We have Cancer – by Cathy Adams
Posted By admin on July 27, 2010
Words are my business, but finding a starting point for describing our journey as a couple with cancer left me mentally mute. There is much of a period of several months that I would choose to forget, but what remains like blessed bullet points are the words of others—of friends and family who became our support team, of singers of songs whose lyrics comforted, and, most of all, of the graciously given words of God that brought us through.
“It is malignant.”
Cancer is a foul word. In the beginning, it is very nearly impossible to verbalize. During the day that we waited for the biopsy results phone call I chatter prayed all day, “let it be ok” tumbling like grains from a violently shaken spiritual pepper shaker. Driving in late afternoon heavy traffic, at precisely the time that my husband got unwelcome news, I heard a clear command to ask instead for acceptance.
An hour later, I heard the bad news in the heaviness of my husband’s footsteps coming down the hall, concurrently dreading what I knew he was going to tell me and marveling at knowing someone so well that I can judge his day by the sound of his shoes.
I went to college on a Latin scholarship. Among the little I retain of that language is that mal translates as bad and ignis as fire. “It is malignant.” A bad fire burning in the person who is the best half of my life.
We have cancer.
We pull the drapes and hold each other. He expresses absolute determination to fight with every medical and personal means available. He reminds me of what is uppermost in my mind at that moment, that we are a team.
While he calls our children I stumble away to my garden, my place of sanctity, and I beg for help. Like a terrible singsong in my heart, “we” have cancer. Plural pronouns suddenly take on an enormous significance. The bad fire is physically spreading in him, but fire fighting will be a joint effort because we are a unit, a team of two.
“Do you know how many people in that building love you?”
One of the most nonsensical thoughts in the first 24 hours was that people don’t get life altering news on a Wednesday, the most normal and boring day of the week. To shove to the back of my mind the ultimate fear that this is not “fixable, I concentrate instead on the fear that life will never be normal again. I wonder if I will ever laugh again.
The morning after “the news” represented what is “normally” for me the best day of the year, the opening of the annual Botanical Gardens spring plant sale. Seeing a friend in the parking lot, I burst into tears, screaming, “Why this, why now?” His response was to point to the building and ask me, “Do you have any idea how many people in that building love you?”
One of the hardest aspects of dealing with prostate cancer is the requisite six weeks lag time between initial biopsy and eventual surgery. My husband was clear from the first conversation that we would somehow make that six weeks the best time of our 38 years together. We could not win if we wallowed, and for that reason we only selectively shared our dilemma. For the three days of the plant sale less than a handful of people knew the reason for my distraction, but I found comfort in how great is the contingent of loyal and loving friends God has placed in our paths.
“Mom, I’m coming home.”
Our son, who lives in Denver, was in Atlanta on business. He rented a car and headed for Birmingham. We sat in the living room with our two adult children and talked about how we would get through this as a family, just as we had over all of the life disruptions of the past almost 40 years. Amazed as I always am at the truly outstanding adults our son and daughter are despite whatever errors in parenting, I knew that when the inevitable moments of scrambling to stay afloat came I could count on them as my life preservers.
“The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”
Our two year old granddaughter can ripple her stomach muscles. I can’t imagine how she does it, but in the first week I literally physically feel the fear of both the known and the unknown, present and future, running through me. I go to see Lucy Turner, our church’s pastoral counselor, not so much seeking religious solace, because I had never felt such a sense of God holding our hands, as to ask for coping strategies to face six weeks looming like a lifetime before an unknown prognosis.
After sharing a personal cancer experience, she tells me something I find hard to process, that life is never again going to be the old version of normal but that the new normal can be something even better.
I ask Lucy for a single verse on which to anchor. She offers me John 10:10, a perfect expression of what my husband had vowed from day one when he announced that we were going to approach every day of the rest of our lives by living to the fullest.
Abundance. One of the most precious and most powerful words in the English language. With the power of that verse in mind we discovered ourselves not only on a mission to thwart a thief but to recognize the abundance that God joyfully assures us in the smallest details of a day. Abundance means wealth and costs nothing. It lies in a raindrop on a rosebud, sun shining through a spider’s web, sharing sunsets and sailboat rides, a bee burrowing into the face of a sunflower scattered by the brilliant red cardinals that crowd our bird feeder.
“Isn’t Pinot Grigio a clear liquid?”
Before this ordeal began I didn’t have to be told that I was married to an extraordinarily good guy. I have been grateful to be reminded, especially by his friends and business associates, who unanimously praise integrity, enthusiasm and positive attitude. I learned of quiet acts of kindness of which I was unaware.
Through every crisis we have faced over the years we have tried very hard to maintain our senses of humor, crucial to keeping your sanity when the world is falling apart.
We ended our six weeks of living on the seesaw of best and worst scenarios with a long weekend at the beach, always for us a place of spiritual strength. Shopping for the restricted diet items allowed on the day before surgery, we became separated in the grocery store. When I located him on the wine aisle, we both laughed as we pondered whether or not Pinot Grigio qualified as a “clear liquid.”
We could still laugh. We were going to make it.
“To God and to the Lamb, I will sing…I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on”
Our family, our friends, our church, fine doctors, we were humbled by the arms around us. In a prayer chain that literally stretched from Connecticut to California, too many people to count who loved us joined hearts to pray at 7 a.m. on the day of the surgery. From the highest point available to me, the roof of the hospital parking deck, I listened to the incomparable voice of Bobby Horton comfort me with his “Homespun Songs of Faith” in my Ipod.
As church bells across the cityscape of Birmingham struck seven times, I could literally feel those prayers rising like the release of a massive bunch of red balloons.
“Contained, clear margins”
We were blessed. Our prayers were answered. The five minutes between the surgical waiting room desk calling our names and the surgeon coming in to greet our son and me with a smile on his face were probably the most emotionally charged minutes of my life. A strong father raised an equally strong son, and never in his 34 years had I been more grateful for him.
I am a wordsmith who has collected words my entire life. Before this experience, I was unaware that “contained” and “clear margins” are the most beautiful words in the English language. I don’t need Latin roots to know that those words represent great potential for the best “c” word of all–cured.
“My Home’s in Alabama”
Of the lessons learned and the gratitude gained, it stands out in my mind that large among our blessings is that we live in the South, where people are not shy about hugging you when you need it, or saying “I’ll pray for you” and meaning that sincerely and literally, where cooking comfort foods is part of the culture. During the recuperation, we were nurtured by neighbors and friends who are family.
“It’s your option to make the rest of your lives richer through your toughest experience.”
Lucy Turner asked me what positive growth we hoped to make in our lives from what we were going through.
One in five men will develop prostate cancer. Others we know will wear the same ill fitting shoes. What role will we play in their experiences?
To move forward, I had to focus on something other than fear. We were blessed to enter this strange and scary land with a solid, loving marriage. Has that marriage strengthened over the unplanned sojourn? Without doubt.
I hope that before cancer we took each other for granted no more or less than most people who have spent more than half of their lives together. With the bravest and most positive man I know as a partner, we consciously committed to making our six weeks of uncertainty over whether or not the cancer had spread, an idyll in our marriage. It was an interlude but also a portal to the best of the rest to come.
I hope that what we take from this is to give to others by educating through example. I hope that my husband’s candor about his experience, as he was back to work in a week and back on the golf course in less than a month, passes on his amazing attitude to another man dreading surgery. I hope that some wife facing that six weeks of fearing possibly facing the ultimate fear of losing the person she loves most comes to me for the lessons in hope that I learned from others.
I hope that anyone seeing us walking our dogs in the evening, holding hands, is reminded of what a powerful connection holding hands provides. I hope that seeing this man come through this experience healthy, happy and recharged gives some other man the nudge to be in tune with his own health.
I hope that our new conviction that getting older doesn’t have to mean getting old is contagious because in the new normal we try to invest our time more wisely, and we don’t have time for people who choose to brood about whatever they can no longer do. We are cultivating 90+ year old role models who still get the most out of every day. They are the people that, together, we plan to grow up to be.
