The Story I Told My Son About an Earthquake
Last night, Arash couldn’t sleep because he’d seen a news report about an earthquake that killed thousands of people. “Why would God let that happen?” he asked, his eleven-year-old mind struggling to fit random catastrophe into his understanding of how the world works.
I found myself doing what humans have done for millennia when confronted with inexplicable suffering: I began to tell him a story.
Not the story of tectonic plates and geological processes—though that story exists and has its own truth. I told him the story of how sometimes the earth needs to shift and settle, like how we toss and turn in our sleep when we’re growing, and how even when terrible things happen, people find ways to help each other, to rebuild, to create beauty from brokenness.
Was this story true? Not in the way that seismology is true. But it was true in the way that mattered to a child lying awake at 2 AM, trying to make sense of a world where good people suffer for no reason.
This is what we do. This is what makes us human. When reality becomes unbearable, we wrap it in narrative until we can carry it.
I think about this when I remember my mother’s death. The medical facts were straightforward: organ failure, complications from diabetes, a body that simply wore out. But the story I tell myself—and the story that allows me to continue living—is more complex. It includes her peaceful final moments, the way she seemed to recognize my voice even when she couldn’t respond, the sense that she held on just long enough to say goodbye to each of us in her own way.
Did these things happen exactly as I remember them? Does it matter? The story I’ve constructed around her death allows me to carry grief without being destroyed by it, to find meaning in loss without pretending the loss wasn’t real.
We are storytelling animals trapped in a universe that offers no inherent plot. Events happen—birth, death, love, loss, earthquakes, miracles—but they happen without narrative structure, without clear beginnings and endings, without the kind of meaning that would make them easy to understand. So we do what our species has always done: we impose story on chaos, we create meaning from randomness, we build bridges of narrative across chasms of incomprehension.
Every culture has creation myths not because ancient people were scientifically ignorant, but because the scientific story—gases condensing, particles colliding, DNA replicating—doesn’t answer the questions that keep us awake at night. Where did I come from? Why am I here? What happens when I die? The story of stellar formation and biological evolution is accurate, but it’s not sufficient. It tells us how but not why, what but not who.
So we tell stories that do both. Stories where we are not accidents but intentions, not random occurrences but meaningful participants in some larger narrative. These stories may not be scientifically verifiable, but they are psychologically necessary.
I see this in the way Happy talks about our marriage. She could describe it factually: two people who met through mutual friends, experienced compatible brain chemistry, made a legal commitment, and have cohabited successfully for fifteen years. But the story she tells—about destiny, about finding her other half, about love that was meant to be—transforms a series of fortunate coincidences into a meaningful narrative that justifies the daily work of loving someone even when they’re difficult.
Which version is true? Both. Neither. The question misses the point.
Stories aren’t lies we tell ourselves to avoid reality. Stories are the tools we use to make reality livable. They’re the software that runs on the hardware of human consciousness, the interface that allows us to interact with experiences too vast, too complex, too painful to process directly.
This is why we find the same stories appearing across cultures that had no contact with each other. The hero’s journey, the flood myth, the chosen one, the sacrifice that saves the community—these aren’t historical reports but psychological necessities. They’re the shapes that meaning takes when human consciousness encounters universal experiences: growth, loss, responsibility, redemption.
When people say “everything happens for a reason,” they’re not making a metaphysical claim about cosmic predestination. They’re engaging in the essential human activity of story-making, of finding narrative threads that connect apparently random events into patterns that the mind can grasp and the heart can bear.
I think about my father, who died when I was twenty-three and still believed that life would eventually make sense if I just paid attention long enough. His death was sudden, meaningless, unfair—a good man taken too early for no reason I could understand. The facts were brutal and simple.
But over the years, I’ve built a story around his death that includes the lessons I learned from losing him young, the way his absence shaped my approach to fatherhood, the possibility that his influence continues through the values he instilled and the memories he left. This story doesn’t make his death good or necessary or part of some divine plan. It makes his death meaningful, which is different and equally important.
Stories don’t change facts, but they change what facts mean. They don’t eliminate suffering, but they provide frameworks for suffering that allow us to continue functioning when pure facts would paralyze us with despair.
This is why Arash needed a story about earthquakes rather than just geological data. His developing mind was trying to construct a worldview that would allow him to feel safe enough to sleep, secure enough to grow, hopeful enough to engage with a world that includes both beauty and catastrophe. The scientific explanation would have satisfied his curiosity but might have increased his anxiety. The story I told him provided a way to hold knowledge and hope simultaneously.
We tell stories because we are meaning-making creatures living in a universe that is indifferent to our need for meaning. We tell stories because we need to believe our lives matter, our choices have consequences, our suffering serves purposes, our love creates lasting changes in the fabric of reality.
Are these beliefs true? That may be the wrong question. The right question might be: Do these beliefs allow us to live with courage, compassion, and purpose? Do they help us treat each other better? Do they inspire us to grow, to create, to care for those who come after us?
If so, then our stories are true in the way that matters most—not because they correspond perfectly to external reality, but because they create the internal conditions that allow us to engage with external reality in life-affirming ways.
Tonight, when Arash asks me another impossible question—and he will, because children are natural philosophers—I’ll remember that he’s not just seeking information. He’s asking me to help him build the story he’ll live inside for the rest of his life. I’ll offer him facts when I have them, but I’ll also offer him narratives that will help him carry those facts without being crushed by them.
Because this is what we do for each other: we tell stories that make the unbearable bearable, the meaningless meaningful, the chaotic comprehensible. We wrap reality in narrative like a bandage around a wound—not to hide the injury, but to help it heal in a way that leaves us stronger rather than broken.
This is our gift and our burden as conscious beings: we cannot live in pure reality, so we must create the stories that allow reality to live in us.
