Two acquaintances I have from high school years just buried
their 22 year-old son. Stephen had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer that
attacks the immune system. It wasn’t the first time someone I knew lost a child
to the ravages of cancer. A friend I knew from my time in the Twin Cities cared
for his son Cameron through his battle with anaplastic astrocytoma, a cancer
affecting the brain. As a parent, I cannot fathom the depth of grief in losing
a child. A child is nothing short of
your very heart on two legs. They are part of you. Because I’ve never
experienced this profound loss, I can only assume that it is as if part of you
dies. Having just returned to Utah after living out of state for a number of
years, I felt the need to support these classmates of mine as best I could, so
I attended the viewing. Stephen had touched quite a lot of lives, so the
receiving line was rather long. When I finally got to my friends, I felt empty.
I just had no words.
The best I could do was to simply be there. Sometimes,
that’s enough. Because I haven’t been a neighbor and a friend for quite some
time, I didn’t know what exactly they needed at that moment, but I hope that
their family, their neighbors, and their church have been and continue to meet their
emotional needs as well as those very practical ordinary ones.
I tend to be rather stoic, self-sufficient to a fault, and
usually nonplussed by the hurdles that life puts in front of me. I’ve generally cleared these obstacles
through attrition or endurance and by sheer willpower more often than not, but
when it comes to a loved one enduring suffering, a feeling of helplessness will
attempt to overpower me. It’s usually at
a time like that where one’s faith steps in, but for me, I want something more
tangible. I want some way to control the situation. I want to fix the
problem. The obvious flaw in my logic is
that there are simply things that cannot be fixed in the quick, convenient way
we Americans are accustomed.
Not every problem has a solution, not every disagreement has
an anodyne, and clearly, not every illness has a drug.
The thing I’ve seen in people who have survived tragedy is
that one of two things generally happens: the first is that that the glue that
held their lives together just isn’t strong enough or they come through with an
amazing sense of empathy, wisdom, and a new softness to their smiles that
somehow belie the pain of their great loss. I have seen the latter in my
Minneapolis friend and I’m rooting for that same result in my classmates!
I’ve stewed over this for the past couple of weeks and I
still have no words, but I what I have is simply what each of us has -
ourselves. I have strong shoulders capable of carrying the burden of tears and
my arms are capable of enveloping the unseen feelings that want to spill out in
every direction. I have the time to listen to the thoughts that were just
yesterday, mundane and pretty boring. The only way I could really have any feel
for why it makes any sense is not because I’ve lost a child, but because this
week, I found myself wandering through the hematology/oncology ward at the Salt
Lake City VA Hospital heading toward an appointment for a bone marrow
biopsy. If the word biopsy on the other end of the phone doesn’t take your breath away,
not much can. But this wasn’t for a friend’s child or a friend. It was for me.
As I write this, I don’t know what lies in front of me medically and while I’m a
bit spooked, I’m not mentally working through the limits of my mortality.
And while I was mentally processing this experience, I knew
what I needed and what I didn’t. And
just as it was with my friends just a couple of weeks prior, I just had no
words…because words weren’t what I needed. I daresay there are people around us
all that really don’t need our words as much as they simply need us. Don’t wait for a life-altering event
to put that proposition to the test.
May I suggest you visit these pages, dedicated to my friends' children and if you are able, please make a donation of any size in their memory to the cancer charity of your choice. Thank you.
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