BebeSnout:
                Where Thinking Happens

       

 

The Necessity of Why?
After heartbreak, I have only one question.

One day it happened that I had lost too much. I crossed the line from being able to justify everything to understanding nothing. And when I emerged from that deer-in-the-headlights moment of glazed bewilderment, I was faced with one overarching question: Why?

Each morning, as soon as I open my eyes, the question is there. It’s so clichéd, goddamn it, but there it is. Last winter, it was more tempting for me to lie in bed than it was to face a cold colorless day, and I would burrow down deep inside the question instead. Now it is the most gorgeous springtime, the birds frantic with song and the sun screaming yellow. Thus, it is a bit easier to force myself out of bed and into acts of busy-ness that make the wondering less insistent. Still, I ask that question.

I do not ask Why me? because I do not believe in such a question. I find it arrogant and cloying and clueless. After all, I read the paper and watch the world. There are children born without faces and women gang-raped in ravaged countries and people I know even now dying of cancer. Furthermore, I survived certain things, and survivors know better than to feel singled out. No, I only want to know purely Why? and sometimes I blurt the question outright into any quiet place I inhabit. It is not a plaintive whine, this Why?  Last winter,  when my new pain was sharp as an unused knife, it was a lamentation. But now it is forthright: Why?  

My need to know Why? is an algebraic craving; I am given the solution, z, but I must still figure out the x and y (no pun intended). So I pore over my journals, kept for 25 years; watch old home movies and comb through photo albums; read old letters from lovers and friends; examine my face in the mirror for clues, read the philosophers, and still I seek Why?

Don’t mistake my rapacious inner exploration as self-blame. Not entirely. I am too healthy to believe that I hold every key. Yet I also recognize the exquisite equation of action and consequence, what some call sin and others call free will or responsibility. I am often made breathless by the many connections between the deeds and outcomes of our lives. So knowing this I am plunged back into my search, back into my questioning: Why? It is inevitable that I should look within.

But I also look without.

When I was younger, I never understood the need people had to sue others. I thought it always selfish, whiny, weak. Now, I occasionally respect it. For in an impersonal society, suing someone or something (like a corporation) makes people look more closely at the complicated web of thought-action-result implicit in a given situation. Lawsuits force some acknowledgment of responsibility, even if the key perpetrator turns out in the end to be bad timing or weird weather.

Sometimes I fantasize about suing as a way to settle my question adequately. I think of suing the gynecologist who told me breezily there was no reason to freeze my eggs even though three years later I would suddenly and prematurely enter menopause. (Now my eggs are all gone.) I think of suing the opthamologist who sneered at the suggestion I had a brain tumor, which I did. His dismissal of my concern could have cost me my life; it didn’t, but it could have.  I think of these things, but I always come back to my own weakness—for not simply demanding from such people, Why?  In the end, I realize that suing someone else is often a failure of courage.  And cowardice is itself a form of irresponsibility.

People say, Things just happen, but I know this is not true. I think what they mean is, There are causes for all of this, but you’ll never fully unwind them, and it is so complicated you will be overwhelmed if you try. But I know better. We have been given the question, the first human question, so that we will ask it. And so I do. There are always many answers; I just want a few.  

copyright 2001 Suzanne Moyers