Meaning In Suffering

There's a before and after, and the line between them is thinner than a spider's thread, barely visible until you're standing on the other side. Before, I believed suffering was a problem to be solved, a wound to be bandaged. As a nun, I tended to the sick with hands that never trembled, convinced my presence meant something, that my labor earned grace. Then I married, and for thirty years, I poured my energy into making life smooth for my dear one—fixing meals, smoothing worries, believing love was measured in how much I could lift from his shoulders.

The after began in a hospice room, the air thick with the scent of antiseptic and fading lavender. He was so small in the bed, his hand cool in mine. I’d been trying to fix the unfixable, rearranging pillows, whispering promises I couldn’t keep. Then, for the first time, I stopped. I simply held his hand. The silence wasn’t empty—it was full. Full of the sound of his breath, the weight of his skin, the quiet hum of the world outside the window. I didn’t do anything. I just was.

And in that stillness, something shifted. I wondered sometimes, as I’d once wondered about the meaning of the rosary beads in my pocket, What if the suffering itself isn’t the enemy? What if it’s the very ground where grace takes root? There’s a kind of grace in that, I realized—holding space for the unfixable, not as failure, but as sacred offering.

After that, I stopped rushing to mend. I learned to sit with the ache in my own heart, to notice the way morning light spills across the kitchen table as I make tea, the way rain on the windowpane feels like a whispered secret. I no longer seek to fix the suffering of the world or my own. I simply witness it. I wonder if this is what the nuns meant by abiding—not waiting for it to end, but finding the holy in its very shape.

Now, when I wake at dawn, I don’t rush to the day. I watch the light grow, and I think of his hand in mine, the quiet truth that sometimes, the deepest meaning isn’t found in the fixing, but in the holding.

— Gertrude Carroll, still wondering