A physician friend has told me of a time when he was a young resident and responsible for the care of a woman, age 34, who was dying of lymphatic cancer. The patient had a 14-year-old son who was at the hospital waiting for news of his mother’s condition.

When the woman died, my friend had to inform the boy of his mother’s death. The doctor came to the waiting room and told him the sad news. The boy’s response was to punch the doctor in the face. As my friend told this story of something that happened many years ago, he seemed again to recoil from the punch.

Eventually the boy was able to sit down with the doctor peacefully and grieve with him over the death, so burdensome to both of them, though in different ways. For the physician, it represented a painful loss of a patient whom he had come to value as a person. For the boy, it meant being deprived of a parent whom he needed and cared about.

The story gives dramatic expression to an instinctive response toward death, especially when that death is of a young person and directly affects young people. The boy lashed out at a fate imposed on him while he was still vulnerable and even less able to understand than adults ever can why a person dies when still needed.

Though it may seem to violate spiritual ideals, this kind of initial reaction to the death of someone much loved testifies to value. The person whom we have lost to death is worth getting upset about. Not entirely without reason do we flail out at the fate imposed upon us. We may feel what the Earl of Gloucester, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, felt in his time of despair: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport.”

Spirituality, of course, does not stop at this instinctive response to death. Rather, it tries to find meaning in the experience of dying despite what is often felt as an unacceptable assault on our human dignity.

But a sound spirituality cannot welcome suffering for itself. Certainly the Christian tradition gives no approval to a love for suffering. “It is not appropriate,” says a writer in a newly published spiritual encyclopedia, “to conclude  .  .  .  that suffering is to be welcomed or left unrelieved.”

In this tradition, at least, a loving God does not want his creatures to suffer but, in the mystery of the world’s freedom, allows it to happen as if reluctantly. That his son Jesus suffered so terribly gives Christians hope of finding some meaning in the experience of death. To discover meaning there, however, is a spiritual gift that no one can count on.

As I look back on the death of family members who passed on prematurely, the pain of their passage has lessened over the years. But the mystery remains: why were the days of my beloved nephew cut short when his presence meant so much to us all?

I no longer feel like punching someone in anger over that sudden death, though his absence still causes pain. It makes me take refuge in a spirituality that can accept what is not understood. This kind of spiritual stance toward the world can give some assurance to hearts that remain broken because of the death of loved ones.

At the same time, one cannot deny that death often inflicts harm on others that may never be repaired. My father’s death came at a time that left my mother vulnerable to anxieties that made the rest of her life terribly difficult. This unhappy effect made me mourn my father even more than I would have otherwise.

My efforts to find reasons for this death have never progressed very far. I still regret that my father did not live into old age. He had much to give that his family needed. But I do find in my spiritual tradition the continuing strength to accept what I do not understand, leaving it to God’s love.

The boy who punched the doctor has become a man long since. One can wonder whether, as an adult, he has perhaps discovered a spirituality that has enabled him to find in his mother’s premature death some consolation and even some meaning.

Richard Griffin