Dawn's Notes
When Bad Things Happen... - September 2025
by Dawn Phelps, RN/LMSW
Emotions ran high for Rabbi Harold Kushner and his wife Suzette on November 19, 1966, ranging from jubilation as they celebrated the birth of a baby daughter to disbelief and dismay twelve hours later when a pediatrician told them their three-year-old son Aaron would not live beyond his teen years.
Aaron was diagnosed with progeria—an extremely rare disease known as “rapid aging disease” that strikes one child in every seven or eight million. By twelve months of age, Aaron’s hair was thinning, and the signs of aging were already setting in. He never grew taller than an average three-year-old, and by the age of ten, his body was physiologically the same as a man in his sixties. Aaron died in his mother’s arms two days after his fourteenth birthday—he only weighed 25 pounds.
The Kushners’ tragedy is only one of many horrible things that happens to thousands of innocent people every day—accidents, natural disasters, senseless homicides, and agonizing illnesses. Bad things strike good people as well as the not-so-good.
The senseless illness and death of Aaron almost shook Rabbi Kushner’s faith in God and sent him on a search for answers. About four years later, Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People was published. (After the death of my husband Ralph, I bought a copy of the book and found it helpful—my husband was one of the “good people.”)
Kushner’s book has offered meaning and comfort to countless other parents and adults who experienced the too-soon death of a loved one. From Kushner’s pain, words of hope and comfort have emerged, making something good come from the rabbi’s heart-breaking experience.
According to Kushner, “Nature is morally blind,” while “God stands for justice, for fairness, and compassion.” He continues, “Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. That is why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone.”
“I don’t believe,” Kushner argues, “that an earthquake is an ‘act of God.’ The act of God is the courage of people to rebuild their lives after the earthquake, and the rush of others to help them in whatever way they can.” His book points out that sometimes things seem to happen for no reason at all, that randomness just happens.
In his book, Rabbi Kushner told about the kindnesses his son Aaron received before his death. A family member got Aaron a baseball autographed by the Boston Red Sox team, and children played with Aaron in spite of his aging appearance. “People like that were ‘God’s language,’ His way of telling our family that we were not alone,” Rabbi Kushner stated.
If you have experienced the death of someone you love, you probably had no control over what happened, but you do have some control over your future. Even though life may not make sense and may seem unfair, you can still make choices to try to live your life meaningfully, even in an unpredictable world.
There are many famous quotes in the story of “Lord of the Rings” that refer to bad things happening. Frodo, one of the main characters, says, “I wish none of this had happened.” Then wise old Gandalf replies, “So do all who live to see such times. . . . All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us” just as Rabbi and thousands of others have had to do after their losses.
Twenty-four years later, our nation still grieves for the almost 3,000 lives lost on September 11, 2001. That is the day that terrorists crashed planes into the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington D.C., and into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing almost 3,000 innocent people.
Like Rabbi Kushner and the families of those who died on 9-11, none of us want to experience the pain of losing someone we love, and we will probably never understand exactly why bad things happen. So the challenge is to make our lives as meaningful as possible from this point on just as many others, including families of 9-11 have done. We can “decide what to do with the time that is given to us.”
Call about the next "Living Life after Loss" Group at:
Meadowlark Hospice
709 Liberty, Clay Center, Kansas
(785) 632-2225
Dawn Phelps, RN/LMSW, Group Facilitator