A Heartbreaking Death

Karl Rove has written a lovely, and very moving account of the death of a young woman, the daughter of a friend of his. Her name was Elizabeth Sterling Oles O’Hara, she was 38, had twin children, and died of metastatic breast cancer. Here are some excerpts:

Sterling — “Sterl,” as everyone called her — was the eldest child of my close friends Julie and Pat Oles. Smart, warm, funny, kind and beautiful, she had a talent for developing strong friendships. She was the daughter I never had.

An all-state high-school lacrosse player, she’d gone to Southern Methodist University and interned for me in the White House. After college, she toiled in a nongovernmental organization supporting female entrepreneurs in Uganda, took a political job in Washington, and moved to New York to work at Fox News.

...In June 2019, she gave birth to twins — a boy and a girl — two months premature. Three days later, she was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer.

For six years she fought this horrible, vicious disease. Chemotherapy. Followed by surgeries. Followed by radiation. Then all over again, ad infinitum. Treatments worked at first. Hopes would rise, then be dashed. The cancer stalking her returned in a more virulent form.

Sterl suffered so much. Yet she found strength to raise her beautiful children, who have felt loved every day of their young lives, and to build a marriage that was solid and loving.

So it seemed all so unfair when I sat with her family and friends in a darkened hospital room. She had come to Los Angeles for new cancer treatments but instead contracted pneumonia, to which her weakened system had left her vulnerable.

Nurses quietly came and went as those who cherished Sterl sat amid a sea of flowers, occasionally whispering while one of them held her hand. Doctors politely said nothing could be done but make her comfortable and say our goodbyes.

Tuesday afternoon, the twins came. Their presence rallied Sterl; she held her babies, told them she loved them and that she would be their angel in heaven.

On Wednesday, her countenance changed. Gone were pain and fear. There was a calmness about her. Only family remained as friends waited down the hall. Early that evening, Sterling slipped peacefully into God’s arms....

Watching a young mother suffer and die can induce spiritual vertigo. Just reading about it raises questions. It did for Rove:

Her death has left me shaken. An ancient question hit me with tremendous force: Why does a loving and all-powerful God allow bad things to happen to good people, especially one so young? For answers I turned to “The Problem of Pain” by the 20th-century Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. But his book was too philosophical, too antiseptic, too distant. It provided little comfort.

Then I reached for “A Grief Observed,” Lewis’s journal after the death of his wife, Joy, at 45, also from cancer. There it was — the anger, fear, rejection and resentment I’ve felt the past two weeks. When told Joy was in God’s hands, Lewis replied that she’d been in God’s hands all the time, and he’d seen what they did. When he contemplated a restoration of his faith once her loss was behind him, he feared it would turn out to be another “house of cards.”

Lewis gradually regained his bearings. He came to recognize that God had given his wife life and was due praise for that great gift. He also admitted that the answer to his question about how God can allow good people to suffer is unknowable. God might be compassionately answering, “Child, you don’t understand.” He’s right; I don’t.

The slim 60-page volume is helping me process my grief. But I’m not finished grieving and won’t be for some time. Still, I know Sterl is home.... We miss you terribly, sweet Sterling. Rest in peace.

There are no answers that can satisfy a heart shattered by grief, but there's one thing that those of us at some remove from the pain felt by this woman's family and friends might keep in our minds.

If the God that Sterling and Lewis believed in is really there then there's very good grounds for hoping that Sterling, and everyone for whom we grieve, is not forever gone and that our separation from those we've lost is only temporary.

The Christian has the words of Jesus to cling to: "Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die." (John 11:25,26).

On the other hand, if God doesn't exist, if Jesus was deluded or a charlatan, if He was not really God incarnate, then we are completely without hope. Loved ones suffer and die, sometimes tragically, sometimes cruelly, and none of it has any more ultimate meaning than the death of an ant.

For the person without God, without hope, life is, as Shakespeare put it, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."