In a world of ever-increasing mobility and ever-greater opportunity, we rush through life at unrelenting pace. Home is wherever we happen to be. We rush past every day without stopping to look and live transient lives founded in shifting sands.
But it’s a fickle world cloaked in an illusion of stability Only when it’s too late, when bad things happen, does the cruel truth emerge. The people we know are just nice people whom we like and who like us, and with whom we share good times. When things go awry, they fade quietly into the background. The place where we live is not really home – in a time of trouble, its novelties feel suddenly sinister. And life’s purpose, the goal that drives every day, is founded not in dreams of a better world, but in mean aspirations to a better place in this one.
When bad things happen, there is no redemption without belonging. A place where we belong. People with whom we belong and who belong with us. A sense of purpose that inspires.
Aengus lived in a vibrant new city, among charming new friends, with a thriving career. There was never any hint that, just a scratch below the surface of his world, lurked emptiness and aimlessness. And when his wife, Caitríona, is killed in a traffic accident, the thin veneer is suddenly and irredeemably ripped away. He tries to relocate his place in the world, to re-establish his path and purpose, but he can’t. All at once he is an outsider among friends he no longer recognises, in a place that has become suddenly sinister. A place where he doesn’t really belong.
And so he seeks out the only person who can give him back a little piece of Caitríona – the daughter they gave up for adoption some twenty years before. His search takes him home to Ireland and to the father with whom he has endured a fractured relationship, to old friends that he has carelessly left behind. He discovers a sense of belonging with people who will always be his own. In places long-forgotten. In dreams he once coveted but never dared to grasp.
Bad Things Happen is a story of one man’s search for the light, a search for strength that we can never find alone.
