Do Not Fear, For I Am With You

I have been struggling with much grief and fear this holiday season.  My beloved family is fractured, some of my children estranged, it seems, beyond restoration.  Being a mother has been the bliss of my life.  Without them, meaning, pleasure, any sense of satisfaction, has paled, despite the outstanding nourishment of my many friends, my remarkable daughter, who is endlessly supportive and helpful, and my delightful grandchildren.  They are all wonderful and I am truly, truly grateful for their love and infinite encouragement.  But we always want what we don’t have, don’t we?   One of our great human flaws is a recurrent inability to be satisfied by the good that we do have right under our noses.  We long for what we miss.  And I miss my children with a gnawing pain that literally howls through my every waking moment.  I try to move on, I try to be accepting, but their absence is a bottomless pit of loss and pain.

Then there is the fact of the unknown.  With the spread of the cancer, it is literally a waiting game.  Waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Waiting for the inevitable day when my oncologist calls and the result of my biannual scan is no longer good news.  Fearing that the facts would be simply too hard to face, I have never asked or researched what exactly my prognosis is.  Last month I finally screwed up the courage and looked it up.  Breast cancer which has spread to the liver has a projection of three to five years from diagnosis.  I know it could be worse.  But I am greedy, another very human flaw.  I want so much more time.  I am already a year down.  I am sad and I am scared.

My faith has been shaken.  Yet another flaw.  I am the first one to admit, I am all too human and all too flawed.  But it has been awfully hard to remain reassured by the spiritual when the corporal is so spectacularly challenging.   Loss upon loss upon loss has worn me down.  The basest, most immature part of me cries out, haven’t I had enough already?!?  I know intellectually that life is just like that.  It doesn’t matter if you have tried to be a good person, tried to do the right things.  Good intentions + going to church + doing the best you can = health, happiness and success, right?  But there is no formula, no equation.  Stuff just happens.  

I have never believed God causes bad things to happen to us, I do not believe He visits disasters upon us.  I could not believe in a vindictive, punishing deity.  But lately I have found it is difficult to believe in any deity at all. 

I have received many Christmas cards this year from the delightful people I am surrounded by.  One card was from someone who is particularly special to me.  The day it arrived was an especially busy one.  Before I could open it, I was interrupted and set it aside.  Four days later, when I went to open it and reply, it was nowhere to be found.  I felt sick.  I turned every room upside down.  Because my mobility is so limited, there are not too many places I could have lost it in.  I went through every box and basket, every surface.  Nothing.  I chastised myself over and over for being so careless, so disorganized, so stupid, so thoughtless, on and on.  I automatically invoked Saint Anthony, every Catholic’s resource for lost things.  But I didn’t really believe a word of it.                                                                                                                                  

After another fruitless round of searching I collapsed in my recliner, utterly exhausted and discouraged.  I’ll just rest for five minutes, I thought, and then I will look again.  It must be stuck in something else.  I’ll turn out every catalog, every book I have laid my hands on in the past year, every container.  As I leaned my head back in the chair I noticed a small white envelope lying face down on the corner of my chairside table.  This is a tiny table, with barely enough room for my laptop.  I had searched for card on the table easily ten times.  I had picked the laptop up each time.  There had been no card.  It wasn’t there.  But it was now.  Perched on the edge, bright white, unmissable.  

I burst into tears.  I don’t ask for signs, I never have, even when my faith was at its strongest, I never felt comfortable testing God, demanding things.  It felt disrespectful and disloyal.  But I believed at that moment, with the inexplicable appearance of a card I had been searching for over hours, God had sent me a sign.  He had sent me a message: do not fear, I am with you.

After I had children, I struggled deeply with the concept of putting God before else, as demanded in the Bible.  How could I put anything before my beloved children?  How could I?  It was impossible, nothing meant more to me than my children, not even God.  I always felt guilty about that and even slightly fearful.  How much of a sin was it?  Was I dooming myself to eternal damnation because I was putting mortal beings before the Lord?  I decided it didn’t matter.  I loved my children more than life itself and if God didn’t understand that, oh well.

But here I was, facing Christmas Eve alone, the night we traditionally had come together as a family and celebrated the holiday.  The night I cherished as a representation of everything I loved most in the world, the night I had the opportunity, shallow though it was, to tangibly demonstrate my love for them by giving them things I thought would make them happy.  The sadness of being by myself, of knowing that they were deliberately choosing to exclude me from their lives when I needed them the most, was overwhelming.  I had laughed in God’s face and told Him He meant less to me than these people who were wounding me so deeply.  And He was saying, I am here anyway.

Some may scoff at what appears to be my fanciful superstition.  Some may say say that the card had been there all along and I just missed it.  Some may argue there is a perfectly logic explanation for missing that glaring white envelope all those hours.  And I might agree with all of them on some level.  But I am making a choice.  I am choosing to not be miserable.  I am choosing to be reminded that I am not alone.  I am choosing to not be afraid.  I am gratefully, humbly choosing to accept the gift of God’s love and comfort.

Isaiah 41:10

10 So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

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Sadness and Miracles

I am so relieved to be home, but there is no getting back to normal as there is no normal left.

I had been in the hospital for three days while the options for surgery on my gall bladder were batted around.  That third day my surgeon, a local superstar wunderkind, previously all good cheer, came to me with an absolutely stricken look on his face.  An ultrasound, x-ray, MRI and CT scan, all done while testing the gall bladder, were showing a mass on my liver.  It did not look good, he told me.  In fact, it was probably a worst case scenario.  I was pretty stunned, but not as upset as I would have expected.  I didn’t cry or anything, I was just numb.  Fortunately, my friend Christine was with me the first time he broke this news and that made an enormous difference.  Thank goodness I was not alone.  He had already been concerned about doing gall bladder surgery because of my compromised breathing.  Now the surgery I needed for a liver tumor was so complicated and serious, I actually had to be transferred to a different hospital where he worked with another surgeon who specialized in liver surgery.  And there was no question of not doing it.

When I posted this on Facebook, the response was staggering, with comments and encouragement and support from almost one hundred people, some of whom I didn’t even know.  Father David, our wonderful Interim pastor, visited and prayed with me, but to be honest, my own prayers were hollow.  I was dazed.  I sent final messages to my children and funeral plans to my friend Louise, to be given to the kids as needed.

The night they transferred me I had a final CT scan before they organized the surgery.  The next morning the surgeon was in my room again, this time almost speechless.  He felt like an idiot, he said, because the CT scan from the night before showed no tumor on my liver anymore.  There was nothing there.  Nothing.

I did not believe the surgeon was an idiot, although I don’t think that was the most appropriate approach to the news he had.  I also do not believe several doctors could have misread multiple radiology studies.  On the other hand, I had had no expectations of miraculous healing.  I just wanted a peaceful death.  Full of self-loathing, which is cheerfully supported by the people I love most in my life, I never considered myself a miracle candidate.  But it seems that might be exactly what I got.

I have sign hanging on my bedroom wall that says “Count Your Blessings”.  I bought it long ago, before I got sick, when I was leading what I felt was a charmed life.  Four fantastic kids who were wonderful, fun company, a terrific, rewarding career, my little dream cottage, travel, back in school for my Master’s, there were almost too many blessings to count.  Then they started falling like domino’s when I was diagnosed with transverse myelitis and, ultimately, MS.  My family relationships are now in a shambles, with most of them not even speaking to me anymore.  My career is finished and I will lose my cottage anytime now.   Travel?  I cannot even travel to my back garden.  My friend Marc, the Wheelchair Kamikaze, likens a diagnosis of MS to a personal Hiroshima. (Read his moving post here)  It may seem like a histrionic and hyperbolic reference.  But the comparison is apt in that the destruction of your former, healthy life is complete.  Our lives are ultimately shattered as thoroughly as that city was by the atomic bomb. 

Despite what turned out to be incredibly good news about no tumor, it is very, very hard to keep positive.  It is a gorgeous spring day today here at the shore and my family just left for the beach and the Ocean Grove flea market.   In my previous life I would have been there already.   I long to sit in the sun and listen to the ocean, to stroll around the flea market and people watch.  But I can’t get there myself anymore and I wasn’t invited to join them.   I am too much trouble to take along.   The logistics of getting dressed, getting me and my wheelchair into the car and then getting onto the actual sand are overwhelming. 

I am simply so weary of being ill.  Anyone else would have had the simple gall bladder surgery already and would be on the road to recovery.  I sit here, a bundle of complications, with a tube in my abdomen, playing a waiting game until someone is brave enough to take me on.  I have already been told I can expect to wake up from surgery with a tracheotomy and on a vent (a hole in my throat and a machine breathing for me).  They anticipate that I will not be able to breathe on my own as I come out of the anesthesia.  The prospect of living on a ventilator makes me feel physically sick.  Yet I feel tremendous guilt for being so miserable, because I know there are people who are far worse off than I and I am still fortunate in many ways.  I still have many, many friends, each a blessing in themselves.  I suppose my ‘miracle’ is another blessing, put in my path to ponder.   I continue pondering…but mostly I ponder my lost son, how incredibly sad I am and how much I miss my old life.

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To while away the idle hours I have been doing a lot of embroidery and some sewing. Whilst my familiar perches at my head. 

 

I loved these little sailboats from Sew and the City.  I had saved the pattern for my youngest grandson, but I think he has probably out grown them already.  So I stitched them up for the baby of a dear, dear friend who is coming to visit.  I stuffed them lightly, the easier for bitty hands to grip them, and I tied together a few bells and put them inside each.  If the little nipper managed to somehow open the toy, they are too big to choke on in a bunch like that.  My Resident Critic, my daughter, felt they are too girly.  But babies love primary colors, so I stuck with scraps from my Depression-era fabric patterns.  I think they are cute.

The only problem is it made me think of my precious little grandson, who I have only seen twice since he was born eighteen months ago.  I have lost so much, did I have to lose him too?  So I ended up crying the whole time I worked on them.  Tears are supposed to be cathartic.  They are not.  I simply feel worse than ever, bereft and utterly broken by the casual cruelty of this inexplicable estrangement.  

The birds and pansies came from a pattern that I got from an embroidery designer who is based in Cape Town, South Africa.  They were inspired by a Victorian gift book published in 1896.

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