RE will meet as scheduled Sunday.

Our Religious Education classes will meet tomorrow.

It's not wonderful

That's what my OB said.  Six months ago she called me with the results of my breast biopsy and said I had to come to her office right away.  "I have some news for you and it's not wonderful."

That's why when I heard my husband say the same words to me over the phone about a week ago my heart dropped through the floor.  "It's not wonderful."  Really?  Seriously?  You're kidding right?  Dear God no - not cancer, not again.  We're not even done with it yet.  I still have 6 weeks of radiation to get through.  It can't be cancer.  It doesn't happen like this - twice in one year!   Maybe it's just a coincidence  Maybe "It's not wonderful" doesn't mean cancer.  It really just means "it's not wonderful"  instead of "life the way you've known it is over. . . again."
My husband has cancer.

He tells me I'm supposed to see the bright side of all of this.  It's bladder cancer.  Highly curable, easily treatable blah blah blah.  They told me all that when I got breast cancer. . . six months ago.  Besides,  I don't know why I am supposed to FIND the bright side to cancer.  I don't want my husband to have cancer.  I don't want him to go through this - I don't want anyone to go through this. . . I don't want to lose my husband. I waited thirty five years to find him for crying out loud and now I get two years with him and we've both got cancer?  What's up with this?

We went away for the weekend to the mountains.  Said screw the money and got a nice hotel and enjoyed ourselves for three days.  Saw some really beautiful stuff.  It was very strange though.  In the back of my mind I knew the whole time we were just avoiding reality and we had to get back home.  Home to cancer.  More doctors, more invasive procedures, more surgeries and chemo treatments.  More sick, sick, sick now both of us at the same time.  More babysitters.  More asking for help.  Help help help. . .

 He says "Mine won't be nearly as bad as yours was."  But we all thought mine wouldn't be so bad remember?  Remember at the start of all this when I put together an exercise calendar with all my friends to help me stay healthy during chemo?  Ha ha ha ha! . . .More dread.  More fear.  More worry.  The Bible says we're not supposed to fear or worry - but give me a break here.. .how am I not supposed to worry?  Everyone says leave everything in God's hands.  Well you know what I DID!  And now we both have cancer. . .

And where is all this going?  I mean - when you get hit with cancer twice in one year is Heaven sending you a message to get your affairs in order??

Beautiful baby girl.  Will her parents live to see her first Communion?  Will either of us be around when she needs us?  What the heck is going on?  I keep trying to focus on starving people in third-world countries.  Compared to them I've lived a life of luxury and ease.  What'a little cancer compared to living in slums and not having any food to give your babies??. . . Everybody has to pay the price for sin somehow right? 

But then I am terribly jealous of my friends who are stressing about stupid mundane things.  A teenager having a difficult time adjusting in high school. . . an adolescent acting up. . .too many committments and not enough time. . . car problems. . . annoying people.  Boy I wish someone would annoy me.  I'll take it!  You can have cancer!! Trade you any day.  Just let my husband be okay.  Let my husband be okay. . .

This Used to be my specialty, Part III

So Factor Three is just a fancy shmancy name for something I've come up with on my own.  Something I discovered, and frankly never factored in.  It's the unexpected factor in all of this.  The big surprise.

No, I don't have a deep feeling of closeness to God as I always have.
No, I don't have a blind and joyful faith that I have always had.
No, I'm still not sure I believe prayer makes any difference anymore.

But I suddenly do have other people.  I'm not sure how to describe this, but it's like, when all those other people I've prayed for all my life were sick, it was like they needed MY faith to uphold them.  And now I am sick, in trouble and weakened spiritually, and suddenly I'm being uphelp by all of their faiths. 

They are praying for me and offering Masses and sufferings for me.  I have fourty choir children offering up sacrifices for me.  One mother came up to me and told me of how her four year old daughter Gianna fell and scraped her knee.  When mommy asked if she was okay, the girl replied "It's okay mommy, I offered it up for Mrs. N."  Gianna is upholding me somehow.   

When I told Pam I was afraid the chemo wasn't working, she said "Who cares about the chemo?!  Jesus Christ will heal you!"  Pam's faith is stronger than mine right now.  Pam is upholding me somehow.

I'm not sure I can effectively explain all of this - I think it is another one of those mysteries of faith that we'll never quite understand or at least not until Heaven.  But I know it is true.  I am weak now, but those who love me are strong and are rallying for me, for my life and for my soul.  I don't feel close to God, but I feel this so deeply, so confidently that it touches my heart very much and it almost replaces the comfort of faith.  I am upheld by the community of God.  Even in faith we are not alone.

This used to be my specialty, Part II

I remember a couple years ago reading about some newly discovered letters of Mother Theresa which disclosed honestly her complete lack of feeling anything close to God for the last twenty some years of her life.  Many people misunderstood this as a sign of her being a fake.  Intellectually I understood that this discovery would bring her closer to Sainthood, but emotionally I had no idea just how dark a dark hour could be. 

I guess right now I feel like I'm going through my "dark hour of the soul" with faith.  It's not that I don't believe.  I do.  I don't have any doubts about my beliefs either.  It's just that I don't have any assurance of Him or His love.  I feel very alone and empty.  Which is a very interesting dilemma.  At this time, the scariest time of my life so far, shouldn't my faith be upholding me?  Isn't this why I've invested all those years of prayer, study and church?  If not for this than what?  What's the point of faith if at the first sign of struggle one collapses like a flower in the wind?

My grandfather used to say that religion is of the will and not of the emotion.  Perhaps the reality is not that I've lost my faith, but that faith is not what I thought it to be.  Perhaps what I was experiencing my whole life, a feeling of joyful contentedness, constant comfort and companionship, perhaps these things are just feelings, emotions, as fleeting as a young lovers passion.  And feelings are not the substance of faith.  Feelings are just beautiful flowers blowing in the wind.  They blow here and there and die and grow in season, but they are fickle. 

So faith is an unknown substance.  Here I had listened to that Gospel Parable all my life about building my house on solid ground and thought "I've built my house on solid ground."  Now I look to see in the first heavy rain that the grounding I thought I had is washing away in the tide. . . but there is another foundation under my fortress, holding it up against the wind and rain. . . there is another, better foundation.  I will call it Factor Three.

This used to be my specialty, Part I

That's a line from the final monologue in the film Jerry Macguire.  "This used to be my specialty.  I was good in a living room."  Jerry is trying to explain how he feels so completely off balance because what he used to feel so confident in, is now strangely so difficult for him.

That's how I feel now.  I recently emailed a friend a two-liner about my inner fears that the chemo is not working.  I have no visual evidence that it is, we've never found a lump, and my cancer breast does not appear to be getting any smaller.  After post-lactation deflation, the cancer breast remains a frightening 1/4 larger than my non-cancer breast.  I check faithfully every morning.  So I told a friend about my fear. 

In response she reprimanded me for putting my faith in the wrong place.  She said that chemo and all its suffering is just something I had to go through to grow and become whatever He has planned for me.  But chemo will not cure my cancer, she said.  Jesus Christ will cure my cancer.

Of course she's right.  I've been a person of deep faith my whole life.  It was my spiritual strength.  Others have told me for years how "inspired" they've been by my "great faith." I've always remarked that where others were strong in love or joy I was always strong in faith.  It was my thing.  It was my living room. 

So now, where is my faith? I mean I heard the voice right?  So why all the doubt?  Why all the fear and worry?  Why the constant thoughts of fear and doubt and despair?  This used to be my specialty.
In a way I suddenly sympathize with the guy in that poem "Footprints in the Sand."  Where the heck are You?  Now I'm living not day to day or hour to hour, but minute to minute.  I don't know if I can make plans for next year, next month or next week.  And there's that dread feeling.  It's no joy ride thinking that something inside you is growing and slowly killing you and there is nothing you can do about it. 

Google has become a terrible fuel source for this fear.  I do searches and all I get is my fears confirmed.  When I was diagnosed with ER+ cancer everyone told me that was a good thing because it responds really well to the AC chemo.  Everyone lied apparently, because EVERYONE on Google says the exact opposite. . . So research and science bring me NO consolation.  Well meaning survivors and friends and family can't console me.  I would say there IS no consolation, but intellectually I know better.  "Lord to whom else shall we go?"

Identity Crisis

"Who am I anyway?  Am I  my resume?  That has a picture of a person I don't know."  A line from the musical A Chorus Line that has always stuck with me.  Suddenly I feel like that character, staring blankly at his 8X10  black and white glossy that he paid a fortune to get made, and wondering if it really portrays me, who I am. . .  and the big question that lurks behind every head shot decision is really "who AM I?"

My whole life when asked this piercing question, I've always given the knee-jerk answer that I am "A Child of God."  I wish I could say I'd given that answer out of absolute certainty.  It seems that's how we start in life, just a child of God.  We come out and we don't even know we are a daughter or a sister.  We have no aspirations and no fears, no relationships.  We are nothing but "A Child of God."  However, as life moves on we begin to identify ourselves.  First as a daughter and sibling, a grandchild, a niece, but then as a student, a friend, a worker, a Catholic, a musician, a singer, a teacher, a friend,  a performer, a scrapbooker, an herb gardener, a wife, a mother. . . Sometimes we get side tracked and have personal identities that shouldn't be there: an alcoholic or a drug abuser, a gambler or a glutton, a sex addict, a liar, a thief, a cheater, a hypocrite. . . and on and on.  Hopefully we try to shed ourselves of some of these identities. . . for many in our culture, our identities circle directly around our appearance.  I have beautiful hair, I have beautiful skin, I'm thin, I'm fat, I'm short, I'm tall. . . So that's who we ARE. . . .

But perhaps, true holiness, TRUE holiness is shedding ourselves of ALL our identities except that first one.  I can honestly say that cancer is doing for me something like what a nun or monk does for themselves as they enter their order.  They give up all their identities.  They renounce all earthly relationships, throw out all their hobbies and possessions, cut their hair and don unflattering clothes, and commit to a lifestyle of obedience  and put all their attention day and night to that one big original "I am a Child of God."

Cancer has taken my identities from me.  First I was healthy, and I am now a chronically sick person.  If you've never made this leap, you cannot imagine how difficult and traumatic it is to go from "super preferred" to "hanging on by a thread."  As I write this, I am sick to my stomach the day after chemo and two days after my third surgery this month.  I have an electric drug pump automatically pumping meds into my body which I carry everywhere, along with my throw up bucket.  It's official  I am no longer a healthy person. Identity taken.

Cancer has taken my beauty.  I am bald, and I look like a freak.  My weight fluctuates between the steroid induced weight-gain and the inevitable weight loss post chemo treatments.  I am too tired to dress fancy everyday or do makeup.  I save these energy sapping efforts for Sunday Mass and teaching days.

Cancer has taken my energy.  I no longer want to exercise, most days I struggle to pick up my baby girl.  Many days, because of the dopiness caused by the drugs I don't dare try.   I have no power to do the laundry or clean the house.  I have not made my husband a meal in months.  I have to helplessly sit on the sofa for days at a time, watching stupid tv.  Reading often takes too much energy. . .

Cancer has taken my career.  Two conductors who had hired me to sing large gigs this Spring have called and out of necessity fired me.  It's completely understandable.  I'm too high risk.  But I've cancelled the rest.  It's just not fair to them.

Cancer has taken my singing voice.  I have no energy to sing.  I don't know what is wrong with me.  My friend in NY who is going through all the same treatments I am, has enough energy to continue singing and training.  I try to sing to my little baby and I can barely whimper out her little nursery rhymes.

Cancer has taken my financial independence.  I am teaching when I can, but cancelling more often because I am in the hospital or too sick and tired to appear before people.  I'm officially a drain.

I am no longer a scrapbooker or an herb gardener.   I am totally unavailable to my family - I can barely call occasionally to give them updates.  I am not a godmother or an aunt anymore.  Am I a mother?  Today I shipped my child out to someone else's home because I couldn't care for her.  Yesterday and tomorrow her father will do everything.  Will I be well enough this time to care for her at all?

With all of this comes this unexpected grief.  When you get cancer, you have to grieve yourself.  All of these are identities that you have to watch die and let go of.  One by one.  Might they all return someday?  Possibly, but saying good bye to a husband who is off to Afghanistan for a year can't be easy either can it?  And neither she nor I know if they'll be back.  It might be a permanent departure.

I had to grieve.  First my health, then my fertility, then one by one as the weeks have gone by, another part of me and then another.  The process always the same for each identity you have (and you don't realize how many you have until they start peeling away).  "Oh no!  Not that!  I can't live without that!  I want to be a mommy again!"  Then "I don't want to lose my hair!  I've had it my whole life!"  Then the rest one by one, each with their own grieving process.  It takes months.  I'm not done yet, I'm sure of it.

It takes me time.  But some people don't seem to need to grieve.  My husband doesn't seem to grieve anything.  When they told us we'd probably be infertile, It took me weeks of crying and anger to accept the chemo treatments with an open heart.  My husband said "okay" in the first doctor's office, and that was it.  Weeks later, we got into a huge fight, our first since marriage, when he told me to give up my children's choir because it would put me at risk for serious illness.  The only time I can ever remember fighting seriously with him.  He was fine with it, right away, and didn't understand why I stubbornly held on to my hopes. . . .Eventually I got both my oncologists to say I could do a rehearsal once every other week. . . but still, I'm not their director anymore.

So you grieve each new time.  And just when you think you've stripped yourself of all your identities, something else comes up and you're stripped of that too.  I wonder if it is fair to compare the cancer experience to that of the concentration camp victim.  They too are stripped of all their identities.  Everything, family, looks, clothes, jobs, Independence, down to their very humanity as they are slowly starved to death.  In Victor Frankle's holocaust book called Man's search for Meaning he describes how, at the end of that stripping there is always something that the soldiers couldn't take away:  your right to choose good or evil.  He theorizes through his own camp experience, that his conscience never left him and no matter what, he was always himself because of that one thing, his freedom to choose good or evil.

Is this getting back to the bare minimum?  Is this the "Child of God" I've always said I'd be?  Stripped of everything I was clinging to, I'm left with my utter dependence on Him and my will to choose right and wrong.  No hair or singing voice to hide behind.  No popularity or world approval.  No daughter to love.

And that is the clincher (in case you're all so depressed that you now want to commit suicide).  I'm still here.  I mean, there still IS a me under all those identities.  I still like purple, and I sill laugh at my husbands jokes.  I have no idea who I am anymore, but I am still here.  And as I am stripped of my relationships one by one, to myself and to those around me, I find that the one original relationship is still there.  It's a mess.  It's in pieces all over the floor, covered by anger and resentment, and occasionally now trust and hope.  But that one relationship "Child of God."  doesn't seem to vanish no matter how hard cancer tries. 

Funny, that nuns and monks choose this. With joy no less.  I think I'm beginning to get that now.  And a part of me hopes (Note I'm using the word hope again, but possibly in a more healthy manner now), that when my hair grows back and my life is restored after all of this, that I will hold on to that ONE relationship, and keep all the others loosely attached somehow.  Love and love and love some more, but never again identify myself by worldly standards.  And never never judge anyone else by them either.  Mother Theresa saw each person as a Child of God, whether Hindu or Catholic, whether healthy and beautiful or dying of AIDS.  She saw them all as what they were when they got here.  And what they would leave this place as.

So all this grieving is actually a cause for rejoicing.  There is, somewhere deep inside of me, a slight shallow "thank God!"  that is echoing through my heart.  Because as crazy as this sounds, I never want to go back.

It's okay to hope again

In the movie Sharshank Redemption, Morgan's Freeman's character says that hope is a "dirty word."  For the last three months I've finally understood that line.  I've been so torn in my personal faith because I've thought "if it's God's Will that I die- why should I hope for life?  Isn't that a contradiction of faith?"  My whole life I've said "Thy Will be done" and now suddenly I'm supposed to say "unless it means me dying and leaving my husband and daughter without a mommy?"  I've really been torn over this.  I don't think I've uttered a sincere "Thy will be done" for three months now. . . .

So I've been intensely struggling with what "Hope" really is.  Is it the patient and joyful waiting for what you want?  Or is it the patient and joyful waiting for His Will?  If it's the former, no problem, I'm all over it.  But if it's the latter, and real holiness is hoping for whatever He wants for you. . . how do you joyfully wait for what you don't know?  My husband points out that I'm supposed to assume that, because God loves me,  no matter what, it will be for the best.  And deep, deep in my heart I guess I can say I believe that.  I can visualize us all standing around in Heaven someday, eternally blissful, and saying "Oh yeah I get it now" to everything that didn't make sense to our earthly eyes.  But from where I'm standing now, there are some outcomes to this situation that I simply don't want to believe are for the best, and the numero uno is the outcome where I end up out of my daughter's life.  I don't want to trust God, that she will be better off without me.  And I certainly am not hoping for it. . .

In any case this morning He let me off the hook.  After three months of seeming silence, I finally heard His voice in my heart.  It was like feeling sweet gentle rain after months of drought.  Sceptics will question what I'm about to write as a bunch of hogwash, and they are welcome too.  But  I don't.  I just know.  I don't believe - I know.  It was His voice.  That familiar voice that comes with automatic caller ID.  One doesn't have to ask who's talking.  Every cell in one's being recognises the sound of the voice that called them into existence. 

"I'm going to cure you of this, and you will live to be the mother I've created you to be."

 I've heard the voice several times in my life - sometimes more clearly than others.  One time I heard it so loud and clear that my bones literally shook with it.  But I think I know now, that was because He was dispelling the evil thing that was following me.   However these months, I've been so waiting and hoping to hear with confidence His voice - part of my spiritual battle is that I've heard nothing and figured He wasn't participating in all of this somehow.  Or that He didn't say anything because He had no good news to share with me.  Or worse, that He wanted me to be a Saint.  I'd say I felt abandonned, but I know that's ridiculous.  I felt afraid to hope.  I felt like Morgan's Freeman's character.  Hope was a dirty word.

But now I know His will is for me to live.  Now I know that He has more plans and dreams for me.  Now I just have to endure whatever suffering is part of all this treatment, and get through it all.  But at least now I know and believe there is a "through it all."  I mean, It's okay to hope again, and I don't have to be a Saint to do it.  that's what I mean when I say "He let me off th hook."