A WORLD IN WHICH SUSIE WOULDN’T HAVE SUFFERED

Susie Schwartz did not come to school on the first day of second grade. Nor the first week. Nor the first month. “Oh, she’s moved away,” Miss Davis told us. But there was a tolling in her voice, one which years later we came to understand as pathos. How far away, we had no idea.

Little by little, a whispered rumor slipped out, that Susie was dead. An illness of which only a few of us had heard. “Cancer made her very sick, and finally, God took her away.” Away forever? Few of us had yet become cynical enough to ask how God could be so selfish. Surely, God had elderly grandparents to entertain Him, not at the cost of the life of a seven-year-old playmate.

Would God take me forever? Would it be better than opening Chanukah presents with Mommy and Daddy? Playing with my friends? No playmates? No Miss Davis? Just some far-away place, never to return. The dread of my body lowered forever into the ground?

It’s the devious nature of childhood to be able to phrase the questions of life without yet being able to comprehend the answers. We certainly did not realize that even our parents and ministers had a hard enough time answering them. True: All the theologians in the world cannot explain away the death of one innocent child.

Susie’s death set off my phobia of death, which was shortly redoubled by the picture of Pius XII lying in repose on the cover of Life – his slumbering face ghoulish blue-green tinged. Susie, too? Me? Soon? Inescapable? The patent unfairness of a child’s death? Each one of us can say that we have had our fill. My classmates Marlene from leukemia, Judie overdosing, Barry in an auto accident, God having “taken them,” when who could have used their presence more?

Ironic, or some morbid fixation that I still have my first grade class picture, and look at it – no, study it – from time to time to see Susie’s innocent smile. And likewise, Marlene, Judie, and Barry from my high school yearbook.

Over 40 years on and off in ministry, I have buried too many children – anorexia, cancer, overdoses, accidents, heart disease, congenital disorders – and reawakening each time to second-grade fears and unanswerable questions.

Then last year there was Alana. She was a toddler whom I came to know through St. Baldrick’s, raising funds for children’s cancer research. We fought with every resource to defeat the leukemia – chemo, surgery, transplant. Her parents fought, too, burdened by grief, self-doubts, fatigue, roller-coasters, and likely, too, by the most irrational feelings of guilt. Finally, her little body could take no more, and she died. Her funeral was more one of resolution, you could see, than of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Now, you have to wonder: Wherein lies the optimism to leave you with hope and not merely morbidity? The answer is trite and simplistic, so trite and simplistic that we have yet to figure it out. The answer is resolve and resolution, not surrender to despair. A thousand theologians may not be able to explain away the death of one innocent child. But, we are obliged to explain before God how we can allow innocent children to die.

Why does God let children die? That I do not know. Why do we let children die? That I can tell you: It’s because a society of Joe Six-Packs still spends incalculably more on cigarettes and Bud than it does on cancer research. It’s because people “cannot” give as much because of the recession. Try explaining the economics of recession to a child dying of heart disease. Priorities, man, priorities.

How many more young people would contemplate dedicating their lives to research or poverty medicine or law, or fundraising, or teaching, if we had our priorities straight? Who would provide us with moral exemplars and heroic stories of self-giving for children to learn lessons of inspiration? How much more character would we inculcate into our students if we would educate them in character as much as in science and math?

It’s the stuff of which quixotic, wide-eyed optimism is made, right? Spare an entire world full of children from the doleful fate of Susie and Alana? Maybe not in our generation or the next. But, don’t say never. Spare one more child here and there, and the cumulative results will be stunning. Dare we dream . . . ? “Drop by drop,” the rabbis of old would say, “can penetrate the hardest stone. It is not for you to finish the task. But, neither are you free to desist from it.”