‘She’s taken a turn for the worse.” I received the text, booked a flight to Los Angeles, and drove to the airport. That was April 14. I was at the hospital soon after Elizabeth Sterling Oles O’Hara was born in 1986. I wanted to see her before she died.
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.
Then she met Brendan O’Hara. He says I waved my steak knife at him at dinner when Sterl introduced him to her parents and to me. Possibly. Something about her made people feel protective. Four years later Sterl and Brendan married. They came to Austin, where he enrolled in graduate school at the University of Texas, and she worked with her father in commercial real estate. Later they moved to Dallas. 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. She was 38.
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.
