It’s an age-old question, but one that has resurfaced for me just this week: Why do bad things happen to good people? We seem to have this internal notion that things should go our way. Bad things should happen to other people in other places that likely deserve it. However, any of us who have lived any kind of normal life in the real world realize that good people endure hardships at the same pace or even greater than the people we deem “bad”. In an otherwise normal childhood, I saw plenty of suffering experienced by some of the best people in the world – at least in my little corner of the world. It’s not a new theme in my life to see good people suffer, but a recent tragedy by an old acquaintance once again has me looking to Heaven and asking, “Why?”.
In my freshman year of college in Paragould, Arkansas (of all places), I became instant friends with a couple of sophomores at a college who weirdly took pride in being “the only two-year Church of Christ school in the nation”. Mike and Josh were musicians who played guitar and sang Country and Southern Rock in local dives from the Ozarks to the Delta. Taking college classes that were scarcely more demanding than our rural high schools had been, there was plenty of time for other things – work and play.
Mike and Josh along with friend Chuck delivered pizzas for a local joint, so naturally I joined them and soon learned all the streets of Paragould and memorized the addresses of the good tippers (and the bad ones for that matter). Mike and Josh used the same charm that made them popular on campus to our advantage so that we could get away with having fun (having fun = breaking rules) at work. The restaurant gave free meals to local cops, so we could speed all over town without so much as looking in our rearview mirrors.
At this pizza joint was another driver named Brianna. She was from rural, Podunk northeast Arkansas who unlike the guys and me actually had this job as a primary source of income. Not that any of the four of us who soon transitioned from the dorm to our own apartment had it made. None of us had parents who were sending us hundred dollar bills on a weekly basis, but all of us had the assurance that if we made decent grades and promised the loan companies their money back that we’d be okay. Brianna on the other hand was only a year or two older than us, but instead of spending her money on cell phones (this is back when they were optional), nice clothing, road-trips, and concerts she spent her money for bills – rent, medical bills, helping take care of her ill mother and her younger school-aged siblings.
Brianna didn’t dress or act like a college-aged girl, but rather like someone from another time and place. Her car was never clean, dusty and dirty from the rural Crowley's Ridge rural roads, and I never remember her dressing up or even fixing her hair. Three of the four of us guys were Christian college boys, but we were still boys in our late teens. Old enough to know better, but still too young to care was our unspoken mantra. We kind of had this frenemy relationship with Brianna. We were still immature enough to make fun of or pick on people like Brianna who were different and such easy targets, yet good enough guys to befriend people who weren’t like us. Bad boys trying to be good, or perhaps good guys trying to be bad. Anyway, thus began our year of working with Brianna. We’d pick on her until she would scream at us and cuss us out. She played by the rules and respected the policies, a real fire-marshall type from elementary school by personality. This was a job she needed, while we did as we pleased because we were college kids who were only passing through and if fired could have cared less or would have glorified it as a badge of honor.
We would accuse her not pulling her weight and instead of learning to ignore us she would deliver a dissertation on how she had actually done her job correctly while we had fubar-ed it. When it was her turn to take orders on the company phone, we would prank call her from our cell phones making up sexually perverse names and addresses. I can still see her storm out of the back door and scold us with her backwoods, country phrases. We would howl with laughter and our managers would pretend to get on to us, but enjoyed the show as much as we did. We weren’t always asses to her, though. We would hang out with her and even had her over to our apartment for barbecues. In our mischief we immaturely saw it as a win-win, she gets friends out of the deal and we take a little self-satisfaction out of being good guys, but we also did it for the entertainment. Brianna was very serious and talked like a philosopher – a rural philosopher, that is. We would engage her in what she thought was going to be a “deep” conversation, only for one of us to lead this to ask her about her love life. Her favorite insult was to call one of us a pig. “You boys are pigs – swine! You dis-gust me!” We’d just fall out laughing knowing that we had set her up. I can still hear the cadence of her voice and how she would storm off hurling insults over her shoulder at us only later to apologize because she felt guilty for using that kind of language, though we certainly warranted it. If the Lord held that against her, then it's hopeless for the rest of us. I'm sure we deserved it, but doubt that we should have enjoyed it so much.
One by one the four of us moved from college to career – counselor, teacher, physical therapist, and coach – while Brianna kept delivering pizzas in what looked like the world’s third oldest car. Brianna took a night class here or there and worked for years towards a degree that we more or less just drove past a university that tossed a diploma through our truck windows as we cruised by. Well, remembering plenty of all-nighters and loans that might be paid off by the time I’m dead or Jesus returns, it wasn’t quite as easy as the drive-by I suggested, but in comparison to all of the obstacles that Brianna faced, none of which she brought upon herself, it’s probably a fitting comparison.
Looking back, the person I was freshman year and the summer that followed is hardly recognizable. I thought then that those guys would be my best friends for life, that we would continue to live near each other and continue with our mild mischief-making and having the time of our lives. Life had different plans. I talk to them irregularly and see them even less and then only on random occasions. Gradually, my friends and I dare say theirs, too, became a different kind of friend depending upon lifestyle and career. I think back to that year occasionally and mostly fondly, but it seems like the distant past when I didn’t have a clue who I was or what I wanted out of this life. If I say I only occasionally think of the guys, it’s safe to say that I haven’t really thought of Brianna since my last day in Paragould in Summer ’99.
Last week I received a facebook message from another girl from the pizza place that other than facebook I haven’t seen or heard from since the Paragould pizza days. The message was something along the lines of: Just thought you would want to know that after a very long battle with cancer, Brianna died. It turns out that she bravely fought breast cancer for six years. I was flushed with guilt. Guilt for teasing her mercilessly. Guilt for being healthy while this girl who already had a difficult, hopeless life got cancer. Guilt for never having talked to her sincerely about the things that mattered in life. I remembered that she was a Christian and I found peace in that. I wondered how many fellow-Christians she had known who had looked down upon her for not looking right, not dressing right, not being from the right family. I wondered how many health and wealth preachers had shamed her for her fate in life. I became judgmental thinking of the preachers who scream health and wealth but wouldn't voluntarily spend a tax dollar for a poor soul like Brianna to have actual health insurance that might have saved her young life! I bet like the rest of us from this evangelical stronghold that she had tried the health and wealth/name it and claim it approach, but while putting herself through school and being a primary-caregiver and breadwinner for her sick mother and her younger siblings, she probably didn’t have the time, energy, or funds to do the latest televangelist’s 7 steps to a better life. Brianna’s was not a rags-to-riches-Jesus-wants-you-to-be-healthy-and-drive-a-beemer story. Hers was an “all my life I’ve had to fight” kind of story . . . and just like that she got cancer and died. Why? This news and all it stirred up in me really brought me down. I’m so glad I got the rest of the story and with it a little hope.
I found out later that her last wish was to meet Dolly Parton and through some organization this dream came true a week to the date before she died. I am not making this up or stealing this from Designing Women or the Southern Gothic playbook, but this is God’s honest truth. Surrounded by friends and family and on some good pain meds and practically escorted to the Pearly Gates by earth-angel Dolly Parton, Brianna left this world of pain, sorrow, heartache, cancer, hypocrites, poverty, and other ills and entered Paradise. It strikes me as odd and strangely very fitting that this poor girl from Nowhere, Arkansas who fought and fought to be the person the rest of us wanted her to be is now completely sorrow-free, safe in the arms of Jesus while the rest of us who never quite accepted her are still down here trying to be people that we are not, rats in a maze, rabbits chasing dangling carrots. My, how the tables have turned. God bless, you, Brianna! How beautiful Heaven must be! Welcome Home, you beautiful person! Welcome home.
