Barely 4 months ago, Yvonne was to the point of not being able get in and out of bed by herself, had trouble dressing herself, couldn’t raise her hands above her shoulders, couldn’t lift anything of any weight. The cancer in her bones hurt nearly constantly; sneezing or coughing caused excruciating pain. She was deteriorating so rapidly that I knew she would be gone by the end of the year.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
My Gift
Monday, December 11, 2006
Happy Anniversity!
Every 17th of December Yvonne and I look at each other and say “What in the world were we thinking, getting married in the middle of the Christmas season?” At the time, Christmas seemed like a wonderfully magical time to get married; each year afterward, however, Christmas has been a lousy time to try to celebrate an anniversary.
Last year we went to a very nice restaurant, and over the course of the evening’s chit-chat with the waitress it came out that we were celebrating our anniversary. At the end of the dinner she brought the check, and at the top had written “Happy Anniversary” – or so I thought at first glance, but when I looked again I realized she had misspelled anniversary and wished us a “Happy Anniversity”, with a big smiley face.
Even while we laughed about it we acknowledged that, in truth, there was a lot of adversity mixed in with the anniversary. Marriage and child rearing are not for the timid or faint of heart, and there’s a lot of wear and tear involved in making a relationship work long term. There were a few years when marriage was a hard slog, and a couple when we wondered whether it was worth the effort.
But 29 years later I can still say, as I’ve said before, that while I’ve never understood what lapse of judgement caused her to fall in love with me (see photo, above), it was the best thing that ever happened to me and I’ve been grateful for it ever since.
Happy Anniversity, indeed :)Friday, November 03, 2006
Family story time...
Emotionally speaking, she was already pretty close to the edge even before she had been told to clean her room. She had been made to turn off the tv, take a bath, and now, contrary to every 5-year-old instinct, we had inflicted upon her the trauma of putting her toys away before going to bed.
It’s a brutal process, cleaning one’s room. The first step is to sit for several minutes in the middle of what looks like a news clip of a natural disaster, wallowing in the overwhelming enormity of the task.
Next, it’s time to complain loudly that there is too much to put away and if she doesn’t get help she won’t be done before her senior prom. This is usually followed by the parent’s terse rebuttal that it wasn’t too much to get out so it isn’t too much to put away. This, of course, is the catalyst to complete emotional collapse on the part of the 5-year-old. Sometimes the parent, too.
It was along somewhere in this part of the process that she spotted the spider. I knew something was up because suddenly there was an edge of hysteria to her crying. When I entered her room she was backed into a corner, staring at the opposite side of the room.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Aaaaaaaaaaa sp- sp- sp- aaaahhhhhhhh.”
“What?”
“Sp- sp- sp aaaahhhh!”
“Honey! Calm down. I can’t understand you.”
“Sp- Spiiiiiderrrr!”
“Where? Over here?” I had crossed to the general area she was screaming at and sure enough, under the wall heater was what had once been a fairly large spider, but had obviously long since met its maker.
“I’ll get rid of it, but it’s okay, it’s dead.” I tried to ease her fears.
“But it mooo - oo - ooved,” she sobbed.
“That’s because it jiggled on the web,” I pointed out.
“But how come it moo - oo - ved?”
I could see she was not going to be pacified, so I removed the offending carcass and vacuumed the webs. But we had lost all momentum toward room cleaning and I could tell that we would never get it moving again. Sensing that - for now at least - mercy was greater than judgment, I sent her to get a drink of water and cleaned her room for her.
It’s a brutal process, cleaning one’s room. The first step is to sit for several minutes in the middle of what looks like a news clip of a natural disaster, wallowing in the overwhelming enormity of the task.
Next, it’s time to complain loudly that there is too much to put away and if she doesn’t get help she won’t be done before her senior prom. This is usually followed by the parent’s terse rebuttal that it wasn’t too much to get out so it isn’t too much to put away. This, of course, is the catalyst to complete emotional collapse on the part of the 5-year-old. Sometimes the parent, too.
It was along somewhere in this part of the process that she spotted the spider. I knew something was up because suddenly there was an edge of hysteria to her crying. When I entered her room she was backed into a corner, staring at the opposite side of the room.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Aaaaaaaaaaa sp- sp- sp- aaaahhhhhhhh.”
“What?”
“Sp- sp- sp aaaahhhh!”
“Honey! Calm down. I can’t understand you.”
“Sp- Spiiiiiderrrr!”
“Where? Over here?” I had crossed to the general area she was screaming at and sure enough, under the wall heater was what had once been a fairly large spider, but had obviously long since met its maker.
“I’ll get rid of it, but it’s okay, it’s dead.” I tried to ease her fears.
“But it mooo - oo - ooved,” she sobbed.
“That’s because it jiggled on the web,” I pointed out.
“But how come it moo - oo - ved?”
I could see she was not going to be pacified, so I removed the offending carcass and vacuumed the webs. But we had lost all momentum toward room cleaning and I could tell that we would never get it moving again. Sensing that - for now at least - mercy was greater than judgment, I sent her to get a drink of water and cleaned her room for her.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Updates on Yvonne
Yvonne has been spending hours each day answering emails from family and friends, so I set up a blog for her to post all her updates to. That way people can ask questions in their comments and everyone else can see them and the answers and hopefully she won't have to repeat everything over and over. You can find her updates here.
Monday, September 11, 2006
You are what you eat
Bill Cosby recently wrote a book titled “I Am What I Ate...and I'm Frightened!!!” in which he describes his horror of having discovered what the food he ate all his life had done to him. Medical research in recent years is waking us up to the fact that what we put into our bodies affects how these bodies function. When my wife was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002 she began researching nutrition and as a result our household diet transformed literally overnight: No processed foods; few, if any cooked foods; no meat and no dairy. Not only did we become vegans overnight, we were raw vegans – as extreme a diet as I’ve ever seen. ("Vegan" in diet only – not ethical persuasion. There’s the time I went into a vegan restaurant wearing my black leather jacket…)
Although it didn’t cure Yvonne’s cancer, within a few months my cholesterol level had dropped from the danger zone to low normal, my blood pressure was back to normal, I lost 25 pounds (back to my young-man weight), and experienced my first allergy-free spring in 30 years. Clearly, what I was putting into my body made a difference.
I began to suspect that this principle also applied mentally and spiritually when I walked into our family room one evening where the kids were watching a sitcom - Friends or Will & Grace, can’t remember which – and saw them blithely absorbing language, images, ideas and morals from a completely godless world view. As I listened to the dialog I had this mental image of the television as a huge sewer pipe, pouring filth into my home. And the more I started paying attention to what was on television, like Bill Cosby, I became frightened.
Even then it wasn’t until recently that I had a blinding glimpse of the obvious, when I read Jesus’ words “I am the bread of Life” and really made the connection: Jesus is saying that He is the food that gives my spirit the nutrition I need for true life. In contrast, so much of what I read, watch or otherwise sit and soak up is mental and spiritual junk food – or worse, poison to my spirit.
I’ve started taking inventory, not just of the quality of things I feed my mind but also the quantity, comparing those things to the amount of time I spend in the Bible, in the works of other Christians, and time spent praying. It’s no longer a mystery as to why I feel spiritually stunted. If genuine Christianity truly consists of relationship with God – and I do believe it does – then it’s no wonder any more why I feel such a stranger to God since it’s obvious (I would have thought) that you can’t have a relationship with someone you never spend time with.
I’ve begun making changes in my spiritual "diet" and it is making a difference. And I can’t help but wonder what would happen if all of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus stopped feeding from the same menu as the rest of the world and ate only the Bread of Life; maybe then we really could be, as Paul said, “blameless, sincere and wholesome, living in a warped and diseased world, and shining there like lights in a dark place”.
“Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.”
Phil. 4:8
Although it didn’t cure Yvonne’s cancer, within a few months my cholesterol level had dropped from the danger zone to low normal, my blood pressure was back to normal, I lost 25 pounds (back to my young-man weight), and experienced my first allergy-free spring in 30 years. Clearly, what I was putting into my body made a difference.
I began to suspect that this principle also applied mentally and spiritually when I walked into our family room one evening where the kids were watching a sitcom - Friends or Will & Grace, can’t remember which – and saw them blithely absorbing language, images, ideas and morals from a completely godless world view. As I listened to the dialog I had this mental image of the television as a huge sewer pipe, pouring filth into my home. And the more I started paying attention to what was on television, like Bill Cosby, I became frightened.
Even then it wasn’t until recently that I had a blinding glimpse of the obvious, when I read Jesus’ words “I am the bread of Life” and really made the connection: Jesus is saying that He is the food that gives my spirit the nutrition I need for true life. In contrast, so much of what I read, watch or otherwise sit and soak up is mental and spiritual junk food – or worse, poison to my spirit.
I’ve started taking inventory, not just of the quality of things I feed my mind but also the quantity, comparing those things to the amount of time I spend in the Bible, in the works of other Christians, and time spent praying. It’s no longer a mystery as to why I feel spiritually stunted. If genuine Christianity truly consists of relationship with God – and I do believe it does – then it’s no wonder any more why I feel such a stranger to God since it’s obvious (I would have thought) that you can’t have a relationship with someone you never spend time with.
I’ve begun making changes in my spiritual "diet" and it is making a difference. And I can’t help but wonder what would happen if all of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus stopped feeding from the same menu as the rest of the world and ate only the Bread of Life; maybe then we really could be, as Paul said, “blameless, sincere and wholesome, living in a warped and diseased world, and shining there like lights in a dark place”.
“Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.”
Phil. 4:8
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
We now return you to your regularly scheduled life…
Three weeks ago my wife gathered all our extended family together and gave us the news that the pain she had been feeling was in fact caused by her breast cancer having returned and metastasized throughout her upper body. The doctors resist giving a prognosis because they can’t say with any certainty how any individual’s body will respond to the treatments. Maybe years, maybe months.
It’s one of many cruel ironies that the specter of death often hovers closest to those who are most full of life. Yvonne is one of those rare individuals who makes everything all right just by walking into a room – or a life, as she did mine. (I’ve always said that I’ve never understood what lapse of judgment on her part caused her to fall in love with me, but it’s the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me and I’ve been grateful for it ever since.) If there were any justice in the world, cancer would only happen to grumpy, crotchety, negative people like me.
Yes, it has thrown my faith a curve ball. How can you possibly reconcile something like this with a God who is, as James Moffat translates, the “Divine Yes”? How does this square with my belief that God created us to be, and desires us to be whole people, physically and emotionally as well as spiritually? I don’t know. Do I still believe in God’s goodness? Yes. Do I believe this is a sign of God’s displeasure? No. Do I believe this happened for a reason, that God allowed it or caused it? I don’t know; I tend to think these things just happen, like being caught in a rain storm without an umbrella. Do I have hope? Sometimes, though more often I’m afraid. Still, I believe that all of life - from cradle to grave - is sacred and held in God’s hands. Should it come to that end, though, I also believe that the end of life in this realm of time and space is not utter finality but simply the doorway into the presence of the Eternal.
But it hasn’t come to that. As Yvonne herself keeps reminding us, she’s not dead yet. While there’s life there’s hope, and a battle to be fought, and battles are only won if those who are fighting them believe they can be won; the surest way to lose the battle is to believe it is already lost. We will be grateful for each day we have to live and fight together.
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