the moment this room is the center of the universe. The psychiatrist is not doing much good. Not that he’s not trying, it’s just that he simply doesn’t have much to offer: accept your feelings, anger is ok,…. But we already know all those things. Poor guy, a doctor with an empty medicine bag. Send him out, send in the chaplain. We need spiritual sustenance, we need hope, some kind of answer. That’s not really what we want; we want Annie back. Rewind the tape. Start the day over. Wake up from the dream. Nothing else will do.
There are those who will say, “How can you believe in a God who would let such a thing happen?” The Problem of Evil. There are those who consider it fatal to religious belief, especially the Christian belief in a loving God. What could be more of a test than the death of a six year old girl? There is a problem that the skeptics themselves have, however. Whatever the difficulties we face in reconciling the loving God of the Bible with our tragedies, there are only a limited number of alternate answers, and if you look closely at those other answers, they go downhill fast.
Is it really any comfort to go for a world without God, say the materialistic evolutionary universe of T.H. Huxley, where “Nature is red with tooth and claw”? Events like this are just routine in such a world. Where is your locus of outrage in Bertrand Russell’s universe? [Or in that of Richard Dawkins today]. This death is just what is normal, nothing more, nothing less. By contrast, a distinction of Christianity is its’ declaration that our world is not normal, that it is bent out of shape. There is a basis for outrage.
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You say that you don’t believe in God because bad things happen to good people so he mustn’t be there, or must not be all powerful, or he must not know all things? A nice tight little dilemma, or so thought David Hume, the skeptical philosopher. Hume died holding his copy of the Epicurean poet Lucretius, despite James Boswell’s bedside evangelizing. Imagine that, Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, who had squired Voltaire’s mistress around, trying to convert the Prince of Skepticism to belief in Jesus Christ. Something of Dr. Johnson’s faith must have rubbed off after all. Was Boswell on to something, and was it the awesomeness of death? Death is the problem, and it is such a big problem, and that is the Problem. It is such a problem that it says something about life; it says that there is more to life than is contained in David Hume’s universe , or Carl Sagan’s for that matter. We value life, especially human life, more that we should value mere collections of molecules; there is no answer to the dilemma of Life and Death in the Cold Cosmos of Materialism.
I am waiting to make a phone call and there are only two pay phones in the emergency room [in 1988]. People need to know that things are bad here, that the worst has happened, but the phones are busy. A woman talks endlessly about a job application. Call after call. The man in front of me is making business deals. In the emergency room? The trivial pursuits of life. I’m ready to rip the phone off his ear. Don’t they understand that my friends are in agony, they need more support. I’ve got to get the word out. At least the psychiatrist is gone, and Rob is here. As a pastor, he sees this all the time, but it doesn’t get easier the more it happens. Little Mark Cressman, Rob knew the little boy would die of cancer, but didn’t know what he would finally say when it happened. And when you are a pastor, something bad is happening to one of your families all the time. You can’t tell them that death is just a normal process like growing up or going bald. Or that we’ve got this Problem of Evil so we’ll just assume that God must not be there and we are all in this together while we’re alive, but after that there is nothing. That’s not an an answer. That’s the nihil, the nothingness. We want something more, what we want is we want them back, and we can’t get them.
The hole is so deep. Why do we value a single life so much in a century of genocide and Holocaust? We talk of the infinite worth of a single human life, but what do we mean? A peculiar thing about Infinity: it does not scale. Multiply or divide it by anything and it is still infinite. Divide the infinite measure of millions of deaths by millions, and you still get an infinite measure for every single one of them. That’s why it is just as bad for a mother and father if they lose a single child as it would be if the whole world would end. You can dig more holes and dig them wider but you can’t dig them any deeper. Infinite worth, that’s what we feel when we lose a child. I think for a moment of what it would be like if this should happen to Claire tomorrow, or to little Julie, or to baby Katherine. I couldn’t take it. Neither would Newlin, he would have said a few days ago, but now he is having to. Let me tell you what we really mean by infinite worth. What we mean is priceless. Something is priceless if you can’t buy it with all the money in the world. Now Annie is gone, and you can’t buy another Annie. You cannot even sire another Annie. You may have other children, equally wonderful, but none of them will be Annie. You can replace your computer, more or less replace a pet, but you absolutely cannot replace a person. So we gaze into the void. We want her back and nothing else will do.
A popular author says that since bad things happen to good people God must not be in control. Departing from his own religious orthodoxy, he says God is caught in it with the rest of us. That sure takes care of any temptation to blame God, but it’s not very comforting. It’s not any better of an answer today than dualism and Manichaeism were in St. Augustine’s time. I mean that this bottom line says that things may look bad now, but that’s not the real bad news; the real bad news is that they may stay bad. Literally, the Devil may win the Battle. Quite a price to pay for a short cut answer to the Problem of Evil.
The more popular set of answers, which are presented as more sophisticated than “Mere Christianity” [C.S. Lewis] today come out of the East. Alan Watts, the late popularizer of Zen in this country, referred to the apparent difficulty that Western religions have “keeping God’s skirts clean,” that is, keeping him free from blame for all these things that keep happening. The answer from the East, the gentle fog of pantheism, just defines away the Problem. Watts said the the problem that Christian missionaries had in India was their insistence on the separation of categories. Little things like Good and Evil, Death and Life, You and Me, This and That. So what’s a death, why are we crying, just let the ashes flow down the Ganges River to the Sea and All will be One. Some people call that an answer. It seems less than useless when I think of these last few days. The “sound of one hand clapping” is not a hopeful sound.
There are themes that endure in our art and our literature. Take opera, for example. The serious ones dwell on the same big themes: Death, Sin, Salvation, Forgiveness, the value of a person’s Soul. Go see “Faust” for instance. These things matter to us, and the issue is Death, the Great Event for which everything else stops. When it hits you want answers, now just why, but what next. We want hope. Something more Than you can get from some guru telling you that “All is One.” We want desperately to see it reversed, or hope that someday it will be, that there is hope for more to come. We look for signs that it may not be final. There was a man who raised a little girl from the dead, it is said. People saw it. We don’t know her name, but her father’s name was Jairus. It’s no wonder that man drew crowds. The resurrection of the body: now that’s an answer. Wish fulfillment, you say. Well, let’s hope not; Blaise Pascal worked out a clever wager: the one who bets on it has nothing to lose, the one who bets against it has nothing to gain. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Church in Corinth more brutally, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless…” If it didn’t really happen, then we are just a bunch of idiots. But you’ve got to admit, this is the kind of hope that cuts to the core of things. We read about it in the New Testament, and if the events reported there are true, then there is hope.
Claire has not been taking this well. As far as she is concerned, there is no doubt that Annie is in Heaven. She will see her again. But that could be such a long wait. She wants her back now. So do we. It is difficult as is, but can you imagine telling her that there is nothing else? That beyond this, the abyss. And why would anyone hold such a view? The record does say That Man did raise Jairus’ daughter, and Lazarus. An otherwise obscure teacher who should otherwise be forgotten if such things didn’t really happen. And finally to conquer death himself as God in the Flesh, submitting to it in order to to restore a world in which death should ultimately be an alien phenomenon.
Now if the things we read about in the New Testament are true, we may even find out that things will ultimately make sense, that even things that could drive you to nihilism figure into the ultimate scheme of things. Even the premature death of a six year old girl.
We are standing against the wall looking at the crowd at the reception, Rob Norris and I. And here is this little boy, about eight, looking up at Rob, his head tilted so far back — Rob is a big guy. “Dr. Norris, I have a question.” Oh, no, here it comes. “How can you manage to preach three times on a single Sunday morning? Don’t you get really tired?” Of all things. Rob: “Ken, do you know Bobby Cressman?” Good grief, this must be the brother of Mark, the boy who just died of cancer. And Rob seems to be a sort of hero to him. “Dr. Norris, I think that I might want to be a pastor when I grow up.” I am undone. Surely his brother is playing with Annie now.
Epilogue — 2024
And so it continues. We are in our seventies now, no longer the parents of little girls; Karen died the next year, and a few weeks later I faced the bleakness of a new decade, the Nineties, one I would enter alone with my own little girls. They are now all wonderful women as are Annie’s two sisters, some mothers themselves. Newlin and Robin were pillars of support for me during five years of single parenthood.
Newlin recently died, in the Fall of 2023 rather quickly from an undetermined neurological seizure disorder. Just five days earlier our mutual friend Terry died of Parkinson’s Disease. Strikingly, both of them passed into the presence of God with a smile on their faces. Terry’s wife Jill and Robin wondered aloud what they must have been seeing as they entered Heaven. I believe Terry saw his special needs sister Janie, healed and whole, and surely Annie was waiting for Newlin.
