Bullshit!

When is death “acceptable”? I suppose you could argue that murderers and child molesters deserve to die, but what about the death of an innocent baby?

Admittedly, I’m not a religious person. In fact, I’m a bad catholic. I don’t go to church, I don’t believe in the church and I don’t advocate organized religion.

Does that mean I don’t believe in God? Hardly! At least not until the passing of my daughter. Since that tragic day I have been left with no other option but to question my system of belief.

If we could step back in time to the day before Ava was born, I would have said I considered myself a more “spiritually” inclined believer. I preferred to think of myself in this light for several reasons.

Spirituality does not require membership with an organized and structured religion. This simple fact freed me from the confinements of the rigid ethics and beliefs of one religion, and allowed me to explore, consider, follow or discount the teachings and ideas of many different types of religions (or philosophies). Perhaps that sounds selfish, but I was quite fond of the idea of building my own belief system based on the ideas that were personally appealing to me from various religious beliefs, philosophical ideas, ethics and morals. By detaching myself from one religion that did not suite my needs or feed my soul, I was able to dig for something on a much more personal level that made sense to me and helped define me as a person, rather than have the systematic ideologies of one religion dictate what I should believe in and what kind of person I should be.

Perhaps my thought process and reasons for considering myself spiritual and not religious are pompous and simply a matter of perception (you say tomato, I say tomatoe), but at the end of the day, no matter what you call it, my quest and search for God was all a journey for one of the deepest and most profound of human needs, hope! Hope that tomorrow will be better than today and hope for a brighter future in a wounded and besieged world.

I didn’t believe that there was a God in the sky that would help guide me on that journey. I didn’t believe praying and going to church helped fulfill my human need for God (or hope…it all means the same to me). I truly believed that I was God. God was a personal experience that each and every one of us lives through every day and that we truly do control our own destiny. I believed that everything happens for a reason and that we could never make a “bad” choice, because our experience of God wouldn’t let us. Everything that happened was part of our journey towards a more fulfilled life. Each experience along the way was necessary to provide the knowledge and coping skills to be able to deal with the next experience. How we chose to live our life (or our experience) WAS GOD. Since we made our own decisions on how to live our lives, each and every one of us is in fact God. If we believe in ourselves, we can control our own destiny and live a purposeful life.

THAT was my definition of God. God was my own experience as I embarked on my life journey. Only I could control the ultimate outcome because only I had the power to control my own destiny. All my stops and knowledge gained along the way happened for the sheer purpose of providing the wisdom and strength necessary to grow as a human being on a journey called life.

Let’s fast forward to the present. To my current nightmare where I am trying to cope with the loss of my baby girl. If what I believed was true, then I allowed my baby girl to die. It means that I choose for her to die and I cannot acknowledge that is acceptable or that I am capable of making such a choice. My entire system of belief that carried me through life, gave me strength and helped to shape my true authentic self has gone to shit.

What do I believe in now? What kind of hope is there to strive for when you loose an innocent and perfect child? What kind of world or God allows this sort of monstrosity? Where does acceptance even begin to be OK?

This is just not acceptable. NOT! ACCEPTABLE!

Labels: Grief and Loss, Thinking Out Loud