When I was sixteen my mother got breast...

When I was sixteen my mother got breast cancer, which spread. I prayed to god to let her suffering be small, but her suffering seemed to me quite extreme. She was in bad pain for half a year, and then terrible pain for much of a full year. The ulcerations on her body were horrifying to her and to me. Her last few weeks she slipped into a semiconscious state, which allowed her, unfortunately, to wake up for a few minutes at a time and to have a full awareness of her pain and her fear of death. She was able to recognize me, and she would try to cry, but she was unable to; and to speak, but she was unable to. I think she wanted me to get her new doctors; she never really accepted that her disease was going to kill her, and she thought in her panic that her doctors must be incompetent and that new ones could magically cure her. Then, thank goodness, he went into a full coma. A nurse who I knew to be Catholic assured me that everything would be done to keep her alive - a dubious comfort. Happily, the doctor was not Catholic, or if he was, not doctrinaire, and they didn't use extraordinary means to keep her alive; and she finally died after several more weeks in her coma. Now there are, I'm sure, far worse deaths- terrible burnings, tortures, plague, pestilence, famine; Christ on the cross even, as sister likes to say. But I thought my mother's death was hard enough, and I got confused as to why I had been praying and to whom. I mean, if prayer was really this sort of button you pressed- admit you need the Lord, then He stops the suffering- then why didn't it always work? Or ever work? And when it worked so-called, and our prayers were supposedly answered, wasn't it as likely to be chance as God? God always answers our prayers, you said, He just sometimes says no. I became angry at myself, and by extension at you, for ever having expected anything beyond randomness from the world. And while I was thinking these things, the day that my mother died, I was raped. Now I know that's really too much, one really loses all sympathy for me because I sound like I'm making it up or something. But bad things happen all at once, and this particular day on my return from the hospital I was raped by some maniac who broke into the house. He had a knife and cut me up some. Anyway, I don't want to really go into the experience, but I got really depressed for about five years. Somehow the utter randomness of things- my mother's suffering, my attack by a lunatic- this randomness seemed intolerable. I blamed myself of course, for letting all of this get to me..... But now, I think it is childish to look for blame, part of the randomness of things is that there is no one to blame; but basically I think everything is your fault Sister.