She faced terminal illness with anger—then found healing as a beggar before God.
There’s just no good day to die. I simply don’t have time for it. As a mother of three, my to-do list is always full and rarely finished. How could I possibly fit “die young” into an already busy schedule? Would I put it between “drive to team practice” and “wash the dog”? Or, maybe there’d be time for it just after I “impart wisdom to my daughter about middle school boys,” but just before I “sit up in the night with a frightened first-grader.”
Sure, I could shuffle things like housecleaning and grocery shopping to make room for it. But who’d want to miss kissing tears and reading stories? Not me. I mean, this is the stuff of life. My life. And I wasn’t ready to give it up. Thank God I’m alive to tell about it.
Actually, I was mad at Death. It had been stalking me for six years; I felt fed up. At 31 I had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma shortly after giving birth to our third child. Cancer and Brandon had grown in me at the same time. Unable to support both, my body cried uncle and gave Brandon to our family several stressful weeks before he was due.
Eleven medically prepared people stood breathlessly awaiting his arrival in the delivery room. Underweight and struggling, he came. Looking like a poster child to end world hunger, he was the recipient of our gasps and stares when we saw him. While he wailed and cried, a joyful sigh escaped from the mouths of the 11 medical personnel as they checked him, one by one. Brandon began to flourish. Weeks before, I had complained nervously of chest cramps to my obstetrician.
Rather dully, the physician explained that there was “no need to worry,” that I was probably just carrying the baby “high.” I had never heard that pain beneath the collarbones and over one’s heart could possibly be caused by a perky pregnancy. Of course, there was no need to worry—at least not until we learned that these chest cramps had been caused by a giant tumor perched right over my unborn son.
Cancer From Nowhere
A tumor the size of a brick had invisibly laid claim to my body, quietly, like a snake on linoleum. It had greedily sat inside my chest gorging itself on a feast of my energy, tissue and lymph nodes. The growth hormones intended to grow my baby had grown my sickness.
My body was consumed so rapidly by cancer that, by the time I saw an oncologist, he looked sternly at my beleaguered husband and then squarely at me and said, “You have the biggest cancer I’ve ever seen. You’ll need to begin chemotherapy by tomorrow. At most, and without immediate intervention, you have four weeks to live. I will order the most aggressive regimen that exists. Hopefully, we can save you.”
That was the first time Death had crouched outside my window and haunted my life. Indeed, my body had been carrying something high, but it was not a baby.
Cancer is a pit with a trapdoor at the bottom. Once you think you’ve experienced the worst and hit the bottom of the pit, some new kind of low creeps up just to suck you into the sewer that lives beneath all catastrophes.
On good days my husband, Darin, and I lived with our preschooler, kindergartner and newborn in the pit. On bad days I sank into the sewer as they watched. This was our life. When there’s a snake on your linoleum, everyone’s trembling on the countertops, just hoping the thing doesn’t grow legs and learn how to stand up!
Against reason and by some ridiculous amount of grace, I was able to escape the pit. After a year of treatments, trapdoors and linoleum, we began to reclaim our lives. By year one of remission I was able to walk, talk and brush my hair. By year two I had resumed most of my regular duties. By year three, cancer had removed itself from the driver’s seat of my car and now resided in the trunk.
Aware but no longer impressed by my stalker, I completed a 55-mile bike ride at year four. By year five of living cancer-free, I competed in a triathlon with two close friends as a celebration of life. One hundred people joined us at our home that year as we celebrated my complete remission.
A month later, though, I found myself engorged with 30 pounds of runaway fluid, a collapsed heart and lungs that had given up the fight. Cancer had left, but as it went it stung me with its wicked tail and sent me back to the pit. My heart and lungs were severely damaged from the life-saving treatments. This was worse than cancer. Death was back and my family knew it.
We Planned My Funeral
Doctor after doctor shook their heads and passed me on. Confounded by my symptoms and puzzled by my internal collapse, they shuffled me in and out of three states for medical care. The guts of my life were spilling out and no one seemed to care.
All the while, the roller coaster of traumatic illness rocked and smacked our entire family at breakneck speeds around harrowing curves. Our family now lived in the sewer together. Clingy and hopeful or angry and distant, we plodded through our days while a mystery lived inside my body.
Finally, after discovering a brood of blood clots in my lungs, one doctor said it: “We have no idea what is wrong with you. You may just spontaneously get better, or you may need to begin hospice care. We do not know. Go home, come back tomorrow and next week for more tests. Here’s a wheelchair and an oxygen tank. Good-bye.”
A tube up my nose and doctors poring over my body like ogres ready for a feast was my new “normal.” I was 37. That night, Darin and I planned my funeral. Sobbing and clinging to one another like disillusioned victims of the Titanic shipwreck, we began to make lists. These were lists people make for themselves when they are dying and lists for those they will leave behind.
At bedtime, my daughter, Jordan, age 11, grasping for control of the crazy, begged to know what to do if I died. Where would she go? Who would be with her? What about school? Who would help Dad?
We had not told our kids about the funeral plans, but they seemed to smell it. The odor wafting through our home was one of disaster. Death was back in the driver’s seat and I didn’t like it. Jordan and I began to lay out a minute-by- minute plan to address the death of her mother.
‘I became still in my anger, breathed deep and vanquished thoughts of obituaries.’
Riding around with Death was not my idea of a good time. It made me mad. I wasn’t ready for it. I felt as if someone had kidnapped me in a foreign country and sold me into slavery. No one spoke the language of my soul. Everything was out of my control.
Paralyzing Anger
The next day I sat alone and decided to have it out with someone, anyone, who might be in charge. As I began to recount all the reasons why dying was not on my to-do list, I finally concluded that I just really lacked interest in the afterlife in my 30s!
It held about the same appeal to me as finding myself seated behind a crying baby on a flight to Australia. Honestly, I would rather peel all my fingernails off backward while watching the fishing channel than have to do something like die young.
Then, something out of the corner of my eye snapped me back from The Big Bass Locator and 10 gauze bandages. It was my oxygen tube. The lifeline that kept me out of the hospital and home with my family seemed to have a kink. It snaked from my snubbed-at-death nose, onto my bed and across the floor to its source in my closet. The tubing lay tangled up in my once-heavily-used running shoes. “Geez, there’s some irony!” I snapped with sharp sarcasm as I jerked the cord free.
Actually, I felt like ripping the tube out of my nose, grabbing the tank and hurling the entire apparatus from my second-story window. I could just see the headline in my mind: “Angry Soccer Mom Commits Medical Supply Murder: Will Her Insurance Cover the Damages? See Page 2B for Full Story and Page 3A for Her Untimely Obituary!”
Truth was that any satisfaction that could come from tossing that device overboard would only begin to scratch the surface of how sold-out and angry I felt. But it would feel good to have power over something, anything, even for a moment.
As I sat in my window-smashing fantasy, I eased myself back to reality as I considered how much energy it would take to commit oxygen-tank homicide. Energy I didn’t have. So I let the delicious, sadistic moment pass me by this time.
Sitting there as a young, old woman on my bed, I became still in my anger, breathed deep and vanquished thoughts of obituaries and the cost of oxygen tanks. I decided to come at this a different way.
Please, Send Help
I laid aside my witty banter with Death for a moment, and let the beggar inside me emerge before God. Ragged, ravenous and weakened by the elements, I stumbled into prayer.
“Please, God…send help.” It was all I could say. I couldn’t get any further. As I paused for more words to come, my soul began to explode its borders. Tears gushed, and all words became lost in a jumbled mix of blankets and sobbing moans.
You see, I became what I truly was and nothing more when I prayed: a kid awake, alone and scared in the dark night of her life. I wanted something bigger than me to make it all O.K. I felt insufficient for what lay ahead. I needed help. In grief, I sobbed through my prayer. Every doctor’s report, E.R. visit, lost ability, labored breath, angry nurse, oxygen tube, cold linoleum and child’s tear ran through me as I wept. They became a wet collection of stained beauty as I offered it all up to God’s canvas.
In exchange, the engulfing presence of a gentle Creator surrounded me. I could sense his tender and terrible paintbrush dip into my depths and begin to paint strokes of new color over my gray. A rare and gentle awareness began to take hold of me as my soul stretched and leaned into God’s plan, whatever it was. With my hands full of acceptance, I laid down my to-do list.
Spent but relieved when it was over, I collapsed. In my darkness, the sunrise of surrender began to rise above my fears. Somehow, sufficiency was present in my poverty. Ironically, in that moment, my body was at its worst but my soul was at its best.
These conversations with God holding his sovereign paintbrush became familiar. They allowed me to swap my wimpy outlook on things for a more healthy vision as I rolled up the blankets of God’s companionship around me. Mysteriously, the pattern of the eternal seemed to rise and repeat every time I went weak before God. I wept. He painted. New would rise from old. It would take that to prepare a young family for death.
A Bowl of Blankets
Just as I began to sense the calming effect of this not-alone prayer, suddenly, I was not alone! Three young hearts flush with love and grief stood silenty watching me. The roller coaster had stopped for a moment. I rose with my red, streaked face and caught their eyes. The weight of a tragedy stood between us.
Pushing past the obvious, I smiled and threw my arms open wide, a sunrise on my face. They fell against me as the sacred became ordinary. Or was it the other way around?
“Hey, come here, you guys. I was just thinking about you and about us. Come close!”
My three adoring fans snuggled their way onto my bed, smiling and trying to beat each other for the closest spot. With flannels, footies and robes they encircled me, and the four of us looked like a recipe of pajama soup in a bowl of blankets. As they snuggled up, the questions began to flow from all sides.
“Why were you crying?”
“Are you O.K.?”
“How long will your heart last?”
“Will you have to get a new heart?”
“Are you going to die?”
“What is heaven like?”
God had tangibly painted love-in-three- parts for me that day as a very colorful distraction. I giggled and nodded at their questions. I thoughtfully answered each of their wonderings with bright gestures and animated silliness, humbled by the richness of my poverty.
Then, in answering, the stuff of courage began to flow through me.
Does It Hurt to Die?
Brandon, almost seven, touched my face with a gentle wondering hand and asked me if the oxygen tube coming out of my nose hurt me much. And then he asked, “Does it hurt to die?” Caught off-guard by the trapped tenderness of his question, I paused. The rawness of my earlier prayer was still wet on my cheek, “No. I think that I will be just like a butterfly coming out of her cocoon,” I said.
My gritty conversations with Death were done. Fingernails and fishing aside, I suddenly became a visionary instructor of heaven and all things eternal for my three students, who listened with rapt attention.
As I compared dying to the silent miracle of metamorphosis, their eyes began to drink me in. As they waited for me to explain, I reached into my nightstand drawer and pulled out some folded papers. It was time. As untimely as time can be, we are all granted just so much of it and then there is no more. It runs out. And it never runs back in once it’s gone. It just doesn’t.
This scared kid, with a sunrise in her heart, had finally moved into accepting that heaven might have laid out a shortened plan for her. From that realization and a time of gutsy weakness, I finally found in myself the courage to share the paradox of life after life within my precious bowl of pajama soup. I pulled the papers out and read them a poem I had written earlier about life and death.
Then I folded the papers and put them away as the sweet and timeless moment hung in the air. Glad to be swallowed up in hero hugs and small trembling hands, I laughed at myself and all my to-do lists. I mean, everyone knows life is not about to-do lists. Life isn’t even about Death. Life is about God’s paintbrush and pajama soup.
This article appeared in the September 2010 issue. Learn more about the author here.
