Two lives ending bring me questions I can only trust with God
Last Thursday afternoon I met two of my closest friends in a hospital waiting room just minutes after their 40-year-old son had decided to enter hospice.
I hadn’t planned the timing. The young man had been in the hospital for eight days, several of them in intensive care, and I wanted to visit again. Without my knowing it, as I was driving there, a team of specialists came to his bedside and one by one explained to him all they had been doing to help him.
Despite their “heroic efforts” (his mother’s words), they could not get him well enough to treat the metastatic cancer swelling in his stomach. He was too weak to receive chemotherapy, and his bodily functions were breaking down at a pace overwhelming their best efforts.
Best word
“Overwhelming” is the best word to describe the whole situation. He had received his cancer diagnosis exactly one month earlier after some niggling symptoms only a few weeks before that. This was too fast. He is too young.
My friends were not alone with this news. The tiny waiting room was crowded with a circle of their family, each aunt or uncle or cousin or sibling trying to grasp what was happening. They had been banished from the young man’s bedside by a nurse changing a dressing. When the word came that we could return, the whole roomful stood as one and headed down the hall.
But I left. This was a time for family, and I had already been with them for 30 minutes. I walked to my car after a promise to see them soon, and I drove home. Alone.
Impossible option
It was a beautiful summer evening. Warm, but not hot, with a cooling breeze. I drove through busy suburban neighborhoods past public buildings whose flower beds were exploding in their full-bloom best. The streets were crowded with cars heading for after-work dinners out as couples and families chose from a dozen restaurants to celebrate the beginning of the weekend.
I didn’t want to go home. Alone. I wanted someone with whom I could debrief what I’d just experienced. I’m a talker, and I needed to talk.
For just one nanosecond, an impossible option flashed before me. I’ll tell Evelyn about this.
It was an involuntary reflex, a response to neural pathways created by five decades of telling Evelyn.
It was a response to neural pathways created over five decades.
Not that long ago she would have been as devastated by this news as I was. We would have struggled together to make some sense of it. She would have enveloped our friend with her hugs. That friend told me with tears, a few weeks ago, right after they had received the awful diagnosis, “I wanted to tell Evelyn.”
Like a lightning bolt, now I felt what she felt. And for the first time since I’d learned of this tragedy, I wept. Alone. My car’s air conditioning cooled my hot, wet cheeks. Maybe I would tell Evelyn, but the news would bring little response. Her capacity to process the tragedy of others is gone.
Unanswerable questions
I’ve written about loss in this chronicle time and again. But somehow Thursday evening, the definition of loss pierced me afresh. A loss means something is gone. Forever. And what will we ever find to fill the space it once occupied?
My friends have been committed to finding any way they can to make every moment with their son count—in the next days. Or hours.
I see myself doing the same thing. My daughter and then my son will be in town to visit Evelyn this week and next. I’m glad they’re coming, but Evelyn’s steady, subtle decline appears clearly to those who don’t see her every day. I’ll make their visits as pleasant as possible, but there’s nothing I can do to minimize the grief, perhaps shock, they’ll feel when they’re with her. How will we live with this grief—for months? Or years?
Which is worse? To see a young life snatched away before summer ends? Or to watch a long life end in a torturous, tedious, slow slide whose end we simultaneously seek and fear?
Important theme
I’m preparing an upcoming series of Monday Meditations around the theme of lament. (More on that in this space next week.) Many lament Psalms begin with questions like mine above. But then they end with an affirmation of the psalmist’s trust and a recitation of all he remembers about God’s faithfulness.
Similarly, in moments of deep grief, I always come back to the rest of my reality. I have seen God’s goodness to me again and again and again, not only in the last years of course, but throughout my life. Today I can say I’m confident he won’t leave me now, when I most realize how much I need him.
But that’s not what I was thinking Thursday night. I was thinking about the sad mishmash of makings for a meal waiting for me in my refrigerator at home. I couldn’t face trying to put them together into something I’d want to eat. Alone.
So I stopped at Skyline. What could be better than that plateful of chili and spaghetti and cheese accompanied by a Coke Zero? Another set of neural pathways, deepened by years of experience, told me this was a feast that would bring comfort.
At home, later, I remembered my vow to quit eating ice cream before bed, but tonight was not the time for self-discipline. The simple scoops of vanilla under a river of Hershey’s chocolate syrup never tasted better.
Soon I settled under the covers with a prayer for my friends and gratitude for the comfort surrounding me. And in spite of everything, or maybe because of it, I slept well.