“I whispered a litany of hate. I breathed hatred at my life, my job, and especially this place¾this fucking house of horrors. I hated the nuns with their pious smiles and the crucifixes with their useless, dying saviors; I hated the nurses who regarded the chaplains with barely disguised condescension and the doctors who barely regarded us at all; I hated the other chaplains who might have been able to do this without falling apart. I hated the whole goddamned world in that moment, all its sadness and death. But mostly I hated the God that let a baby be a corpse, a baby who would have been born to possibly the most worthy mother on the planet. What does John 3:16 mean to that mother in that moment? What use is God in the face of absolute hopelessness and irreparable sorrow?”
Norm saw Katrina stretched out before a monstrous glacier of other people’s pain. It rolled over her day after day, piercing her skin¾shards of anguish becoming imbedded along with jagged strips of bitter grief. Fragments of human tragedy attached to her like angry, stinging barnacles.
Little universes were dying and being born at the same time on her face. Even as she stabbed at God with her anger, Norm marveled at how much simple goodness shone in her eyes, an empathy deep and ancient as the sea, inextricable, unconquerable.
