Mrs Metaphor

This is what we do. We think of where we were when it happened, when something awful and unbelievable happened, something that changed our lives so completely that it is then hard to remember what life was like before that.

I was on the couch, having sent my husband off to work and my daughter to preschool. I was nursing my son on the couch and got a phonecall that I needed to turn on the television and so I did. I watched with great horror and utter disbelief. I watched and then I saw the tower fall…I watched still, struggling to make sense of it. I heard words but the images were far clearer than anything being said. My husband called to see if I was watching. We stayed on the phone as the second tower fell. Neither speaking for a long time.

This is what we do, we remember. We hope, we pray, we listen, we observe, we speak, we cry, we watch and we remember.

Writerchick is part of a event which takes time to remember those whose lives were taken on 9/11. I hope you will take a moment to check this out.

I got news this week about a friend who is facing a diagnosis of bone cancer. We don’t know anything for certain yet except that it IS cancer and that it is either on his sacrum or in it. Depending upon the type of cancer that it is, they will let my friend know how best to treat it.

In the face of this news I began to pray because that it is the only thing I can think to do and because my friend asked me to pray. It is not nearly as instinctual for me as I’d like. I’d love to be the sort of “pray-er” who falls right into the well versed, proper stance for prayer but mostly it just follows Anne Lamott’s example of “help me, help me, help me” or “thank you, thank you, thank you.” Today I approach the throne with rather a surly attitude and all I can muster is “why?” and the occasional, “please!”

I’d like to say that it’s because of the injustice of it all and make some grand pronouncement about bad things happening to good people and the wisdom of God and not understanding God’s thinking on all of this but in the end it just boils down to me thinking about me, really. All I can think about is me, I confess. I feel like I’ve entered into a new phase of life in which I see people I love dearly passing into ill health, devastating crisis and fatality. Someone told me it’s because of my stage of life but this is a hard pill to swallow since I am only just knocking on the door to forty but I suppose she might be right.

It seems as though every year for the last 5 years there has been a loss of a friend or a friend’s family member or child and each time my response being mouth agape and lost for words. Because I’m a writer and because I’m a talker I look for the words when I see my friends who are suffering, who are facing treatment, chemo, radiation, nausea, death. I look for words and you know in the long run, words just fail…they just do. Once when I struggled to find something wise and comforting to say to a friend who was looking at terminal cancer I broke down and sobbed and she smiled the most peace-filled gracious and loving smile I have ever seen, she became the Comforter, the face of Christ and what a tremendous gift that was to me.

The same friend went through radiation several times. What is striking about this sort of treatment was that she could not touch or be touched for a few days afterward, she’d have to announce to people as she saw them with a stop sign palm out, “I’m neutropenic…” meaning that the radiation had destroyed so many white blood cells in the fight against the cancer that it also meant that our germs could hurt her, our touch could cause her more illness.

At a loss for words and a loss for touch…what am I left to offer?

My gracious smiling friend said to me once in the midst of her treatment that she was so glad for visitors because even though they could not touch and there was little, if anything they could say, she wanted to be seen, she wanted to be heard. This is what made her feel as though she was still a part of the human race. Her perception was that at first during her cancer people were everywhere, wanting to help, wanting to pray, wanting to speak but over time people drifted off somehow, got tired of the battle or got busy with their own lives. She suspected that the struggle was just too much. I suspect that the it was not the struggle but rather the loss..the loss of words, the loss of touch, the loss of control, the eventuality of the loss of a friend. Maybe we shut down to cauterize the pain of loss but forget that those still in the business of survival merely grieve for normalcy, for ordinary time, for the chance to have coffee and talk about American Idol.

I wish I knew more…I wish I could change things…I want to understand….I want to know God’s mind on this…I hope it turns out well…I hope my friend doesn’t die too soon…I hope he is not in pain…it all begins with “I.” Maybe “I” is all I have right now.

What comes to me is this; To see and be seen….to hear and be heard…maybe that is something. Maybe being present, being available, being eyes to see and ears to hear is enough. I hope it is a valuable. I hope it is a gift. I hope it is enough.

third in an ongoing series…

There is something I should note going forward; Anna is not the only friend with whom I have had this experience. There have been several friends of mine who have struggled with infertility and miscarriage. I can say that almost each time I was pregnant, including miscarriages I walked with a friend who was also pregnant. Three times I went on to deliver a healthy baby and they did not, three times they went on to deliver and I did not. I have also walked with friends who never got pregnant, never miscarried and never stopped desiring motherhood even so.

I find myself skittish now about how to move with other women. This is sad to me. I think, perhaps, what should have come from this relational distress should be a greater understanding of how to find our common language. It is easy to speak Hope, easy to offer up bite sized helpings based on scriptural references. God WILL grant you the desires of your heart, He DOES have plans for you, plans to prosper you, Remember the persistent widow…blah blah blah…easily said. While all of these moments of Hope are genuine, prayed for, shared, they are not always meant to be delivered by someone who has no need for that particular brand of Hope.

I think what would have been life giving would have been for us to operate with Grace as a mediator, rather than Hope. Grace is difficult to speak because Grace operates so often without words. Grace is quiet and still. Grace does not require action but rather waiting and breathing and listening. When Hope enters the room it fills in the empty spaces like expandable foam, entering into the cracks but Grace, Grace is the air we breathe. It is what fuels this “walk beside me empathy” that is required. Hope may be dashed to the rocks when spoken in the silence but Grace is sweet when given, in noise, in quiet, in grief.

Second in the series….

I have no comparison for Anna’s experience. There is nothing I can compare, any loss or unfulfilled dream I can imagine that can equal the absence of motherhood. I cannot compare it to never having a car or a house or a career because we are talking not about a “thing” but rather about a human and about a transformation of one’s very being. That may seem like an overstatement but I don’t believe it is.

For someone who desires motherhood the experience of having a child, whether by adoption or biologically, brings with it something which changes forever the fiber of one’s being. Well known humourist, Erma Bombeck once said that to become a parent means forever wearing your heart on the outside of your body. There are very few joyful things in life that cause this degree of vulnerability really. A good friend struggling with infertility said recently that “right now my personal need to mother children is right under breathing, eating and shelter.” It would have been easy for me to take that statement to a place of judgement, to “call her to a higher place” and tell her that it sounded like she was elevating motherhood to an idolatrous level and then what she said next was so beautiful that I was floored. She said that what she needed, what she was desperate for in fact was “walk beside me empathy”. When she said this to me I immediately saw how little I had understood.

All this time with Anna I had been trying to either walk ahead, shouting directions on how she should move, how fast she should walk or just saying “come up here…THIS is where Jesus is!” or I was lagging behind and making myself more deserving of grief than she, “Well, yes, but I’VE suffered too! Can’t you see how much grief I have had??” Now what I really wish I had done was stand next to her, walking as she walked, asking once in a while if she would like to stop and rest and just listening and hearing that it was hard. Walk beside me empathy, Christ on the road to Emmaus.
Of course I have had pain, I have had hard experiences too in the field of fertility but that is not really what comes into play when I am walking with a friend who is suffering. We cannot move our emotional furniture to make space for Joy to live because Grief brings with her some very heavy pieces. All the light in the room is eclipsed by the weight of the fabric on the windows, the need to protect oneself from the glaring daylight of reality, statistics and desperation. The only air to breathe MUST come from a third party in the room.

The first in a series of articles about friends and infertility…

“We ought to be able to navigate this,” I kept thinking. It was my second child. It was her first, she was newly married and this baby was a suprise, a honeymoon baby. We were close friends so to be pregnant together was exciting. It was another commonality we had, one more piece of the foundation to our friendship. I remember being at a lakeside vacation house with her and we both ordered fried food for dinner one night to satisfy a craving. Our due dates were about a week apart so I was close to 8 weeks and she was going on 7 weeks.

About a week later Anna began to spot a little. I was afraid immediately because I had recently experienced a miscarriage and the circumstances felt familiar to me. I prayed for God to ease my fears, I prayed for this baby of Anna’s to continue to develope. When the spotting didn’t stop and the morning sickness did stop Anna told me she didn’t feel pregnant anymore. She made an appointment for an ultrasound and I prayed.

When the doctor told her that the baby had stopped developing and that she should have a d&c, I prayed. I prayed that God would show the doctor and the ultrasound to be wrong. I confess that I even prayed the He would give me the miscarriage and Anna the baby. It’s not that I didn’t want to be pregnant, it’s more that I wanted Anna to be spared the loss. It was unfair that she should suffer a loss while I already had a healthy baby.

Anna had the d&c, something I had avoided with my miscarriage because it happened “naturally.” At first we talked about our experience with miscarriage, compared the d&c route to the “natural” route, much as we compared pregnancy experiences. I tried to avoid saying things that used the words “God’s plan” or “Nature’s way.” I tried to be encouraging to her when she was grieving, acknowledging her feelings and standing close when she asked that of me. I tried to not talk about being pregnant anymore even though time and the growing baby I was carrying were a constant reminder, a blinking light in her face.

“We ought to be able to navigate this” was all that came to me, nothing more. I did not know what to say and what not to say. Often I chose to remain silent and she became more silent. I could see the grief on her face as the months wore on just as she saw the joy in mine as my due date grew closer. A wise mutual friend suggested that there had to be room in our friendship for her grief and my joy but I’m not sure we were able to arrange our emotional furniture enough to discover that room.