Where is God for us who care for the sick and the dying?

For suffering —of others, or our own, often both—to become redemptive requires participation. Not performance. Co-operation.

It asks for a posture of surrender — not because surrender is noble, but because suffering eventually removes our illusions of control.

Many of us are trained to rise above suffering: stay positive, stay strong, make meaning, push through. 
This is not transforming suffering; it is avoiding, or denying, or distracting ourselves from suffering. 
And suffering that is not transformed is transmitted, as the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says.
Suffering is not conquered by resilience. It is transformed by cooperation and by consent

If we don't transform our suffering. the ones we love and care about will bear not only their troubles but our untransformed suffering, which is bitter and vengeful, and pushes people apart from one another.

The moment we stop demanding an explanation for suffering, as if we are owed one, and didn't deserve this suffering in the first place, and simply ask, God, help me, something shifts inside us.

Someone once said, "We don't learn from experience. We learn from reflection on our experiences."
Likewise, without reflection, suffering is only pain. Suffering by itself is not redemptive. It's only with reflection that suffering becomes relationship with God, and because we notice God's presence, however small or quiet, reflection turns experience into grace. 

And when we accompany others in suffering, we discover something unsettling and holy: we are not standing outside their pain. We are meeting them inside our own.

It is here that we find true empathy, not the implied distance of sympathy, or of pity. True empathy is communion. And communion is where Christ is.