When a casual friend called me aside and began asking about my schedule for the coming week, it took me a few minutes to realize that she just wanted to arrange to meet and talk.

"I'd like to talk to you about a personal matter," she began hesitantly, and then went ahead without waiting to set up a meeting.

"It's been eight years since my daughter died," she said, "and I can hardly get through March both her birthday and the anniversary of her death come in March. Does it ever get any easier?"

And she told her story tremulously, of a "routine" childhood disease that suddenly turned deadly, as an overwhelming infection literally destroyed her child's heart.

"I'm okay the rest of the year even at Christmas but this month is so hard. How is it for you? Does it get easier?"

Ah, the sad, sad questions that come back again and again.

The answers are not the same for everybody, I told her. Every one of us brings something different to the griefs in our lives, and what comforts one may haunt another, what evokes sweet memories may shatter another.

Our middle child died 22 years ago today. We mark the day almost casually, one of us saying to the other, "Today's April 7," and sometimes we spend a moment wondering out loud what it might have been like if our artist-daughter, the soft-spoken one, the motherly one, had lived to be nearly 40.

Knowing I'm a believer, people say, "Your faith in God got you through that time." I disappoint, I guess, when I reply that I don't remember feeling especially close to God then. I do think, however, that every experience, every event of my life until that point was brought to bear on getting through Alice's illness and death.

Certainly the loss of a child changes one forever, but that too becomes part of who we are. The pain went away a long time ago, and just left a wistful void in our lives, made more poignant, perhaps, by springtime.

Less than a week before Alice died, we drove around Fayette County just to absorb the beauty of the season: azaleas blazing, wisteria cascading through the trees, dogwoods beginning to spread tentative petals. I knew, and she knew, that she was seeing springtime here for the last time, and you could have convinced neither of us that heaven's would be more beautiful.

When I told my friend that it's different for everyone, I was thinking of a family whose teenaged son died in a car wreck years ago. The mother was a long time coming to terms with her loss, but what seemed to work for her was that she believed it was God's will.

Similarly, came a letter last fall from a man who said he believed the loss of a loved one was "ordained by God." To which everything in my being cries out, "No!"

My dictionary says "to ordain" means to decree, order, establish, enact, predetermine, predestine. The God I worship is too loving to ordain cruelty upon anyone.

But the God I worship created a universe in which the rules are absolutely even across the board.

When airplane controls burn out, airplanes fall. When a man gets drunk and drives into a tree, or when an inexperienced young person speeds, death and injuries happen.

When we eat the wrong foods and fail to exercise, our arteries clog up, and when arteries clog up in certain ways, sometimes hearts or brains stop working. And when certain changes take place in cells, for reasons not yet clear to us, cancer happens.

No exceptions. For me to expect that God will suspend the laws of the universe on my behalf is nothing less than arrogant. Certain events and certain choices have certain conequences. We don't always know the how and why.

All that we do know for certain is that God has promised to be there for us and that God suffers with us, even as we (in pale comparison) suffer with our child when her favorite doll breaks. We may even know it's going to happen, given her carelessness with her belongings, but we do not necessarily intervene.

We do, however, offer solace in her time of grief and assurance that eventually the pain will lessen and she'll come to a clearer understanding of why these things happen.

No, it does not comfort grieving parents to be told their child's illness and death were "God's will." But it is a comfort to know that God is there for us, grieving with us, consoling, loving, and full of grace.

In a perfect world -- in Eden -- there would be no cancer or arteriosclerosis or plane crashes or bad choices. This is not a perfect world, yet Easter's message still is this: We have a loving Father who has not forsaken us and never will, even this side of Eden.

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