Three Women

Foreword: Today I was one of three women comforting a co-worker in her hour of grief.  Later, when reflecting on the day, I realized the significance of three women and was instantly honored to be one of them. The essay below was my personal Thank-You note to the three beautiful ladies who got me through one of my darkest hours. It was written just days after Pop’s death in 2018.  Today’s events made me reflect on this, and I post it now to honor the friends who love beyond measure.  

On the last day of March I interviewed for the first time with OIB, after which I went back to my office at the Catholic Center, certain that I had not made the impression necessary to land the job. I reasoned that I could find peace in that fact, that God would place me where he needed me, even if it meant staying where I was.  An hour later I was sitting at my desk when a call came in with news I almost couldn’t bear.  My father-in-law’s upper GI that morning revealed a tumor in his esophagus.  A biopsy had been performed, but even without full results doctors knew it was most likely cancer.

I recall sinking into my chair and putting my head on my desk as tears threatened. We had just come through the darkest night with my mother-in-law’s cancer.  Her healing had been the miracle we dared not expect. Her illness had been tumultuous, and I had taken her care as my personal responsibility, though in fact it was shared by many. The news of Pop’s tumor burst the bubble of hope and ease, the promise of brighter days, that I had allowed myself to seek comfort in for almost a year.

When I raised my head from my desk, three women surrounded me. They were the family I chose, the friends who would stand by me through any storm. I burst into tears as one held me.  All I recall saying is, “I don’t think I can do this again.”  They each assured me that not only was I strong enough, but that they would not leave my side.  And they didn’t.

Leaving the daily presence of those friends whom I love so dearly was not easy. I feared for a long time that I might not enjoy relationships that close, that near to my heart, in my new work environment.

I was wrong.

Last week when I answered the phone call that told me of Pop’s exit from this earthly life, I felt the weight of a sadness I have never known. As a family we have not sustained loss this close.  Dom and his brothers, their wives and I all have our parents, alive and well.  I was wading into territory none of us knew how to navigate.  Fear and hopelessness closed in on me and I could not contain the emotion, regardless of my preference to remain wholly dignified in that moment. I laid my head on my desk and tried to breathe through the sobs that simply would not be silenced.

When I raised my head I was at once moved by the sight of three women surrounding me. Three beautiful women whom I have grown to care for quite deeply in the short time I have known them.  Three women who held me and assured me that I could weather this storm, and that they too would be by my side.

When I consider the parallels of the journey I have taken over the past year, I am struck by God’s truly amazing grace and the constant reminders of his love. His joy shines through you daily and gives me courage to press on through all things. His love poured out through you three on Wednesday and in the days that followed.   For everything you have done and everything that you are, I love you immensely.  Thank you.

Not All Who Wander…

I said some day I would write this down.  Figure it all out. Make the story make sense.  Because I am a figurer… and a planner… and a puzzle solver.  It’s what I do.  I may do it on a small scale, but I do it whole-heartedly.  And often.

It was 2014 when I said to Dom, “What if I went back to school? What if I wanted a master’s degree? Would you be cool with that?”

I wasn’t asking permission to expand my horizons, mind you; Dom would never hold me back from what I felt called to do with my time. But we are a team, and I needed to know if he could sacrifice some dinners or pitch in with the housework while I studied for the next two years. I knew this would not be easy on any of us.   I would publicly state two years later, “If I ever say that I want to go back to school for a  third time, someone hit me in the head with a rock.” It was an adequate statement, and I sensed it before I even began.

So there I was, rocking along toward an MBA.  Dinners were still relatively on schedule.  Dom was becoming a laundry KING. I was stressed out and stretched too thin, but I was killing it, or so I thought. And then the bottom fell out.

October 2015.  I’d been in school for a year. One down, one to go.  Mid-way through Halloween decorations and smack in the middle of terms, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with Stage 3 pancreatic cancer.  We live right next door to her, and of the six of us “kids” (her three sons and their wives) I had the most flexible work schedule.  So I rose to the occasion.  I managed to balance school and work and doctors’ appointments.  Against all odds, Mom lived.  Hell, she was outright cured.  I fell to my knees in gratitude and when I rose I danced and cried and danced some more.  I had plenty to be thankful for and I was ready to shout it from the rooftops.

Six months after the doctors looked at my mother-in-law in astonishment and I thanked God and every saint I could name, I finished that dang program and got my MBA.  The trials were over; the dust had settled.  There was light at the end of our tunnel.

I thought the achievement of the degree would satisfy me, but a desire to do more started murmuring in my head and wouldn’t shut up.  What good was that degree if I wasn’t going to use it? What had all the struggle been for if nothing was going to change? Why did I pay that tuition if my family would never see some return on the investment?

So I said to Dom one morning, standing at our bathroom sinks, “Among those companies that your company works with, if you hear of any job opening that I might be good at, let me know, okay?”

I don’t know how much time passed between that statement and a certain phone call.  “Hey, remember when you said for me to keep an ear open for jobs?” he asked.  “OIB is looking for a credit analyst.”

“A what?”

Seriously.  That’s how this journey unfolds.  The next thing I knew, I had an interview.  I’ll never forget it – March 30, 2017.  My father-in-law had a doctor’s appointment that morning at the same time as my interview.  After two years of my accompanying them to every appointment and my helpful ability to recall dates and details so that I was almost a walking medical file on my mother-in-law, Pop wanted me there at his appointment.  “That’s alright,” I remember him saying. “They’re just going to look at my esophagus and figure out why I can’t swallow. It’s no big deal.”  That wasn’t self-pitying sarcasm; he genuinely meant it and I believed him.

I had my interview and came back to my office at the Catholic Center to tell my co-workers, “Y’all, I bombed that thing! There is no way I’m getting that job.”

Within an hour my phone was ringing.  Remember that light at the end of my tunnel? Turns out, it was another train.  Dom told me that Pop’s appointment that morning had taken a morbid turn. Esophageal tumor.  A biopsy had been scheduled, but it was most likely cancer.  No. Just, no.

Sometime in the next three weeks, Pop’s diagnosis and treatment were confirmed, and I got the job.  It was bittersweet, to say the least.  In a new work environment with entry-level vacation time, there was no way I could attend all of Pop’s appointments as I had attended Mom’s.  Everything felt upside down and I felt guilty for so many things –  for being happy about new opportunity when those I loved were so distraught, and also for not being available to my extended family when they needed me.

I cannot imagine that I was much good those first six months of my employment at the bank.  My family was going through some tough stuff – scary, and yet too familiar all at the same time – and I did not have my same confidantes and supporters in my day-to-day world.  I had new people. Wonderful people, but not those onto whom I thought I could dump all my crazy and still keep my job.  I held it in, for the most part.  I only let out the little bits that I thought wouldn’t send my new coworkers running for the hills or searching for the nearest straightjacket.  I know now that I did not give them nearly enough credit.

As 2017 drew to a close I experienced my first series of working holidays. Switching careers from the Catholic Church to banking is culture shock, to say the least.  We work on Christmas Eve?? Are you kidding me?? Perhaps I would not have been as selfish with my holidays if I were not watching Pop dwindle in strength and spirit with each passing day.  I managed to take some time off after Christmas that year, and I vividly recall taking a phone call from my new friend and supervisor as I stood in the backyard on a partly cloudy, cold December day.  She was informing me that our community bank was being bought by a larger bank. Our merger would be complete in February.

I spent that last week of December mentally willing myself to see the silver lining in our merger.  Maybe I would start to grow into my position and gain some confidence. I had not been with the community bank long enough to feel credibility in how I did my job; maybe that would change.  I don’t know if I was tricking myself, but I managed to feel hopeful about the whole thing.  Maybe this was why God led me into banking. Perhaps I would find my footing after all.

Three days into 2018 Pop succumbed to the cancer we could not beat.  I don’t have to tell you how badly that hurt.  I started comparing the timelines and sizing up his cancer journey and my OIB journey.  Both began on the same day. Both ended within just a few weeks of each other. Both turned my world upside down.  Both were beautiful and painful. Both would leave permanent marks on my heart.

The following month I spent my birthday in training for the new bank.  My heart was still heavy, my body was still tired, and my head hurt with too much new information. While I had only six months of procedures to re-learn, my co-workers had years’ worth. I was quite surprised (and somewhat ashamed) at the relief I felt as more and more people joined me in my unsteady little boat of The Unknown.  I finally felt like we were all on the same ground, rather than me being in a pit while everyone else stood far above me. To be fair, some days we were all above the pit, and some days we were all down in it, but at least we were together.  Misery does indeed love company.

It was somewhat similar at home.  Some days we were all smiles and some days we were just weepy messes. Oh, I could talk a good game – God’s plan for our lives, waiting patiently on the Lord, no need to worry about tomorrow, blah blah blah.  I was saying it, but I wasn’t instantly buying into it even as the words were passing my lips.  Okay, yes, my heart knew the truth.  But it was like my brain had just been through a war-zone video game that it couldn’t shake even though the game was over.  There were no winners in that game, by the way; it was all just destruction and shambles – programmed blood and pixelated gore that I couldn’t unsee.  There was real loss that I couldn’t unfeel.

I recall one particular Spring day when I was feeling especially down and I was complaining to Dom that making new friends at work had not been easy, that I missed terribly the sisterhood I left behind at the Catholic Center, and that I didn’t know if I’d ever have that level of emotional camaraderie again.  His response gutted me. “I know how you feel,” he said. “Think of who I hung out with, who I shared everything with when I wasn’t with you. Daddy was my best friend; we did everything together. If I wasn’t with you or at work, I was with him. I don’t have that anymore.”

The realization stung as it sunk in.  I had been so laser-focused on what I was missing that I failed to see the innumerable layers to Dom’s loss.  My selfishness had known no bounds.

I wasn’t willing to ignore our feelings at home, and fortunately neither was Dom.  We began to set aside time every night just to be together and talk about our day with no distractions. We tried to make sense of where we were, both personally and professionally.  Did we want what we had? Did we like who we were? Were we simply too scared to change? The answers varied, depending on the day’s events, but ultimately we realized that we had been changed by our experiences, not ruined by them.  The question that remained was simply, “What now?”

In the midst of our grief-filled year, we had some pretty significant events – Aaron graduated from high school and we dropped him off at college. I managed to distract myself from the additional changes in our home by focusing on travel, crafts and holiday party plans.  But December found me at my lowest point. For the first time in memory, my favorite season of all was not filled with hope and wonder and peace. I had no spare vacation time and was working through Christmas. I came home one night in tears and vowed to Dom, “I will not do this to another Christmas season. I have to have a different job before this time next year.”

As 2018 became dust and shadows I realized that we had been to Mass approximately four times during the year, not counting Pop’s funeral.  How had I been such an idiot?  No wonder the year had been so hard.  I prayed still, but my prayers were more akin to venting sessions with the hopes of a magic eraser.  They lacked gratitude.  I began to see that as a general rule, I lacked gratitude.  This had to change.

“We gotta go to Mass,” I finally told Dom after the year anniversary of Pop’s death.  “We gotta get our butts back in a pew or we are never going to recover from this.”

He nodded.  “I feel it too.  We need a major change, though.  Maybe a different church.”

I could be on board with this.  I understood the sentiment.  We needed a drastic enough change that we could see and feel a fresh, new start. “Okay,” I said. “But, can I ask one thing?  When we change churches, can we still be Catholic?”

“I’m not gonna quit being Catholic!” he exclaimed, and then we both laughed – he with amusement and I with relief.

There were so many issues with changing churches that my stomach soured at the thought of addressing them all.  Victoria was in the middle of her Confirmation year; I served on the church finance council; our church had a new pastor whom I deeply respected and whose feelings I did not want to hurt; we had grown to love so many of the congregation members, and all of those people had supported us and loved us through the highs and lows of the previous twelve years. There was no way leaving wasn’t going to be awkward.

I decided to start with the pastor of the church we would attend: the church where it all started – where I fell in love with Midnight Mass, where I became Catholic, where we were married, where our children first learned how to sit still in a pew. In other words, home.  I called Father Tim, whom I know from my days at the Catholic Center, and said, “I need confession and consultation.”  He came to my office and we talked about all my issues. There wasn’t a single problem I brought up for which he didn’t have a reassuring answer. It was not official, sacramental “confession,” though I did share with him all the ways I had gone wrong in the past year and my general state of discontent.

“You need to come back and work for the church,” he said.  I laughed.  He didn’t.  “Why not?”

It was the question that would start the healing I needed.  The next time I saw him, he outlined a job description for a new position he was creating. I didn’t tell him right away, but that description was exactly what I had decided I wanted to do – a little HR, a little insurance, budgeting, facility management – basically, managing a small business.  I just never thought that business would be a church.  But, if I’m qualified for anything, it’s a church job. We touched base with each other several times over the next two months while he fine-tuned the position and took applications and I prayed for direction.

“You still interested?” he’d ask.

“Yep.” I handed him my resume. “You still hiring?”

“Yep.”

It became official on April 17, 2019, just a few weeks past the two-year anniversary of the kick-off of my journey. I got the job.  I’m back in the fold.  I’m going home.

In The Lord of the Rings epic, Tolkien wrote, “Not all those who wander are lost.” It feels like I have wandered for two solid years, and I frequently felt lost. Hindsight is 20/20, and only now I can look back and see that I may have lost myself but God never lost me.  Even when I let go of his hand, he still had my back.  He blessed me with new, dear friends and a bank “family” who consoled me in my loss and lifted me with their daily presence for two years. Perhaps he blessed me with a little darkness so that I could appreciate the light. And he blessed me with opportunity – to sacrifice, to grow and to love.  My mental image is of me as a child, toddling away toward something shiny while God gently reaches out and holds a belt loop to keep me steady. The toddler, oblivious to everything in the periphery, is only aiming for what’s ahead, and what’s ahead is always going to be unknown to us.  But we learn when we wander.  We learn so much.

 

** Since this post contains Dom’s feelings as well as mine, I had him read it to be sure he was okay with my sharing and required no edits before this was published.  He said he had only one edit from my original draft: that I share my mental image of God as Henry Blake from M*A*S*H. It’s true.  From the time I was little, I envisioned God with Colonel Blake’s quirky hat and fishing vest, complete the the pinned lures. I have no idea why I made that association at such a young age, but there it is.  Since Henry Blake was always smiling and happy, yet still Large-and-In-Charge, I suppose it’s fitting in its own way.  I can definitely picture him corralling a toddler by the belt loop.  And that’s good enough for me.

The Process

We all grieve.  We grieve things, circumstances, pets, people. It’s a process.  It’s long and it’s messy. I hate messy.

Sometimes during the process I realize all over again the finality of the situation. The bus just pulled away from the station without me. The person I love is on the bus. Gone.  Just like that.  Can’t call him.  Can’t go visit. No more last minute Hey-would-you-mind or How’s-your-day-been.  The imaginary line just buzzes, or worse, I get that upward ringing tri-tone and the voice that annoys me even though it’s pleasant. “We’re sorry.  The person you are trying to reach…”

I know, I know. He’s gone. I get it.

For the last two nights I’ve dreamed about Pop. They’re perfectly normal days and circumstances in the dreams, except that I’m aware Pop is supposed to be dead.  I’m glad he’s not, but I’m confused.  He awakes from his chair, round faced and wide-eyed. “Hey!” he says as he gets up and walks outside.  The family follows. He chats ‘em up.  I hear him laughing. That laugh.

I’m staring dumbfounded after him. I turn to my sister-in-law. “They embalmed him,” I say. “How is he walking and talking?” She shrugs.  And then she smiles.

“Where are the groceries?” Pop asks as he throws his arms around a grandson. Groceries are dinner. Pop’s ready to eat. What in the world is that doing in my dream? I don’t know, but there it is. I hear him laugh again.

I think of cooking, and suddenly remember that my food-prep knives are dull.  Really dull.  Pop always sharpened them for me.  I’d send them next door and he would bring them back, five deadly weapons wrapped neatly in newspaper. “Wash those before you use them,” he would advise. Hey, maybe Pop can sharpen my knives while he’s here.  I’ll ask him after dinner.

Pop moves to stand beside me and I examine his profile.  His hair is not the white I expected.  It’s black, peppered with a little grey, I notice. He’s younger than when I last saw him. How is that possible? I reach to touch him and he moves away.  If he’s aware of my confusion, he doesn’t let on. I let it go. Food. Pop was hungry.  I need to get food made.  I turn toward a kitchen I do not recognize and wonder why my legs are bound. I can’t move as freely as I should. I look down into nothing.

My eyes open and I’m staring at my bedroom ceiling. My legs are bound by the sheets, comforter, and a Siberian Retriever. Move over, Max.  I gotta go help fix dinner.

Except that I don’t. There’s no dinner to fix. No Pop to eat it. The realization brings back the heaviness. Ding, dinng, dinnng… “The person you are trying to reach…”

This sucks.

When the Sun Shines Again

It’s been ten days since Pop left us.  So many people have offered consolation and wisdom for what we face.  They tell me it will get easier, that time and memories will see us through.  I believe them.  I have certainly found reasons to smile and laugh in these past days, but I also find that I cry over the smallest things now.

I think it’s the moments in between the moments that get me the most.  The quiet moments when my mind is still.  That’s when I think of the little things, just out of the blue.  Like lunch, and how every day when Dom and I would meet at home for a lunch of leftovers from last night’s dinner, we would be stirring or re-heating or pulling plates out of a cabinet and he would casually ask, “Want me to see if Pop wants any?”

“Of course,” I’d say. “There’s enough.”

A few minutes later Pop would come striding through the side door into our kitchen, tea glass in hand. “Hello, hello,” he’d say, quickly followed by, “Get back!” as he admonished our dogs to stop greeting him with such enthusiasm.  He would stroll around the island and take a seat at one of the middle barstools before launching into a lively conversation about something on the news that day, or a chat he’d had with a friend that morning. Many conversation topics began with Pop waving his hand in the air as a means of pointing our attention in a certain direction as he stated, “Dominic, we need to…” followed by a task or chore that he wanted Dom’s help with somewhere on the property.

Pop would eat with us, compliment the meal, then lean back in his chair with a satisfied sigh before saying, “Alright. Let me get back to your mom. Thanks for lunch. It was delicious.”

“Alright, Pop,” Dom would say. “See you tonight.”

I’d chime in with, “You’re welcome, Dad. See you later.”

And then Pop would walk out the door with one last, “Thank you.”

Pop thanked us every time he saw us, even when I didn’t feel like we had done anything to be thanked for. Each time I told him goodbye, he would answer with, “Good night, now. Thank you.”

The last time we spoke he thanked me. I truly feel like it should have been the other way around. Of course, I didn’t know that was to be our last conversation. That night, it should have been me thanking him – for unbridled laughter, for raising his boys to be perfect gentlemen and showing them how to be great husbands and fathers, for being an amazing father-in-law, for letting me see his own strength as well as weakness, and possibly for leaving that strength behind so that each of us who miss him can use it to get through the hard times without him.

I imagine it will always sting when I think of the things we won’t get to do again with him. But I will be forever grateful for the time we had and for the gifts of his love and laughter, which he shared with all who knew him, holding nothing back. I will remember to say “Thank you” every time I think of him, and I will smile at the memories. One of my favorite Rose Kennedy quotes reminds me that it’s okay to find joy even after loss: “Birds sing after a storm.  Why shouldn’t people feel as free to rejoice in whatever sunlight remains to them?”

You know me.  I’ll be looking for the sunshine.

Robert Joseph Mainiero
October 27, 1942 – January 3, 2018

 

 

 

The Vaulted Files: Pop’s Eulogy

This is the eulogy I wrote and read at Pop’s funeral vigil, January 7, 2018. Some of my most treasured essays are on this blog, so it belongs here, late though it is. I am backdating it to fall in line with other essays from the same period.  – LSM 12/28/19

On behalf of our family I want to thank each of you for being with us tonight.  Whether you personally know just one or all of us, we have felt and have been lifted by your kindness, your concern, your love and support, and most importantly your prayers.  You have fed us, held us, laughed and cried with us.  You have allowed us to lean on you and have given us strength. When we cursed our darkness, you lit a candle –  with a phone call or a text, or a simple Facebook message. Some of you quite literally lit candles, and I love you for it. You let us know we weren’t alone, and you shared our pain as much as you could.  We are forever grateful.

For those among you who don’t know me, I’m Lori, the middle daughter-in-law. I belong to Dominic.  I call Charolette and Bob “Mom and Dad” and they call me their daughter. Melissa, Kasie and I are fortunate to have been embraced by Mom and Dad so openly – so completely – that they do not distinguish between the children they birthed and the children they acquired.

I don’t remember the day I actually met Dad, but I do remember the first time I ever saw him.  Mom and Dad came to our college campus to watch an intramural soccer game. Charolette sat in a lawn chair on the west edge of the field while Bob stood a few feet away on the sideline with Dominic. I was positioned a good distance behind the men, where I could bear witness to the physical similarities between them. Dominic and Bob stood side by side, each with one hand hanging on a hip or a pants pocket, one leg bearing most of the weight while the other leg bent just slightly at the knee.  That day on the soccer field I felt as if I was looking at two versions of the same person, brought together by a thin fold of time, as if past and future were somehow overlaid and allowed to coexist in the same space for a single moment.  I thought to myself, “I must really like this boy. I mean, I can see what he’s going to look like in thirty years and I’m still interested.”

As the pages of our days turned over and new chapters were written, I learned that nothing put a smile on Dad’s face like his grandbabies.  With the patience of Job and what I can only imagine were built-in noise-cancelling eardrums, he paced the floor with gassy, screaming infants; tolerated the most obnoxious clanging toys; and remained unphased by temper tantrums.  When my daughter announced at age three that she liked Papa best and I inquired why, her answer confirmed what I had suspected all along: “Because Papa never tells me ‘no!’”

If you knew Dad personally, then you know how he loved to help people.  If you were ever on the asking end, you could be certain he would not turn you down.  Need twelve cords of wood split?  Here he comes.  Need something welded? Bring it on over.  Need extra hands digging trenches, cleaning gutters or serving meals? Make room for Bob.

In addition to saving stockpiles of random lumber, PVC and metal pipes, Dad was known to salvage every nut, bolt and moving part from every machine he or his boys ever owned.  In fact, they are all in his garage right now.  I affectionately call Dad’s garage the Rusty Home Depot because if you needed anything that Home Depot sells, and you don’t mind a little rust on it, you can get it from Dad’s garage for free.

Dad lived happy and could laugh about almost anything (and frequently did, much to Mom’s annoyance.) In all the years I knew him, I saw Dad get angry maybe three times.  I saw him cry.  None of us likes to cry in front of people, but Dad was never ashamed of it. I saw him break, fully and wildly, only once and that was because one of his sons was in danger.  I learned in that moment that nothing – not recent triple bypass or a seventy pound table in his way – would keep him from holding his boy.

When I began to write this I had two goals in mind: to honor Dad and to comfort my family, so I will address this last part to the first few rows.  This is not the end.  Papa’s life is not over. He has gone where we cannot follow, but only for now.  There will be moments when our minds will naturally expect to see Papa, and our hearts will break again when we remember that he is not here.  For me, it will be every time I look out my kitchen window and expect to see him tinkering in the well house or watering his plants, with Lady wagging her tail beside him, faithfully following wherever he goes.

This will be hard, but we have each other.  We will cry together; we will hurt together.  And we will still gather for Sunday lunch, even when we don’t feel like eating.  Our hearts are broken but they are not empty, and none of us has to bear this pain alone.  Papa loved each of us deeply, and it is our job now to nurture that love among us and pass it to the next generations.  His joy for life will live in our memories.  His laughter will echo in our hearts.  We will see him in each other, and one day, after we have lived a life as full as he did, when we arrive on the other side, we will hear that booming laughter again, and we will know we are home.

This Is the Day the Lord Has Made

It’s funny, the things you remember once your brain gets past bad news.  I’ve been in a funk lately.  Duh, right? No, it was more than a sick-family-member funk.  It was a why-is-the-world-like-this funk. A what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this and how-will-I-ever-get past-this funk. I was run down from emotion and circumstance and the general 2017-ness of it all.  I’d had enough.

To be honest, I recall many details of the past year, but it flew by.  Seriously.  Wasn’t it just last month that Pop was diagnosed? It was April.  Has it really been eight months? No.  Where did the year go? I’ll tell ya where it went.  It spiraled down a swirling vortex of suck, flinging out tiny moments for my memory to hold on to. Little snapshot photographs.  A conversation here.  A milestone there.

Until yesterday.  Yesterday I decided to get my spirit back on track.  I threw myself a little pep rally right there in front of my computer at work. The day was decent.  Baby steps. I held another pep rally this morning in the car on the way to work.  It’s not my car, actually.  It’s Pop’s truck.  After my van was totaled a month ago we decided not to replace it right away.  Pop’s truck had been sitting dormant in his driveway for the better part of the year. Suddenly the truck needed a driver, and I needed wheels.  We seemed a perfect match.

Can I state for the record that I am sooooo not a pickup truck driver?  There it is. But back to the pep rally.

I turned the wheel of Pop’s truck and literally said to myself, “You’ll never get past this if you can’t be grateful. It’s time to move on.” It’s a whole new year, I reasoned.  And, as much as I miss the comfort and convenience of my van, at least Pop’s truck has heated seats.

Although I’m usually having these conversations with God, today I was talking to myself.  He answered anyway. As I straightened out onto another street, a verse lodged in my head. “This is the day that the Lord has made.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”  Be glad in the day.  Not hard, right? Be glad that we have this day. I’ve said repeatedly over the last few months that God only gives us one day at a time and that’s all we should concern ourselves with.  So what’s up with all my moodiness lately? It serves no one, least of all God. I’m his child.  I’m the daughter of a King, I reminded myself. THE King. Whatever today brings, He and I can handle it together.

The call came in just after 2:30 this afternoon. Pop was gone.

Twelve hours later I rolled over in bed, aware that Dom was up, aware once more of the events of our day. I closed my eyes and instantly saw Pop’s steering wheel and the ridiculous half-patched bump in the road I take to work, the sun blazing down on me as I drove in freezing temperatures. I recalled my conversation with myself and God’s interjection. I can see now how He was preparing me. Be grateful… Take one day at a time.  I thought I was preparing myself for a good day.  He was preparing me for a hard one. “This is the day the Lord has made.”

I will rejoice and be glad in it.  Even as my heart breaks.

The “C” Word

Tags

cancer cured, chemotherapy, faith and cancer, pancreatic cancer

Update/Prelude/Whatever: A month after I wrote this, Mom’s tumor markers unexpectedly shot up. When I said in the post below that she had other issues, I was saying – without really saying – that things were still wrong and we just couldn’t get them identified.  It may be that we will soon have a resolute cause for the issues that still plague her. It may be that the post below is rendered incorrect, if not completely obsolete. It may be that we continue to swim upstream against a relentless current of cancer.  The only thing that keeps me from now deleting this post altogether is that for a few brief days – long before the conversations detailed here, before I dared believe in the word “cured” – we had hope.  We still have hope.  It may very well be all we have, so we cling to it with all our might.

I have not previously blogged details of my mother-in-law’s cancer.  I have written about it, of course, and maybe someday my words will be suitable for public consumption. I don’t quite know why I have hoarded the experience of her cancer, while I shamelessly share here all the other events of my life. I think perhaps the difficulty of what we have witnessed as a family, the magnitude of the diagnosis, or even the need to focus on Charolette’s health instead of my own experience of it prevented me from sharing in this outlet.

I suppose there is also the reality that the journey is not over. We have not yet been sent out through any physician’s office door with well wishes for a long and healthy life, call-us-if-you-need-us, it’s-been-great-knowing-you-now-go-forth-and-prosper.  She has not yet been dismissed from their care. Her case is not yet closed. And, since my preference is that stories have a definitive outcome before I share them, so we can all enjoy the neat and tidy ending – or at the very least laugh at the crappy and chaotic aftermath – at this point Mom’s story doesn’t fit the mold.

Then, of course, there is the fact that it’s her cancer and her story – not my own. I have felt an intense need to respect her privacy in my writings.  But in a way, the cancer happened to us too.  Its impact has not been limited to the confines of Mom’s body.  Cancer, as you know, weaves its cellular tentacles through and around healthy tissue, invasive and uninvited. I only now see how its emotional tentacles sprawled to weave themselves in and among our family members, making it our story and our experience as well.

I have wrestled a host of demons these past nine months. In October I cried and prayed and begged that our feet would not have to walk the path that lay hauntingly before us. In January I feared we were losing her altogether. In April I struggled unimaginably with doubt before “putting my hands in His side,” and relaxing into the knowledge that – whether we chose to call it miracle, successful medicine, or outright anomaly – Charolette’s cancer was gone.

Feeling like a traitor to my faith and a modern-day Doubting Thomas, I insisted on getting the pathology results before completely succumbing to tears of joy and thanksgiving.  The following week, with a dread borne of experience, I became the World’s Biggest Hypocrite in the face of more chemo as I silently chastised doctors for not “believing the miracle” and releasing Mom from the grip of torturous cancer treatments. Even though I had (finally) settled into the knowledge and faith that she was cured, no doctor would use those words. That’s okay, I told myself. I know what I know. And if you think I’m stubborn, you’re right.

For any person with pancreatic cancer, the treatment plan is: 1) radiation supplemented by chemotherapy, then 2) surgery, then 3) more chemo. We knew this from the beginning. We also knew that without treatment, a person might expect to live 3 or 4 months. With treatment and surgical removal of the tumor, there is a 25% chance that the patient will be alive in five years.

That’s the gist. Now here’s the rewind: We first heard these statistics in November, three weeks following Mom’s first surgery, which was unsuccessful because her tumor turned out to be larger than expected, too intricately involved with three major arteries, and therefore deemed “massive and inoperable.” Our only hope at Charolette seeing her next birthday was tied precariously to chemo and radiation shrinking the tumor to an operable state.

Surprisingly and against many odds, it did.

Mom’s second surgery on March 17 was successful.  There was no longer any tumor to speak of, much less remove. Doctors took over half of her radiated pancreas, her spleen and an adrenal gland. The pathology report on the excised tissue was perfectly clean.

Our follow-up visit with the chemo doc prepared us for six more months of chemotherapy treatments.  Several people, on hearing the news of Charolette’s surgery and the clean pathology report that followed, have asked why she still has to have six more months of chemo. Believe me, I asked the same thing.

Essentially, Mom had completed two of the three steps in the treatment plan.  There is not enough documented precedence – so few people whose pancreatic cancer is obliterated to this degree – for the doctors to recommend anything other than proceeding with the original plan.

I get it, really I do. I understand that they just aren’t quite sure what to do with her, since she pulled a mind-scrambler on them and came up cancer-free before the end of the prescribed regimen of treatment. And without precedence, without cases upon cases of successful mid-treatment cures before hers, they are unwilling to release her without following the plan to the end.

This is where my will conflicts so heavily with that of modern medicine and the cosmic forces that are more complex than my little mind can fathom. But such is life. So I give myself an attitude adjustment, focus on what is right for Mom and what she wants, and move forward.  She is alive today and I can do nothing but support her desire to stay the course. And so I do just that.

Even though the cancer is gone, Mom has struggled with other issues as her body adjusts to functioning with only a portion of her pancreas. As we visited with Mom’s GI doctor last week, I shared with him what I understood of her treatment and recovery. He asked me what her CA19-9 levels were prior to surgery and now.

“I have no idea,” I confessed. “You just started speaking another language.”

The CA19-9 marker, which indicates tumor growth in the pancreas, had not been discussed in any memorable way by any other doctors. The GI doc told me to ask the chemo doc about it, just out of curiosity.

And so, at Monday’s appointment with Dr. V. I brought up the subject of Mom’s CA19-9 levels.  “Do you monitor those?” I asked.

“Yes, we look at those once a month,” he said as he flipped a page in Mom’s chart and paused. “Oh, wait. No, not yours,” he said directly to Mom. “We don’t monitor them as closely once you’re cured.”

There it was.  He said the C-word.  “Cured.” I chomped down on that word like a Rottweiler on the mailman’s leg.  Cured. No doctor has wanted to say that to us yet. Even if he slipped, he said it.  He said it and I believe it and I’m going to hold onto that spark of reassurance for the rest of my days.

“Since you brought it up, we will check them for you next week, okay?” Dr. V. looked at me with raised eyebrows and I realized that a manic smile must be stretching across my face.

“That’d be great,” I said, hoping I wasn’t scaring him. I really do like Dr. V., despite my inherent distrust of conventional medicine and my decade-old belief that chemotherapy is Lucifer in liquid form. All of the physicians who have guided us along this journey have been compassionate, caring and sincere individuals whom I have grown to respect immensely. Their hearts are true and their priority, like mine, is taking care of Mom.

So we continue with the care and the treatment and – if we may be so bold – the cure. We ask that our friends continue with the prayers. And we wait to see where this journey will lead us.  After all, we walk by faith and not by sight. Well, most people walk; I seem to stumble along.