Mom, Cancer, Serendipity, and God

My mother has stage 3 pancreatic cancer.  She will soon leave this earth, but while her body is quickly fading, her mind and spirit are still there.  When she laughs, the twinkle in her eye is still hers.  She’s still there, and my family (and extended God-family) and I are relishing our remaining time with her.

We treated her to several days at Ocean City, Maryland, where we rented a penthouse condo overlooking the boardwalk, shops, and Atlantic Ocean below.  One evening, my sister and I put together a slide show to reminisce about past laughs, adventures, and tender moments.  In the middle of it, we were interrupted by a magnificent fireworks display – the kind you’d see on the 4^th of July in a medium-sized city – exploding above the beach directly in front of us and at exactly our altitude.  It was almost as if the display, which serendipitously began in the middle of an emotion-packed slide show, had been intentionally perfectly centered in our line of sight as we gazed out over the vast ocean.

My initial thought was: was this an amazing coincidence or actually God’s hand?  It happened on Monday, July 8.  It’s hard to explain why the fireworks would have happened at that exact location and in the middle of our slide show four days after the 4^th of July.  Obviously, far more impressive coincidences happen all the time.  Still, I think that God can and does intervene in the physical world.  However, given that God created the laws of physics – and has good reason to respect his own creation – then let’s assume that God’s power to meddle with the physical world is limited to “highly amplified quantum events” (HAQEs).  In other words, if God had actually intended to create an emotionally meaningful fireworks display to augment our slide show, then it would have been via the process of taking advantage of quantum events that get magnified chaotically to macroscopic outcomes; it would not have been via the process of unilaterally inserting fireworks into the beach, lighting them, etc.

By the way, physicists who take seriously the possibility of human free will usually make use of HAQEs (albeit with different terminology), since the ability to choose the outcome of a single quantum event (or even when a quantum event “collapses” into an outcome) can allow for free will without necessarily violating any known laws of physics. 

So let’s assume that God can manipulate quantum objects within the bounds of known physics – i.e., God can cause quantum collapse events and can choose the outcomes to the extent of their possibilities.  Here’s my question: could God have caused the fireworks display to happen at that exact place and precisely when we were doing the slide show?

Here’s a potential scenario to further elucidate the problem.  The fireworks themselves have to be planned well in advance: they have to be purchased and received; the pyrotechnics people must be hired for a particular day; the beach must be cleared; the fireworks must be mounted and connected to a control panel; and so forth.  Each one of these macroscopic events could have been (and to some extent probably was) ultimately caused by a HAQE, but how far back in time would we have to go to find the “source” HAQE for each of these macroscopic events?  For instance, perhaps it was the Mayor of Ocean City who determines exactly when the 4^th-of-July fireworks are set off, and perhaps she was particularly concerned about bad weather.  Weather is the quintessential example of chaotic amplifications of quantum events – indeed, the well-known “butterfly effect” is an example of how a butterfly’s wings can affect weather!  God could easily have invoked HAQEs to cause thunderstorms on all the nights leading up the 8^th, at which point the frustrated mayor would have decided it was finally time to light up the belated Independence Day display.

So, anyway, it’s an interesting physics question about the extent to which divine events or miracles are within the scope of the known laws of physics, a question that I will continue to ponder in the coming years.

And that’s what I initially pondered at the moment which was, as you recall, when a fireworks display interrupted a slide show tribute to my Mom.  Coincidence or not, there was a certain divine magic to it. 

I sat next to her and held her hand – the bony hand of a quickly decaying body – as we watched a loud, obnoxious, beautiful display that very well may have been meant for our eyes.  I felt overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation, the sadness I felt, the depth of meaning and emotion I was experiencing.  I felt an intense gratitude for the opportunity to experience such love for and from this woman, a silly giddiness at how simple everything seemed in that moment.  I felt intense pain and intense joy at the same time.  I squeezed her hand and sobbed deeply.

On one hand, how tragic that I would soon no longer taste her homemade cheesecake or hear one of her terrible jokes in which she starts laughing before reaching the punchline.  On the other hand, how wonderful that her cheesecakes and terrible jokes have brought me so much happiness in the past.  How dare God take this woman away from me.  Then again, as overwhelmingly sad as I feel, thank God for giving me a Mom whose loss would make me feel so overwhelmingly sad. 

Out of my joy is born sorrow, and vice versa.