Through the miracle of the internet I was reconnected with a neighbor whose family I barely knew years and years ago. Never mind that we’d exchanged but a handful of words even when our apartments shared a wall! In my first flush of Faceook enthusiasm I happily accepted his friend request which was followed by near-instantaneous irritation as my wall filled up with hand-wringing over the infiltration of secularists into society as well as  paeans to the likes of Rush, Hannity and Limbaugh. My finger itched above the delete button more times than I care to admit but I never pressed it, in large part because he’d just become a father and I go all melty inside at images of babies whose ejecta I am not responsible for tidying.

And this child…well. From the very first picture you could tell there was something special about him. He looked otherworldly, like the offspring of an archangel and a high-elf, conceived in the æther and yanked into the everyday world only very unwillingly. He was utterly beautiful. He just didn’t seem quite right.

I wish I could say that the impression I garnered from his hours-old pictures was wrong. I wish, despite my abhorrence for his father’s politics, that he was now a toddler babbling and darting with the energy of five cocker spaniels rolled into a twenty-pound package of sticky enthusiasm. Instead he has endured one hospitalization after another, one surgery after another to the point that every problem fixed seems to set off a chain reaction of three more. It is heartbreaking to watch even from such a distance as is provided by Facebook. I read my acquaintance’s updates and the responses of his friends, almost to a one referencing the power of prayer and the certain knowledge that faith will get them — all of them — through.

What do you do in a situation like this? What can any non-praying person do? I took my fallback approach which was to match restaurants in his current hometown to ones also in mine; finding a suitable candidate I bought a gift card and sent it with a note to the address attached to his Facebook profile. When ill the last thing I want to do is plan a meal, cook a meal, then clean up after a meal and I can only assume that others feel the same — only a billion times more when it’s not the flu but is instead a perilously sick baby.

I completely forgot about it until, during a week in which I noted that the child had been admitted to the hospital twice for issues which seemed increasingly terrifying, my acquaintance messaged me his thanks for the gift. How are you doing, I asked him. Is there anything at all I can do to help?

“Not really,” was his answer, and quickly was it followed by the stark message that he was having trouble keeping faith when everything that could go wrong was doing so, spectacularly. “I don’t think life will ever be enjoyable again, for any of us,” he said, and even insulated by hundreds of miles and years of separation and the whole goddamn internet, my heart broke.

How he carries on I do not know. He works in a church. His entire family are believers. I’m absolutely certain that they’re all praying their hearts out for parents and child but is anyone close to him ready to hear that he’s losing faith in God? What would they say if he did?

Like I could do any better. It’s terribly unfair, for all of you, was the best I could manage, although it crossed my mind to be more blunt. Pray if it helps, I wanted to say, but a blank and pitiless universe will give back no solace. God isn’t ignoring you, or at least he is not ignoring you any more than he ignores anyone. But I doubt he was ready to hear that. What Christian parent to a gravely ill child would be? And how monstrous would I have been to suggest it?

A god who will let a sick baby suffer or a god who has forsaken us all equally. Cold comfort in either option, but every so slightly less cold in the latter.

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Cold comfort for change