So the first reason why I had to have a party last Saturday is just that I’ve been pretty giddy lately. I was prepared to go all drunk and disorderly, but wiser heads prevailed. Are we getting old, or are we getting smarter? I think most people had a good time, and we ate a lot and got to catch up with each other a bit. It has been, literally, ten years or more since some of us have been in the same room together. It was fun watching friends from my various worlds collide. My buddy, Sharon, and I did stay up until 2am talking, like in the old days before children, only this time, my daughter joined us for the first time. That was very cool.
How appropriate that I am writing this blog entry the day before Thanksgiving. The second reason why I had to have a party is to try to say thank you to everyone for all the love and prayer and practical help they have given us.
This saying thanks is an ongoing process. I will probably be at it for, like, forever. I have already had a crack at publicly thanking people a couple of times. I went to our Quaker high school’s Meeting for Worship a couple weeks ago, and tried to say thank you there to the students and teachers. And then I stood up in my own United Methodist church and tried to thank the folks there.
First, I want to thank everyone for praying for me.
Last March, when I first found that lump in my breast, the day before I went to my doctor, I sought out a friend at church and asked her to lay hands on me and pray for me, in the ancient tradition. She did. Later that week, when we’d seen the X-rays and knew I was in deep trouble, I put myself on our church’s prayer chain. At that point, my son, Sean, who was a sophomore at the time, stood up in his high school Meeting for Worship and asked people to hold me in the Light, as the Quakers say.
Since then, I have been prayed for by people of many descriptions, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Wiccans, maybe others. I suspect maybe even a few atheists may have put in a good word for me with the Ineffable Mystery. I know of one classmate of Julia’s who, with her mother, has prayed for me every day since March. I have been prayed for in Australia and Africa. I have had candles lit for me in Rome.
I can’t tell you how much this has meant to me.
The other day, when I stood up in Meeting for Worship to thank my high-school Friends, one of the things I told them was how well I was doing. I said I was lucky in the specific type of cancer I got, because it was responsive to chemotherapy and Tamoxifen. Later in that Meeting, our Head of School, Tom, had a few words of his own to add. He said he does not believe in luck; he believes in grace. I think what he was saying was that by opening up and asking for help from everyone, as we had done, we opened ourselves up to all the available means of grace. We sort of threw ourselves on the strength of the Community, and it helped us tremendously.
Now, I am not ready to claim that prayer is what caused me to get better. (I am not ready to deny that, either.) I know our church has prayed for other people, recently, with the same diagnosis as me, and some of them got better, and some of them died, leaving small children in tragic situations. I can’t begin to say why sometimes the answer is “yes” and sometimes it is “no.” It is a mystery to me. However, I can honestly say I did feel the power of everyone’s prayer, and it gave me great peace. That, in itself, had to help my family and me heal.
I believe everyone’s prayers kept me from going off the rails, emotionally. I was unusually able to not panic. This was very important when I was making serious medical decisions. It also freed up a lot of energy. Instead of using all my strength to freak out, I was mostly able to conserve it to get through the chemo and the other crap.
I believe everyone’s prayers also got me through depression. This summer, in August, I hit a low point. I was exhausted and feeling absolutely lousy. In addition to me being sick, Matthew was not doing well at all, and there was some other stuff going on, too. I was running on empty, physically and emotionally. At some point, I had what you would call a faith crisis. I pretty much believed God was there, all right, but I didn’t personally care. His ways were so mysterious they had pretty much become irrelevant. I may have been clinically depressed; it lasted for a couple of weeks.
In the end, I snapped out of it. Not through any strength of my own, but because, even when I stopped praying, lots of you guys didn’t. When I had no faith, I used yours. And when I was at one of my lowest points, Dennis and Luke would walk in the door with a meal, and a blueberry cobbler, or Brenna would show up with a plate of Rice Krispies treats. Or a box of fresh huckleberries would arrive at my door. Of course, in the end, I realized the bottom line was: of course there is a God. I was seeing That of God, in all of you. Where else would all this love come from? So you got me through that, too.
In addition to all your prayers, your practical help and love were magnificent.
You sent me wonderful notes and cards and drawings. I have them stuck to my fridge and sitting next to my computer screen. I am now getting remission cards. I have one on my fridge right now from Matthew’s buddy, Ben.
At the beginning of all this, I was terrified that people would freak out and hide from me. I had seen that happen before to seriously ill people. When a potentially-fatal illness strikes so randomly, it can scare people away. You become a walking advertisement for mortality, a reminder that this can happen to anyone. And people don’t know what to say, it’s awkward, and they become so uncomfortable, they run away.
This did not happen to me. At all. None of you guys even blinked. Everywhere I went, at school, at church, at the grocery store, I kept getting my hugs. Even when I was at my sickest, and the chemo made me swell up and turn red and go bald, nobody flinched. You gave me silly hats. You made sick jokes. We got through it. Nobody ran away.
You all drove my kids around and fed them, when I was in the hospital or at chemo. You had Matthew over for play dates so he could have a little normalcy. You drove to Jessup to go dancing with me—with an oompah band, for God’s sake—when I needed to go dancing. You drove me to Idaho, at one point, when I wanted to see the camas blooming. You went to the movies with me while I waited for biopsy results, and you sat with John while I had surgery. You brought us all kinds of delicious food. You brought me books to read. And when I got too sick to read, you brought me audio books and funny DVDs instead.
You never stopped inviting me out or asking me over for dinner, even when I could hardly eat anything, and you knew it. Sometimes you just let me talk, even when I was saying some pretty dark stuff.
Those of you who are reading this, who have good and loving parents, do you remember what it was like to be a little kid and have the flu? And no matter what time you woke up with your fever, your mom was there? That is what you were like, for me.
At one point in June, it’s the day after I got my chemo. I am pretty much unconscious for two full days; when I’m awake, I’m pretty much on the planet Tralfamadore. And our dear friend, Peter, is here, all the way from Canberra, Australia, helping John take care of me. He just sits with me and sends emails and makes phone calls while I sleep. I wake up, and I don’t know who or where I am, but that is Peter sitting there, so this must be Maryland and it must be okay. And I go back to sleep.
I will always love you guys.
No comments:
Post a Comment