“Would you like to say a few words?”

I almost miss my cue. For the past hour my attention has been solely on Eleanor; an easy distraction to everything else. There is something about the childlike wonder of caskets that allows for a dissociative fantasy.

“Why is mommy in there?” Eleanor asked earlier, pointing to the cold, but shiny casket.

“Because mommy died,” I tell her.

“She looks like she’s sleeping.”

“Well, when you die, it’s like your body goes to sleep for a long, long time.”

“Why did mommy die?” she asks.

“Because she was sick for a long time.”

“Why was she sick?”

I sigh. “I don’t know.”

“Can I have some lemonade?”

Her attention has been that of a bird, flitting around the church. To the stained glass windows, to the musicians, to the priest sprinkling the casket with holy water before we enshroud it in a white symbolic cloth. My attention follows hers; pointing things out, playing a game of Eye Spy.

“Do you see a pink flower?” An easy win after a few moments.

“Do you see Mama Mary?” She points to the statue in the corner. “Nobody puts Mary in the corner,” I whisper, but she doesn’t get it.

“Do you see anyone wearing black?” I ask. Too easy.

I brush the back of her hair with my hand, adjusting the little pink butterfly hair clip holding the hair back from her face.

“Would you like to say a few words?” the priest asks again.

I peel my hand from Eleanor’s and stand, scooting her closer to my parents as I make my way to the lectern.

I was never any good at this. She always had a far superior memory than I did. There’d be times when she would bring up a memory from the past and I would have no recollection. Sometimes if I was lucky, there’d be a faint glimmer, but she would relish in the memory and the feeling of that memory. Every action and every emotion was still fresh and I would be left there smiling and nodding, pretending to remember more than I did when the reality was that I didn’t. Feeling is such a distinct and consistent companion to memory and I could never consistently tether myself to feeling in those moments that mattered so much to her.

There’d be nights when our conversations would end and we’d drift to separate corners of the house and I would pour over the details that she had shared; internalizing the event, trying to force myself to remember—to feel something. There were even times, moments with our daughter, things that happened in the not-too-distant past that I held no strong recollection or emotional attachment to.

Why couldn’t I remember something that was so firmly rooted in her mind? Was it not important to me? With each story, as she recounted it, it seemed as if it were something that would be important enough to remember, but for whatever reason it wasn’t.

Even now as I try to recall examples of those lapses of memory, I cannot recall those specific instances.

But there is one memory that is firmly rooted.

We stand, making small talk as we wait for our table. For whatever reason I’m being shy. I want to make eye contact with her, but I can’t, because every time I do, I can’t stop smiling and she’ll stop mid-sentence and ask “What?”

I believe that this memory is ingrained more firmly than any other because, although this event had only occurred once in reality, it played over in my head on an infinite loop before it had even occurred. So much anxiety was built around and toward this one moment that I can easily recall and feel how I felt in this memory.

Before this occurrence, we had met several months prior. It wasn’t love at first sight, but I was beginning to realize—which was causing my boyish grin—that she was coming into focus.

I had met and known many women who absorbed my thoughts and imagination, but she infected them. Since the phone call setting up that date, every stray thought led back to her.

Before her, I had always regarded the idea of love as passion; as an emotion that surpassed all other emotions. Whenever she entered my thoughts, that heightened sensation was never there. Instead it was replaced by this nagging feeling of something drawing me towards some event.

Because we were still strangers, it was easy to push that feeling away and try to chase down another sort of connection. Yet, that nagging feeling persisted, growing alongside my curiosity about what might happen.

Through a friend of a friend we were introduced more formally and began conversing online. Before long, numbers were exchanged. Late nights in front of the glare of a computer screen were traded for late nights sitting in random spots throughout the apartment and city talking on our smartphones.

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After several weeks, I finally built up enough courage to ask her out to dinner.

I had spent the week before watching all the late night talk shows, practicing my small talk. A backup of talking points were stored on my smartphone in case we hit a dry spell or my memory proved faulty; easily accessible during a conveniently-timed bathroom break or fictitious celebrity sighting.

That wasn’t him? I could have swore. So, how about this weather?

Over the course of actual meal courses and drinks and avenues of conversation, I began to realize that through my initial resistance an idea of what could be love had blossomed. As the hour grew late, the idea continued to grow.

It wasn’t passion—or at least, my original idea of passion. It was the collision of two beings realizing that they—out of billions of other beings—ought to belong to each other. As devoid of emotion as that might sound, there was still some semblance of emotion, but it wasn’t emotion fueled by passion’s fire. There was a spark—no, several sparks—from all the other little moments leading up to that night. That night, though, it was fanned; ever-growing, supported by both logic and reason.

Once dinner was over, the conversation carried on outside as we walked down the city streets. Away from the noise and distractions of the restaurant, our attention was solely on each other. We walked side by side. For once I walked without my hands in my pockets, trying to judge her reaction as my fingertips purposefully, in the most accidental sort of way, brushed her own. I finally took the plunge and reached for her hand. She didn’t shy away. My fingertips sliding across her palm, gently taking hold as her hand received mine.

Palms met.

Fingers grasped.

Electricity.

Love was more than just an idea or a feeling. For us it was a connection, so strong that it went beyond words or gestures. It was difficult imagining a time before her. She came into focus, existing. And in doing so, helped shape my own existence.

Now it’s difficult to grasp what this time without her will be like.

Without her, a part of me feels like I am missing part of my existence. It’s to be expected. It’s part of the grieving process, but there is so much about me she shaped. Her distaste for beards is the reason I’m always clean shaven. She helped provide the motivation and confidence for me to take my career to where it is today. She’s the reason I’m a good father. But as she got sicker and weaker, so did my confidence in being a parent. How could I do this without her?

When she finally said that science had enough of her and the trials stopped, we still thought we’d have more time–time to prepare and plan and to have conversations. But what was months turned to weeks and then to days, and then she was gone.

Throughout her decline, we kept hearing the thoughts and prayers mantra. But prayers were only pleas or near-silent whispers. They lacked the other half of what prayers should be: work and action. Because we couldn’t do anything except sit and wait for the next batch of test results.

Thoughts and prayers were typically coupled with the utterance that God has a plan. But this couldn’t be God’s plan. Why would God want my daughter to grow up without a mother? Eleanor deserves better.

There have been many moments of quiet solitude where I was left to the dark recesses of my own thoughts. And I have thought about this a lot, but I have yet to find a way to explain, to rationalize why Veronica is gone.

For a while, I had hope that there was an explanation, but then I remembered all those stories in the Bible about how God wanted Abraham to kill his son, or how he made a bet with the Devil and then proceeded to torture Job and his family. There’s an element of pridefulness and vindictiveness and cruelty that’s present in all of these stories that we quickly gloss over.

Innocent people are killed so that His chosen people can conquer and have more land.

He sends his angel to kill the firstborn of Egypt

Laws are put in place where the punishment is being stoned to death

And then ultimately, the culmination of God’s great plan: the sacrifice of His only Son.

If God exists and is an all-good, all-powerful God, why do we suffer? Why did Veronica have cancer? Why does cancer exist? Children all over the world are born with hideous, crippling diseases, but why does God allow them to suffer? Why do those diseases exist? Why do those children exist when the kindest thing God could do is to not let them be born? What does God gain by allowing such things to happen to innocent children?

There isn’t an answer that exists to these questions that is satisfactory. But even if there were answers to these questions, which there are not, such answers could not fully explain why there is suffering in this world, because they’d be unable to explain why God allowed suffering into his creation in the first place.

The problem with suffering is that a benevolent, all-powerful, all-loving God created a world in which there is suffering. That’s the problem with suffering. The problem of suffering is not a problem about whether or not there is suffering in the world, because there is. The problem is that suffering exists at all.

In a world where suffering exists, it makes sense to ask why there is suffering, or why there is suffering that is unnecessary. We do enough to ourselves in the choices that we make that cause suffering, whether causing ourselves or others to suffer. But cancer? That is unnecessary suffering.

Why does God allow suffering? Why has He created a world that has unnecessary suffering in it?

I’ve asked and asked again, and I can’t continue questioning what His motives are for hurting countless innocents. What's the point in praying to a being that either can't help or simply doesn't care?

Someone told me that God knows exactly what Eleanor and I have been through because of the sacrifice of His Son. But God doesn’t know, because He got His Son back—with some wear and tear, but He got Him back. I don’t understand the concept of sacrifice through this lense. I lost my wife and she is gone. She isn’t coming back. Her body was ravaged by the disease and by all the medical trials and chemotherapy and she isn’t coming back.

I’ve always had a hard time balancing this notion that God is Love, but for some reason God is also behind pain and suffering. Is the lesson here that love is pain? That we live to love and by doing that we live to suffer and be in pain?

Why did He do this to her?

What was the point?

Why didn’t He intervene? Why didn’t He save her?

Because God didn’t intervene for whatever His reasons are, it seems to me that He allows suffering and cancer and all the unnecessarily awful things we endure to exist. They have God’s permission to exist. Silence is consent, after all.

What was the lesson in all this?

What is He trying to show me!

I feel a hand on my back and it’s then that I realize my eyes are closed, leaning on the lectern, head down. I look up and see my daughter staring at her dangling, swinging feet. My mother, next to her, is crying.

The priest is standing behind me; his hand on my back, his eyes full of empathy and concern and worry.

I walk back to my seat and sit, taking my daughter’s hand in my own, and that’s when I start shaking again.