Thank you

   February 14, Valenentine's Day, would have been my 19th wedding anniversary. We got married at Bookcliff Country Club in Grand Junction, CO. We had planned to get married in May, after I graduated at what was then Mesa State College. I had an apartment and Jack was going to live with me until then. But our parents didn't like the idea of us "living in sin" for 6 months. So it was decided that instead of a May wedding, when things were green, in full bloom, and it was warm outside, we would bow to our parents' wishes and marry on Valentine's Day. After all Jack would never forget.
   For nearly 19 years Jack gave me all of his love and devotion. For that I say Thank You. I will forever not know if he knew how much that love and devotion was appreciated and reciprocated.  The last two days of his life I don't remember us even touching. How I long for his touch now that he's not here. That is one of my biggest regrets.
   In a strange way I also have to thank Jack for dying too. For nearly three years before his death I had been having a smelly discharge. It made me embarrassed to go out in public. All the doctors that I saw in Rock Hill, including the surgeon that did my colonostomy and the colonoscopy that started the whole thing, said that there was nothing they could do and I would just have to find ways to mitigate it. It wasn't until I came back to Grand Junction and was referred to Dr. Steven O'Day that I finally found hope. During my initial meeting with him not only did my medical history spew from my mouth but so did my recent loss and my frustration with the discharge which caused wounds on my backside that wouldn't heal. Both my mom and I were so relieved to be heard that by the end of that meeting we were both blubbering messes. He must've wondered what he had gotten himself in to. But he told me that there was a solution to my problems and that he was going to find it. I believed him.

   It's not a matter of if I believe in God. All I have to do is look at nature in all of it's diversity and I know there is a God. And as a Christian I believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. My question is whether he/they are benevolent, kind, and loving as my fervently Catholic mom and stepdad and my other, Protestant, family members believe. Or is He a son-of-a-bitch who doesn't give a damn?
   I can't talk to them because they will argue to their dying breaths that God is benevolent and He/they are watching everything that happens to me and all of mankind.  If God is so good then why does He allow, not only my own, suffering?
    I have had hydrocephalus and spina bifida since birth. I have also had over 150 surgeries in a little over 45 years. I have also known of children who have had cancers or other diseases that require multiple rounds of chemo only to kill them, painfully, in the end. What did they do? What did I do to deserve this?  What did people in Africa  and other places around the world do to deserve years of drought, starvation and disease?
   When I was a kid I believed in a benevolent God. When I was a teenager I believed He was a son-of-a-bitch who delighted in my suffering. I would pray fervently for my I.Vs to last and not infiltrate my veins so I wouldn't be painfully stuck multiple times. They never did. I would pray fervently that I would die during surgery. I always woke up and and cursed Him. I prayed fervently for God to take Charles Manson and not a good man like my father. My father died when I was 15 and Charles Manson is still in prison. Now, as an adult I want so much to believe in a benevolent Being, but I have been through and been made aware of too much suffering.