Why? The Question that Refuses to Go Away.

Why? Why her? Why did she deserve to have a tumour? I have asked myself these and other questions constantly since Evie died 2 years ago. There is no answer of course, but the question itself never leaves me. Even if there was an answer I doubt very much that it would quieten the noise in my head. It would just create other questions.

It is all part of the whole ‘acceptance’ argument I suppose. Accept that you will never find that answer and you are a step closer to living with the grief in a way that doesn’t split your soul. The type of person that I am means that I am always seeking answers. Answers to the trivial and the meaningful. Why did Evie love going to the Bishop’s Palace in St David’s so much? We had to visit it every time we came to Pembrokeshire. Why did she choose to help others so much from such an early age? And of course, why did she have to die so young?

‘Why?’ is a question that raises it’s ugly head every day when I watch the news. Why is a wonderful human being gone, and yet some seriously rotten people remain? It’s there every day when I wake. Her death, and the deaths of thousands of children every year, is fundamentally wrong. When we look around us at the wider world, we see the unfairness of it all. The question makes me deeply sad and angry all at the same time. But as hard as I look, I can’t find an answer, and so in turn I can’t find peace. I know full well that if I can put the question out of my mind, my own life will be easier. But to do that, it feels like I am abandoning Evie in some way, not doing her life justice. it somehow feels as if I owe it to her to understand.

Our nature as human beings is to find reason behind events, find someone or something to blame, which is why the ‘Why?’ question is so important. If I can answer the question, maybe I can blame Evie’s death on someone or something else, so it wasn’t my fault. We will never know why that first cancerous cell took hold and grew. We will never know how it got there, or what the trigger was, if indeed there was a trigger for it to start growing. The neurology team said it was most likely a chromosome fault. All that does is ping up another ‘Why?’ question. People have said that her death was no-one’s fault and that is true, as is the fact that it couldn’t have been avoided, but the ‘Why?’ question still remains.

Finding an answer to ‘Why?’ is incredibly complex from a mental health perspective because, like Evie’s cancer itself, it is has infiltrated so much of my mind. Would finding an answer bring peace? I doubt it very much. Will I just accept that there isn’t an answer to be found? Probably not, because to do so would feel like a betrayal of Evie. It makes no sense, but in a strange way, having a question to answer gives me a focus, something to cling onto; it means that I haven’t given up on her. It’s yet another double-edged sword.

So I will continue to look for the answer, knowing that it cannot be found.