Why, though?

There’s a one-word question people often ask that rarely elicits a concise answer—that question is: Why?

Have you ever asked your teen why they did something they shouldn’t have or didn’t do something they were supposed to do? If so, chances are that the answer you received was, “I dunno.”  Your first instinct may tell you that they’re being a smartass or maybe just giving you a lazy reply, but if you think about it, how many times have you asked yourself the same question about something and found that you struggled to come up with a better answer? This is especially true when you want to know why something happened the way it did.

There have been so many times in my life that I wondered why this or that happened. Sometimes, it took months, or even years, before I got the answer, but even then, the explanation seemed to be one I had concocted for the time being, possibly just to help me make it through something painful. See, no one ever gave me explanations, and that’s because, for the most painful things we experience, nobody has explanations.

I guess the first time I struggled with the need to know “Why?” was when my mom died. I was young, and she was only forty-two, so I couldn’t understand why God took her. It just didn’t make sense. Why would he take her away when I still needed her? That’s one I still haven’t figured out, and until it’s my time to go, I probably never will.

But there have been many other “Whys?” in my life, and even though God never appeared before me to give me the answer directly, he eventually showed me…

After my father passed away, I discovered that he was not my biological father. My sister had always suspected that his friend, our neighbor, was my “real” father, and a DNA test later proved her correct. When I got the test results back, my initial reaction was shock. After the shock came denial and then depression; after all, my mere existence had been a lie. For over forty years, I believed I was one person, and within seconds, one little email told me I was someone else. I realized that every belief I had about myself was based upon something untrue. I’d heard the term “identity crisis” but had never understood what it meant; now, I did.

My first question, of course, was, “Why?”  Why didn’t anyone ever tell me? My dad, my mom, and my biological father were all dead, so there was nobody left who could answer that question. Over time, though, I learned the answer: nobody ever told me because I wasn’t emotionally equipped at the time to know—I couldn’t have handled knowing. By the time I found out, I had a few years of sobriety under my belt, yet even then, I struggled. Also, with this newfound information came some half-brothers. I’d known them my whole life (remember, they were neighbors), but up until a few years before the DNA test, I was still drinking—a lot—so my lifestyle wasn’t a great foundation to build any new relationships on. What I wanted to know wasn’t revealed to me until it was supposed to be.

There are so many other “whys” that took seemingly forever to get answers to. Why were certain people brought into my life? And why did some of them stay while others left? And regarding the ones who left, why were they here to begin with? What was their purpose in my life, and what was mine in theirs? Some of those “whys” remain unanswered, but there is one that I’ve finally figured out the answer to, and it’s the only one that matters:

The question:  Why did this happen?

The answer:  Because it did, and knowing the reason (if there even is one) won’t change a thing.

Some things, like the death of a loved one, will never make sense, and even if someone could tell us “why,” the answer wouldn’t lessen the grief we feel. Other times, the “why” behind things only comes to light once we have healed and moved on because it’s only then that we can look at where we stand now, compare it to where we stood then, and understand the reason that particular path was chosen for us. In the meantime, we just have to trust that if it is meant for us to know why, one day, we will.

So, the next time you ask your kid why they did or didn’t do something and they reply with a shrug, try and think of all the times you didn’t know the answer to that question and ask yourself whether the answer really even matters.