Suffering
The Broken Circle Breakdown
Part One of a Seven-part Series
Most of our sufferings are little, niggling things, like colds and runny noses. We deal with them; they go away. These things don’t bring us to tears and existential despair. But some sufferings are overwhelming; they do not go away; they linger, or they get worse. Such sufferings may lead to physical or psychological crippling, or may end in death. When we boil it down, everything ends in death. Suffering and death are elephants in the room. We try to ignore them. But when something moves the elephants to action, they command our attention.
“The Broken Circle Breakdown” is a recent foreign film. It is not an easy watch. It is a long, hard look at the issue of suffering and death, which is why I’ve chosen it to introduce this series.
The events of the story take place in Belgium, approximately 2008. The main characters are Elise, her partner, Didier, and their child, Maybelle. Didier and Elise meet, fall in love, and make a life together on his small farm. Their life is idyllic and undisturbed until the day Elise announces she is three months pregnant. The prospect of responsibility for a young child is a daunting surprise for Didier. He runs off for a week-long drinking binge and some self-searching. Finally, he comes to terms with having a child in his life, and he returns to Elise, committed.
Maybelle is born, becomes a great joy to her parents and, over time, becomes crucial to their “circle”. When she is seven years old they discover she has cancer. The cancer is treated…but the treatment fails. A more severe treatment is employed, which involves bone marrow, blood replacement, and significant pain for the child. In the end this, too, fails and Maybelle dies.
Both parents are shaken to the core. They anguish over whether actions from their pasts, or how they raised Maybelle may have caused her cancer. Elise picks fights with Didier, accusing him of not wanting Maybelle in the first place. She drifts into a depression that is sometimes worse, sometimes better, but never resolved.
Didier, overtly more calm than Elise, finally releases his pent-up anger by means of a rambling rant. The rant is served up in the middle of a bluegrass performance in front of a large audience. He blames George Bush and all of his stripe who stood in the way of embryonic stem cell research, and who were therefore to blame for his daughter’s death. The concert is cancelled. Elise, already fragile, is unnerved by Didier’s irresponsible behavior. Perhaps she had been relying on his steadiness in her time of instability. At any rate, she can no longer bear to live in the house with its memories of her daughter. She can no longer bear to be with Didier. She leaves him.
Alone, Elise takes an overdose of pills. She lapses into a coma. Didier finds her and has her rushed to a hospital. Didier continues to visit Elise in the hospital, but eventually she, too, dies. The spirit of Elise walks over to Didier to whisper something in his ear. Didier gives no indication he hears, but there is a faint smile on Elise’s face, which seems to suggest that she knows she is communicating in a way not consciously recognized by him.
Didier seems revived. He turns to his bluegrass friends and finds peace in the joy of fellowship, the singing, and the playing together. The story ends on this relatively light note, though the sense of loss is palpable and the difficulty of loss unresolved. The story may suggest that pain and suffering are resolved through resurrection and reuniting in the spirit world.
Obsession over the loss of a loved one can lead to paralysis. This is quite common among those who grieve, though such reactions typically last only for hours or days. For some, the paralysis proves to be difficult to shake. It’s not easy to accept what has happened. It’s difficult to return to life again when someone else, hugely important, has been removed. The cruelty, barbarity, and power of death is terrifying. What will keep such a thing from happening again? In fact, isn’t it a certainty that such things will happen again? Is it better to withdraw and avoid giving value to relationships? These thoughts and many others will run through the minds of the bereaved. Providing answers is not easy. There may be as many answers as consultants.
Severe suffering often seems arbitrary… and sometimes it feels capricious. I’ll give a considerably less severe example from my life. One day, an eerie storm enveloped my city. Though it was nearly mid-day, outside was like night. A bolt of lightning hit a tree in front of my house, traveled part way down the tree, then followed the house’s service cable to the service panel, which it fried. Immediately after, a deafening thunderclap shook the area, shattering glass in a dozen buildings. My house was the worst affected.
It was not a happy day when I returned home to discover the chaos. We moved out of the house for five months in order for repairs to be completed. There was a lot of anxiety, and frustration, and effort required to get the place back to normal. It was also difficult not to take the experience personally. (What did I do to deserve this? Why did God single me out for this grand demonstration?)
Sometimes suffering is the result of someone else’s evil. What was the point of the deaths of the 12 million poor souls who were murdered by the Nazis, not to mention the millions of war casualties? I suspect very few of the people murdered by the Nazis did anything to deserve the evil brought on them.
Evil and suffering permeate this planet’s history. There are horrible stories: babies slaughtered in front of their mothers, people who had their bowels removed in public squares, the mass murders by Stalin and the Soviets, the mass murders by Mao, the mass enslavement of Africans, the ongoing murder of young black men by other black men in America’s cities, Muslim suicide bombers blowing up any and all who oppose their ideology. It would not be difficult to add pages of examples. Most of us are shielded from the worst horrors, thankfully, but these horrors represent only a small piece of the misery of the human condition. What we term “long and prosperous” lives can equally be characterized as slow, difficult degenerations unto death. The great horror is not so much the imaginative ways we find to kill one another as the fact that we all end up dead. There is no one who does not suffer dearly. There are no deaths that are not horrible.
The world is clearly not the way we would have it. Why is everything broken?
(End of Part One of a Seven-part Series)
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