Holy *** Week! The world was going to hell in a hand basket even before the Pandemic…
Right when you think things can’t be more horrible than they are, they are. I just got back from delivering a gift bag to friend. She found out last week she has face cancer. Cancer on her FACE. What hurt for a year at the top of her nose, and which she attributed to heavy glasses with poor pads, turns out to be cancer: on, in, her nose. She’s in surgery now having bone removed, her eyeball lifted out to check behind it and her forehead opened up so the skin can become a flap to pull over the eye.
She cares for 3 of her grandkids frequently because their mom has breast cancer and their dad, her son, is in depression since his little boy died tragically a few years ago. She, her husband, and handicapped daughter live with her parents full time to care for them. She’s a good person. Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to good people. Yeh, well, that theory was debunked a long time ago.
I could hardly sleep last night thinking of the sick dread I would experience having my face carved up. Prayer and planning help when I’m obsessing about pain, so I got up, said “hello” to the “Pink Moon” and madly picked my few roses, some mint and Mexican oregano. I even raided my pantry for chocolate to give her. (I’m a good person too. No spontaneous trips to the grocery store or florist these days, although I do object to some definitions of “essential services.”) My friend in face surgery right now recently found out that both her brothers have cancer. What is a bit of herb and chocolate in the face…of so much suffering and horror!? One does what one can.
I landed home in Houston on a flight from Canada three weeks ago, to read a text from my daughter saying she was cutting off all communication with her dad and me. Gut punch: a knife in my heart. In the midst of this pandemic people are still losing children. And faces. Suffering is not new to humanity but the corporateness of PANdemic and it’s resulting PAN-DEMONium is just too much already. Right?
“We as humans have weathered plagues and wars many times in the past and we will do it again.”
Spoiler alert: I don’t have a cure for all the suffering in all the world. But I do have some ways that help me deal with pain and grief. I’m not an expert, but put it this way, in the last few years after a marriage crisis that should’ve dissolved my marriage but didn’t, I lost 3 close loved ones, and experienced 3 life-or-death health crises. Our home flooded twice, in 16 months. But I survived. In my case, “survival of the weakest.” I had to be weak to become strong. I had to die to myself to gain hope, life.
I’m asking how life can be so hellish. But realize I have also to ask how can life be so heavenly? The impossibly big, bright Pink Moon of April? My friend has 3 top-notch surgeons operating on her today. How could my marriage be restored after four years of crisis and separation? A miracle: hard work, yes, but still the miraculous showed up. How is it that 55 people volunteered to “mud out” our house after we had 39 inches of flood water from Hurricane Harvey? How is it that my husband didn’t die when the main artery — “the widow-maker” — to his heart was 100% blocked for five weeks before discovery and a stent finally put in? How is it last year that I was found in a motel room with my electrolytes having “bottomed out” and taken by ambulance to a small country hospital and for the doctor there to have just happened to have seen this rare condition when he was an intern? Get the idea? For every funeral there is a wedding, for every sorrow there is a joy. For every single question asking, “Why is there pain, sorrow, loss?” there must be a corresponding question, “Why is there health, joy and happiness?” I am often drawn to the scene in LOTR where Sam says to Frodo, in midst of the fires of Mt. Doom:
“Frodo : I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam : I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end .Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened .But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo : What are we holding on to, Sam?
Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”
Now that I’m a grown-up I’ve come to see that life is far better and far worse than I’d ever dreamed. I can choose to medicate or meditate, to scream panic or seek peace, to worry about tomorrow or make the most of today. Corrie Ten Boom comes to mind these days: her book and movie, The Hiding Place is the story of hiding Jews in an isolated attic room, only (like Anne Frank) to be discovered near the end of the war and, trapped in a prison camp, she penned these words for others:
“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.” Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place
As we live in our Hiding Places, may we find out what really matters and how to find peace and even growth. My next few blogs will address what works for me. I’d love to hear what works for you. Is this your “wake up call?” Maybe it’s your chance to shine. Maybe the “normal” world said you were awkward and “overly sensitive” or, maybe you just woke up at sixty and realized you forgot to pursue a dream career. Who knows? Anything goes. Think about newness, creativity, adventure. I like to start with what T.S. Eliot calls the “still point of the turning of the world.” Maybe it won’t look like anything you’ve seen before; “Unless a kernel of grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it bears much fruit.” Think and pray. Take of the bread and the cup of wine.
We do what we can, and we look for graces along the way…more to come — advice on how to find meaning and maybe even Joy in our current circumstances. With the miraculous budding of Springtime, in the new life and rebirth of Easter — here we can find meaning and peace, even hope. Think of it as meditation (or medication) — let us raise a glass to the future, to the Life waiting to lovingly fill our souls!
