Turbulent Waters

-->Sometimes, you've just got to write it down.  When we are followed by the joyful, the precious and the sorrowful shadows of our past, we must remember it is the sun shining on our face that casts the shadow back. Therese Steinhoff shares her story of witnessing the suffering of loved ones. -BTH

I don’t know how to explain it but the happy memories of my childhood are bringing me to tears of sadness this week. I haven’t cried myself to sleep in a long time, but I did last night.  I actually woke my husband up and asked him to hold me as the tears and words flowed. Between sobs I said “I feel such a heaviness pressing on my heart right now.” A happy picture from my childhood of a 12 year old version of me dancing with a sweet kid I used to baby-sit was the catalyst for the tears and the words.

I was so fortunate to grow up in a small town with wonderful adults to look up to and their beautiful kids to look after. My parents really knew how to pick good friends.

When you grow up in a town far away from your extended family, your friends become your extended family. When my parents first moved to our town they didn’t really know anybody. My mom made a friend named Cindy, who she worked with. Cindy was from Beaufort, South Carolina and had a thick southern accent to prove it. Within years they were good friends and my mom and dad drove down to South Carolina to watch her marry Gary.

 By the time I came around they were great friends. I am pretty sure one of my first words was “CindyandGary.” They were like an aunt and uncle to me. They didn’t have any kids of their own, so they doted on me. They ended up moving on to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where they would have three kids and send us Christmas pictures set on the swing on their front porch for the next 30 years.

We visited them a few times and they visited us almost every Thanksgiving or Christmas when they went to see Gary’s family. They always brought laughter and joy with them on their visits.

A few weeks ago I learned that Cindy was dying. Her first grandchild is due in May. Last night her daughter wrote on her Caring Bridge site that Cindy was losing her battle with cancer. She was suffering. She was buoyed by her strong faith accepting that God had a plan for her. Her children and husband are following suit.

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Tom and Lori were the couple across the street that I babysat for. I loved their two children like they were my own cousins. Lori became a mentor to me and was the reason why I majored in Journalism . She freelanced from home when you had to fax your stories to news institutions. Her passion for her job and her family appealed to me. She was a great mother who had found a good balance between a career and motherhood during a time when women were forced to choose one or the other. This was what I craved for my own life. I wanted to write, but I also wanted to be home with my kids.

 Lori had married her high school sweetheart Tom and they always came back from their date nights refreshed and laughing. Lori once told me that it was nice that she and Tom had known each other for so long, because they could talk about people from their past with each other. They had grown up together.

A couple of years ago Tom was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). They told them that it was a slow moving form of the disease which made us all take a deep breath, but soon Tom exhibited signs of dementia in which he would act out erratically. He would embarrass Lori in a grocery store parking lot, and then would tell her she was the most beautiful girl in the universe. Last week Lori told me that Tom now has home health care full time and they just received his lifeline clicker in the mail. You know the one you click when you have fallen and can’t get up? Tom is in his late fifties.

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If my parents close friends were like aunts and uncles to me, their children were like cousins to me. I have known Claire before I can remember. She and her sister Erin were so musical and cool. They acted in many plays and were always singing. Erin was two years older than me, and Claire was a year younger than me.

My dad and their mom became ill at the same time. They died within months of each other.

Claire ended up going to Stanford Law, met her husband, settled in San Francisco and then became pregnant. Her pregnancy was rocky from the start. She delivered Nora at 25 weeks and Nora weighed less than two pounds. We all held are breaths for months as Nora tried to breathe on her own. She never has breathed on her own and she is now three years old. A few weeks ago I learned that Nora is on the list for a full lung transplant. She is a happy, spunky, little girl who runs around trailing her oxygen tube behind her. She has her mom’s smile and curly hair. She has her grandmother’s strength. She is like any normal three year old—she just can’t breathe.

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Life is a lot like the lake I grew up on. Some days you can just float on water that is smooth as glass. And then a storm comes and the lake gets choppy and tosses you around. Sometimes you feel as though the heaviness of the dark water is pulling you under. Then the sun comes out and you are floating on the calm water again. Right now I feel like this turbulent time in our friends’ lives are pulling me under. The happy memories are the only thing keeping me above water. I remember hearing all of their diagnosis’s and thinking “well they are OK for now” and that kept me floating on the calm water. These past few weeks the waters have turned dark and choppy. I feel the heaviness of what’s next for them and their families weighing me down. I feel guilty for being so far out from shore. I want to swim up to land and help them out.

I know that the sun will come out and that the water will be calm again. I am grateful that my own family is safe on land. My heart is physically aching. Right now I wish I could go back in time and be that 12 year old girl who is watching the calm water from the dock and laughing. The girl who hasn’t even seen the dark choppy water of life. The girl who has never had to swim against the waves. But if she never had to struggle she wouldn’t have gotten strong. Right now the woman she has become must gather that strength to swim against the current swelling around her today. She knows she will be back on shore soon. Her family is waiting for her.  

Losers Weepers, Finders Keepers

We got take-out Chinese for dinner last night and watched Wreck It Ralph. As it ended, my husband sighed and said to me:

"I miss my brother."

 

We're having a little bit of a hard time.  My husband and I can't quite put our fingers on it. Winter doldrums? Stress at work? Just the effects of keeping so many balls in the air? Who knows. But we had the realization a few days ago that tomorrow will be the sixth anniversary of his brother's, The Chef, abrupt death.

The kids piled into the car this morning and my daughter got accidentally kicked in the head, one son threw a pencil at another and everyone was just being sour.  I turned the car off and looked at them.

Deep breath.

"I'm going to tell you something.  Look me in the eyes. Dad is having a hard time right now because he would give just about anything in the world to have another night with his brother." 

Everyone perked up, wide eyed and nervous. Maybe not my best parenting, but like I said, we're both having a hard time.

"You have many gifts. But the people in this car are the best things that have ever happened to you. Some day, I will break a hip. And one of you is going to need to get in a car and come help me. And I will be crabby about it. I will not like feeling old and fragile. And you know what you're going to do?  You're going to call each other.  You're going to NEED each other."

No one said anything.

"Someday I am going to drive you nuts. I promise you. And the only people who will empathize with your frustration are the people in this car. You're going to help us with our finances, fix whatever kind of new fangled technology that dad and I can't figure out, and deal with the fact we don't hear so good anymore."

They start to laugh.

"Mom, it sounds suspiciously like a full time job," said my oldest.

I told him, it would be.  I promised to cause him a lot of trouble.

"But it will be happy trouble.  We're going to have a lot of fun.  We're going to take care of each other. Right now I do a lot of the care giving, but soon you'll be taking more and more care of each other, and eventually of your dad and I too. That's what family does."

Everyone softened a bit. We went to the gym. It's not easy to be good to your siblings all the time. We can be competitive. We can be frustrating. Sometimes we have nothing in common except an initial address. But it is a relationship that helps us learn how to be a good friend. I'm guessing that if you were never nice to you siblings, you aren't a great friend either.  Maybe I'm wrong. But it's an interesting thought.

Today is also my friend's, The Hummingbird, birthday. The name is apt because I've never met anyone who talks or works faster. At one point or another she has cleaned my refrigerator, bathed my kids, planted tulips in my yard (in freezing rain), fed my family, cut my grass, challenged me to run faster, rewired my 2nd floor, cheered for me, read to my children, made rhubarb cake at 5 am before my first triathlon, decorated my house for Christmas, shoveled my walk, flown 1,500 miles to hold my kids and help us bury my father-in-law; but mostly we've laughed and laughed and laughed. She is beauty in motion.

We were celebrating her birthday the night The Chef died. His heart just stopped at 32 years old in front of his wife and newborn son. We were devastated.  He lived far away and we were weeks away from the birth of our third child. My siblings showed up one by one and were incredible helpful with packing and planning, with offering support and sympathy. But the next day, The Hummingbird came quietly buzzing into the house and did laundry, took our two toddlers up to her house to play, made lunches, did dishes. She was just a calming breeze that blew through that day. At the very end of the day, when we were alone in the kitchen, she asked

"What happened?"

No one had told her any details, she just showed up and filled in.  She knew he had died but had no idea how or even when exactly. The whole time she just acted with kindness, without question, without judgement or self involvement. I've always remembered. She helped without needing to know why.

This friendship changed my life. 

I love my siblings. We are all very close. But she has helped me become a better sibling by showing me how rewarding unconditional love is. She's not perfect - but she's done a lot of perfect things for me, for my kids.

I want my kids to have this kind of capacity.

About a year ago, her out of town sister learned she has cancer and is really sick. She's angry sick. And it is heartbreaking. Loving and supporting siblings from a distance is challenging work.

It doesn't matter if you lose someone slowly or suddenly, the result is the same. Today, we feel the absence of my brother-in-law in different ways than when he first died. The anger, the shock, the confusion has mostly passed. It's the inability for my husband to call him and complain about me or talk about fatherhood to the only other man who was parented by the same father, or to think through family finances and career planning. These are the phone calls and boys get-a-way trips that The Athlete still grieves.

 

We can't go back. So how to do we go forward?

• By making it count.
• By saying I love you. 
• By putting the petty stuff aside. 
• By reaching out and not holding back. 
• By offering big, generous acts that are unexpected and unnecessary.
• By encouraging relationships, fostering friendships.

This weekend, we were going to the cabin, but instead we offered it to my adult nephews who wanted to have a boys weekend. Some are married, some have kids. We can give them that - a chance to make more memories, deepen their friendships, strengthen their brotherhood. That we can do.

We've moved on in so many ways from six years ago. The physical relationship is part of the past. My brother-in-law is a part of the horizon now. We see him in the distance, simultaneously real and ethereal, yet he is still there resting between our past and our future. When we feel the loss, we grieve, but when we embrace all that we've found in the process, we feel the blessing upon our hearts.

We will see you again, brother.

What Do You Say?

I got this submission yesterday from a good friend. It makes me ache.  She asks the complicated question: how can we best love and support someone at the end stage of cancer treatment? It is a question without one clean, clear answer; a question of individual experience, of stage of life, of personality and faith. She's suspended somewhere in between reality and grief, between respect and support.  It's during these hardest time, these inexplicable experiences, where we have to see the illusion of shared experience. Somethings we cannot fully share or understand, somethings we must just witness. How we witness, how we honor and support is what makes all the difference.  - BTH

She didn't think I'd understand - she was apprehensive to stop chemo, but she was apprehensive to continue. Trust me, I understood. In this situation, there is no answer.  There are decisions to be made, but no answer to be had.  If only there was the slightest possibility of peering through that crystal ball to see if one path or the other might lead to a slightly better outcome - a few more weeks, a better quality of life. But there is no crystal ball, and in the absence of the ability to see into the future, she has to make a decision.  Today, to me, that is the definition of courage - of making a decision when there is no answer, and no information at hand to help guide you. I suppose this is where in my life, I would turn to God and my faith, and pray for guidance to follow the right path; that there is, in fact, a path meant to be.  I've never heard her speak of her faith, and I am not one to proselytize, and so the best thing I could do was offer to listen as I drove her to her chemo appointment, and to hope to offer the right words of encouragement to her, because honestly what the heck do you say in these situations? 

I don't know what those right words are, but I think I would want to someone to tell me that I've done an amazing job, that I've fought a heroic battle, that I had found strength to carry on when others couldn't have, that I wasn't letting anyone down, and in fact, that I was inspiring. I think that's what I would want to hear...but I hope to never have to find out. So that's what I told her today, because every word of it is true, and because I could tell that the burden of letting her parents down, that she was appearing to 'give up', was weighing heavily on her shoulders.  She needs to know she is loved, loved dearly, and that she is capable of making the right decision for her and her family.  She asked me if I knew what I would do in her shoes. I told her I did know, or that I think I know what I would do. She didn't ask for my answer, and I didn't offer it - because I think she hears plenty of opinions, and because I think she knew what she wanted to do.  I know that if I had given the battle everything I could, that I would choose quality of life over quantity of life.  The clinical trial she is on right now causes vision loss, and causes her to generally feel as bad as one can imagine.  I would want to see my kids.  I would want my kids to know that I gave my absolute best, but in the end, I would choose to spend my days with as much strength as I could, to enjoy them for every quality moment I had left.

I heard from my friend tonight, a few hours after I left her with her husband at the doctor's office, and she told me she had found peace.  I think it was a kind of peace that she hasn't experienced yet.  I will tell you that as hard as I have been praying for a miracle for her, I have equally been praying for her to be at peace, and to have a good quality of life for however long God will grant her on this earth.  I am so heart broken tonight, so deeply sad for her daughter that will grow up without her mother, for her parents who will lose their only child, for her husband who has had to endure an unjust burden in his early years of marriage, for her friends, and for her students.

My friend was my son's 1st grade teacher last year.  I remember overhearing whispers as we went to meet the teacher night in August.  We didn't know anyone, and finally I learned she had been diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer just weeks before school started, weeks before her daughter turned 1, weeks before she turned 29. Twenty. Nine.  I hate that the first thought that passed  through my head was that of selfishness.  We had just moved to Seattle, and my son (who takes a good 8 months of the year to adjust to a new situation) would have a first grade situation that would mean his teacher was gone 2 days every other week for chemo. We had just left a preschool situation where his amazing (also young) teacher was fighting cancer.  Was it selfish of me to want a normal classroom experience? In about the same amount of time that the thought flashed in my head, it was gone. I wasn't sure why, but I immediately felt at peace that we were put in this class for a reason. There were 4 first grade classes, and God had placed us in this one. I knew that wasn't just by chance. As it so happens, we met one of (if not THE) best elementary teachers our kids will ever have. My son was challenged to go beyond meeting expectations to create new ones, and push past them. She knew every kid's strengths and abilities, and she taught to them each successfully. I have no idea how she did it. In the process, we became friends outside of school, and I saw my son develop a compassion that I have never seen in him before.  He is not an emotional kid, and does not wear his feelings on his sleeve, but I know that the situation with our friend weighs heavily on him.  I know that I must now also pray for the courage to help him through what lies ahead, and to pray for peace for him as well.