How Death Can Teach Us to Make Meaning From the Inexplicable
Learning to Embrace the Consoling Power of Coincidence
I kept a large green votive candle burning as a form of prayer during the last six months of my niece’s life. The eldest of my brother’s four daughters, Amelia was only thirty-six. She’d spent her last decade tending, advising, loving, supervising, and comforting teens in a group home of last resort, and she had a toddler of her own. Now fighting a virulent form of breast cancer, Amelia was always in my thoughts, even though I rarely saw her in person.
She lived in San Diego, just two hours away from me, but she didn’t invite me to visit. Her terminal diagnosis two years earlier had prompted her turn to evangelical Christianity, and she was too conscious of my agnosticism (which she’d previously shared) to ignore it. I was allowed to come and help care for her baby daughter when Amelia went across country for treatment, but for months we’d crossed paths without meeting. Then, one day in October, I was scheduled to speak at a book event in San Diego.
That morning, before leaving the house, I set the green votive candle burning inside its glass sleeve in the kitchen sink, for safety. My niece was in the hospital.
