A little while ago I was writing a letter to some friends who have walked alongside me through the past year and I began thinking about miracles. We so badly wanted the miracle of Ramsy surviving this tumor that is really not survivable. We asked for this one many times, and we know that many others asked on our behalf as well. I still wish we could have been given this spectacular one.
And yet-
even though we didn't receive this most longed-for miracle, God was (and is) at work in us and around us in ways that cannot be ignored or denied. So I would like to take some time to tell you about the miracles that we did get.
Our finances were in good shape when Ramsy was diagnosed, and because the church conference has such excellent benefits for its employees, there was not much adjusting that needed to be done in our day-to-day budget while he was on long-term disability. But of course, critical illness adds many extra expenses that have the potential to become a huge burden for the affected family. We were humbled over and over by gifts from people- friends, family, strangers- that allowed us to cover these expenses without having to go into debt. This is one miracle.
Not only did we have almost all good weather during the 6 winter weeks we had to drive into Winnipeg for radiation treatments (about an hour's drive from our door to Cancer Care), but we had NO car accidents. Not even a fender-bender. Another miracle.
During Ramsy's entire illness, our family suffered from very few viruses or infections. I think we each had a cold maybe once. Since October, the kids and I have already had way more sickness than that! Another miracle.
Our hearts remained soft and trusting towards God and each other. Somehow we did not suffer with bitterness or resentment. Somehow we were able to see God's heart towards us in spite of the circumstances, and to hear his reassuring voice over and over. This I truly do not understand, and to me it is one of the biggest miracles.
Ramsy retained his comprehension of language and daily tasks until just a couple of months before he died. Part of his tumor was located in the area controlling expressive language- being able to put thoughts into written or spoken words- and this was obviously significantly affected; however, the tumor was also directly adjacent to the area controlling the ability to understand language, and when he went in May to see the neurosurgeon who operated the previous November, the surgeon was very surprised to see that Ramsy's comprehension was still completely intact. I wonder now whether this was perhaps a hidden miracle, the result of the many prayers we all prayed. Maybe without those requests, his comprehension would have disappeared much earlier. We can't know that for sure, but what I do know for sure is what a huge gift it was to have him understand me even when he could no longer say anything other than "yes" or "no". Another miracle.
And the last one, maybe the biggest one of all: me walking around, breathing, living. It's a crazy mystery to me that I can function at all with half of me missing, crazy that I can find joy and that I am visited by peace. People have told me that I am a strong person, but I know that I am not this strong. This comes from outside of me. This comes from the one who is able to do things far beyond what we can ask or even dream up.
I feel that in talking about this I have to look at a difficult question: when we say that these good things come from God, what does that mean in the cases where the good things are missing? What about families who experience crushing debt, or terrible bitterness or fear, or years and years of agonizing pain? Does that mean that God is not with them, that he does not bless them or grant them miracles? I don't mean to imply this at all, and I am well aware that this is a painful question for many, many of us. The only answer I have is, "I don't think so." But I have no explanation for it. I just don't. It's so puzzling. The question of why God refrains from intervening in ways that we would wish is a deep, ancient question which has never been answered to our satisfaction. The only thing I know is not to take these good things for granted, because I have seen that they don't always happen. I am deeply grateful for the good things, and humbled that we have received them.
And here's another wild thought: I look at this amazing list of miracles and think, "And these are only the ones that I know about." I believe that God was (and is) also at work in ways that are invisible to me. I will not know about those in this lifetime, but I think that when I get to see him, he will also allow me to see those many invisible graces. Sometimes I feel like he is pouring little pieces of coloured plastic and beads into my hands, showing me that he is making a fantastically gorgeous kaleidoscope- not showing me what he is making, only that he is making. On the day that all those pieces are displayed in glorious, intricate colour and pattern, I believe that I will be astonished at the beauty of what he has done.
This gives me hope.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Christmas
I love mail. I love snail mail and email both, and I love going to either mailbox this time of year and seeing what is waiting for me there. The written word is powerful, and I am grateful for the many people who take the time to share themselves with me in that way. Ashley, thank you for your lovely card- I hope to meet you someday!
Many have asked how we are finding this Christmas season. In some ways, last Christmas was our first Christmas with loss, as Ramsy and I had given up working, our social activities became severely restricted, Ramsy was experiencing seizures and increasing symptoms with language and motor skills, and the future was a giant blur of fog. I think because of all of that, this year's Christmas has not been crushingly difficult, but rather has felt like a pair of shoes that has suddenly become too small. I know I loved wearing these shoes, I know I have usually felt good wearing them, but when I put them on and try to walk in them as I did before, they pinch.
When I pass our Christmas tree, lit up in the dark and smelling amazing, I think of Ramsy inviting me to join him on the couch to look at it, and there is a pinch. When I hear his favourite version of "Silent Night" on MercyMe's Christmas album, I remember him cranking it up in our van the first time he heard it, and it pinches again. When I spent time in Polo Park Mall, where we often did gift shopping or, more typical in the last year, had lunch in the food court and did one errand after a Cancer Care appointment, there were many pinches. Those parts are hard. But I still love our tree, and I still listen to Christmas music (although pretty selectively!), and I am still happy to be able to treat my family to gifts, and I will wear these shoes this year anyway, knowing that by next year they may have grown a little bigger again.
The song my heart sings this year is one that fits me now in a different way than it has fit in the past, but it does not pinch:
O come, o come, Emmanuel
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.
O come, thou Dayspring,
come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here.
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
and death's dark shadows put to flight.
Peace to you, near and far.
Shannon
Many have asked how we are finding this Christmas season. In some ways, last Christmas was our first Christmas with loss, as Ramsy and I had given up working, our social activities became severely restricted, Ramsy was experiencing seizures and increasing symptoms with language and motor skills, and the future was a giant blur of fog. I think because of all of that, this year's Christmas has not been crushingly difficult, but rather has felt like a pair of shoes that has suddenly become too small. I know I loved wearing these shoes, I know I have usually felt good wearing them, but when I put them on and try to walk in them as I did before, they pinch.
When I pass our Christmas tree, lit up in the dark and smelling amazing, I think of Ramsy inviting me to join him on the couch to look at it, and there is a pinch. When I hear his favourite version of "Silent Night" on MercyMe's Christmas album, I remember him cranking it up in our van the first time he heard it, and it pinches again. When I spent time in Polo Park Mall, where we often did gift shopping or, more typical in the last year, had lunch in the food court and did one errand after a Cancer Care appointment, there were many pinches. Those parts are hard. But I still love our tree, and I still listen to Christmas music (although pretty selectively!), and I am still happy to be able to treat my family to gifts, and I will wear these shoes this year anyway, knowing that by next year they may have grown a little bigger again.
The song my heart sings this year is one that fits me now in a different way than it has fit in the past, but it does not pinch:
O come, o come, Emmanuel
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.
O come, thou Dayspring,
come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here.
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
and death's dark shadows put to flight.
Peace to you, near and far.
Shannon
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
How are you doing?
"How are you doing?"
One of the most commonly-voiced questions in our society. Often someone will ask me that out of plain old social conditioning and then suck in their breath and say, “Oh, that was a dumb thing to say- sorry!” To me it is not a dumb question. It’s a convention we use, and it gives me an opening to say how I am really doing right then, or, in the cases where it’s not a great moment for personal sharing (we are in a rush, one of us is busy with something, the tears are too close to the surface for conversation) it allows me to say, “I’m okay today,” and just move on.
The way I have come to think about “how I am doing” is something like, “I am doing as I should be.” By this I mean that I expect to be sad and lonely and restless; I expect that nothing will feel the same as it used to; I expect that I will actually feel this enormous loss. I am not afraid of feeling sad. I think I am a little afraid of feeling flat and dull, but that is part of the deal sometimes. When I took pre-natal classes 16 years ago, the instructor told us that when the labor pains would come, we should try to relax into the pain, not to fight it. Easier said than done, in my case anyway. But although it was really hard to do that with physical pain, I am finding that I am more able to do it with this pain of loss. I don’t know why- maybe it is a skill that God is giving me just for this time.
The interesting thing is that many, many of the books/websites/articles on grief that I have come across seem to take the opposite approach. There is a definite sense that people (whoever is writing these resources, and also a few people that I encounter) want me to feel “better”. Sometimes I think this is a result of the medium- magazine articles have to wrap it up quickly, for example, and this can cause a bumper-stickerish feeling. “Let’s learn to move past our grief! Let’s find the moral of the story! Let’s think of God as our husband!” It kind of makes me want to throw up- or else throw something. Sometimes I sense that a person I am talking with is simply not comfortable with my references to loss, for whatever reason. That’s ok- not everyone can live in that space.
I have been very thankful to find a couple of books which have not given me the impression that I should rush through this phase as quickly as possible. One is a picture book called Tear Soup, given to our family by a friend on the day of the funeral. One is C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. Another is A Healing Place by Kate Atwood. She lost her mother at age 12 and now, as an adult, runs a grief group for kids in Georgia. One of the most helpful things that I found in her book is her comment that grief is not a project, not a task to be completed; rather, it is something that the kids and I will encounter repeatedly through our lives, meeting our loss in different ways over the years, and we must work on learning to navigate it.
Here’s another interesting thing: much of this grieving process, so far, has not looked the way I expected it would look. Yes, I am sad, but I am not flattened as I expected I would be. I get out of bed in the mornings. I get dressed. I go out. I stay home alone and am okay. I pay the bills and grocery shop (with enormous mental effort, however!) and play the piano and write letters and do all these things I did not think I would be able to do. It constantly astonishes me. I find myself in a moment which is difficult- say, my first lunch out alone in a sit-down restaurant- and it is terribly painful; yet in the same moment, I am also observing myself with surprise and saying, “Huh. This hurts, but here I still am. I am doing this thing and it is not killing me. How strange.” I don’t understand where this ability to navigate comes from, except that it too is a gift from God to me.
And stranger still: alternating with the moments of excruciating loss and of everyday normalcy are moments of great joy and sometimes excitement. These come, to my surprise (again!), when I think of Ramsy being in the presence of Jesus, more alive, more real, more himself than ever before. Sometimes the veil between this reality and that one seems very thin indeed, and I am full of awareness that he is solidly real on the other side of the veil. I like to do what I call “making up stories” about what he is doing in Heaven. I might imagine him directing the most exquisite choir, or golfing with his dad, or hanging out at Starbucks with Jesus and maybe Beethoven, or casting his golden crown at the feet of The One Who Sits on the Throne. The joy also shows up when I think of what God is up to on both sides of the veil, when I get to see glimpses of and participate in his work here- the work of building or restoring relationships, showing kindness and compassion, sharing time or money or cookies, allowing him to refine me- and when I think of the end of this chapter of the story, of the day when Jesus will come back to set things right and fully restore his kingdom, and I will get to see him and join Ramsy and other dearly loved people in unending rightness and joy and satisfaction.
All of these feelings weave in and around each other, usually every day. Some days are mostly sad, some are mostly “regular”, some are mostly joyful. I cannot see any pattern to the way I flip-flop between them, or predict what will cause me to switch perspectives. I just have to live in the “and yet”- I feel the joy, and yet the sorrow waves through me as I am stricken with the remembrance that he was just here a little while ago, solidly real on this side of the veil; I feel so sad, and yet here I unarguably am, living. And yet…
Friday, December 2, 2011
The time thing
Ok, I have finally found a way to describe the way time feels so relative these days, the way that Ramsy's absence feels far longer than two months even though the days do not drag, the way that a day from a year ago seems more recent than the day of his death. It has to do with memories and how they occur. Instead of the habitual manner of particular memories being more vivid or less vivid according to their place in chronological time- typically more vivid if more recent- this is how I experience them right now:
I am in a darkened circular room. There is no furniture; I am just standing in the middle. On the walls are scattered squares of light and colour, like a whole bunch of slides projected in random fashion, some overlapping. All of them are at least slightly out of focus, and some of the images are very blurry. As I wait, one of the images jumps into sharp focus. It might be something Ramsy and I did together in the past year- oh, it's me bringing him a drink of water in the radiation waiting room, or leaning out the van window at the Burger King drive-through to get him a Whopper (one of the only things that tasted good to him while he was on chemo), or him lying in the hospital bed after his biopsy while I read to him. That slide might stay lit up for a whole hour, or fade in and out of focus over a day, or just flash for a moment. Then there's a picture of us walking side-by-side in Seattle the first time we spent the day together alone, or one of him laughing at my pitiful volleyball efforts on choir tour in 1990, or the two of us ice skating at the Bessborough hotel on New Year's Eve 1991 and making plans for our spring wedding. Then one of him holding our newborn daughter in 2000... coaching our son's soccer team five years ago... knocking out a wall in our first house in Kelowna... sitting in his wheelchair in our kitchen here washing dishes with his one working hand... leading singing at his brother's wedding in 1997... driving his '88 (I think) Mazda 626 with the fan full blast on "cool" and his sleeves rolled up but the windows shut tight because the wind's noise makes conversation impossible... playing guitar accompaniment for our eldest daughter's solo last October...
No matter what year that memory was made, when that slide is in focus, it is right here, like it happened yesterday or is maybe happening right now. When a slide is out of focus, it feels like a dream or something that happened very long ago. Occasionally it's possible to bring a slide into focus myself by reading an old letter or looking at actual photographs, but most often these images appear and fade according to their own mysterious pattern. Sometimes it's painful to see what shows up, and I feel something contract under my ribs; sometimes I am given the gift of laughter or joy with the picture; almost always, whatever it is, it's unpredictable and fascinating.
I am in a darkened circular room. There is no furniture; I am just standing in the middle. On the walls are scattered squares of light and colour, like a whole bunch of slides projected in random fashion, some overlapping. All of them are at least slightly out of focus, and some of the images are very blurry. As I wait, one of the images jumps into sharp focus. It might be something Ramsy and I did together in the past year- oh, it's me bringing him a drink of water in the radiation waiting room, or leaning out the van window at the Burger King drive-through to get him a Whopper (one of the only things that tasted good to him while he was on chemo), or him lying in the hospital bed after his biopsy while I read to him. That slide might stay lit up for a whole hour, or fade in and out of focus over a day, or just flash for a moment. Then there's a picture of us walking side-by-side in Seattle the first time we spent the day together alone, or one of him laughing at my pitiful volleyball efforts on choir tour in 1990, or the two of us ice skating at the Bessborough hotel on New Year's Eve 1991 and making plans for our spring wedding. Then one of him holding our newborn daughter in 2000... coaching our son's soccer team five years ago... knocking out a wall in our first house in Kelowna... sitting in his wheelchair in our kitchen here washing dishes with his one working hand... leading singing at his brother's wedding in 1997... driving his '88 (I think) Mazda 626 with the fan full blast on "cool" and his sleeves rolled up but the windows shut tight because the wind's noise makes conversation impossible... playing guitar accompaniment for our eldest daughter's solo last October...
No matter what year that memory was made, when that slide is in focus, it is right here, like it happened yesterday or is maybe happening right now. When a slide is out of focus, it feels like a dream or something that happened very long ago. Occasionally it's possible to bring a slide into focus myself by reading an old letter or looking at actual photographs, but most often these images appear and fade according to their own mysterious pattern. Sometimes it's painful to see what shows up, and I feel something contract under my ribs; sometimes I am given the gift of laughter or joy with the picture; almost always, whatever it is, it's unpredictable and fascinating.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)