A Son’s tribute

A blessing of this blog are the people who correspond with me.  Some are patients, some are survivors, some are caregivers or friends; some are Christians and some are not, but we all have one thing in common, cancer and it’s changing  impact on our lives.

Recently I was contacted by Sean, a son who watched his mom travel the cancer road and lost her earthly battle but is forever in Eternity with her Savior and Lord, Christ Jesus.  In reading his story, his mom’s cancer and her faith brought an understanding and desire for his need and relationship with Christ.

In his love for his mother and inspired by her pilgrimage, he wrote a song for her and all others who share the common bond of cancer.  Music is comforting and therapeutic, calming the unpredictable storm; the ups and downs, the unknowns and uncertainities, the victories and set backs.  I know because music was one of my anchors during my journey.

Sean sent me a link to his song, “Deliver Me”, and his authenticity and humility are felt in the words.  I asked him to share with us his mom’s journey and how she inspired him.  Please enjoy and find the peace you may be looking for in this song of comfort.

My mother Aurora was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer (glioblastoma multiforme) in the spring of 2004. She was an extremely strong and driven woman – wife and mother of two (my older sister and I), executive in the workplace, social butterfly, and active in the community. The thing that stood out to me most about her though, especially in the last two years of her life, was the amount of love and devotion she had for God.

That reliance on God carried her through the remaining 20 months of her life on earth. Suffering through 2 different major brain surgeries, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, strict dieting, and a whole slew of other treatment processes that are too numerous to count; she remained steadfast in her faith. While her body deteriorated, her relationship with God increased. Though we prayed for her miraculous healing, we knew ultimately that the decision was in God’s hands, and that His plans are greater than ours.

God sustained her for 20 months, which was literally 14-16 months longer than the original time frame we were given by the doctors. She passed away on November 9, 2005, just 2 months after she was able to walk me down the aisle as I married my wife Justine. She had asked God that, if anything, that would be the one last major event that she wanted to be able to attend in person, which He granted her before she went home to be with Him.

I can go on forever about my mom, and the impact she had on people’s lives, including my own. One of the lasting memories I have of her in her final days, was her smile as she repeated the words, “Always remember… God loves you.” It was the final line I was able to share at her funeral service in honor of her, and in that God began a work in me that is the biggest surprise of all.

I had just personally come to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior of my life in 2003, the year before my Mom’s diagnosis. I firmly believe that His timing is perfect, as He had strengthened me and my faith over that year in between, which enabled me to support my mother and family through this difficult time and help us to focus on the eternal perspective. While the years between 2005 and 2012 were somewhat quiet for me as God developed and built me up, last year marked a sudden change as He thrust me fully into music ministry, that I never for the life of me, thought I’d ever be a part of.

And thus I’m sharing an original song I wrote called “Deliver Me”. I wrote the chorus during the final months of my Mom’s life, before I was even a “song writer” (I guess I’m one now!). I kept those words in my heart, and He recently completed that song through me earlier this year as I was praying for my friend Kristi, who is currently battling stage 4 lung cancer. It’s based on Psalm 18:2, which reminds us that we can depend on God through any circumstance, and that regardless of the earthly outcome, we have ultimate and eternal victory over every enemy through Jesus!

Kristi reminds me of my Mom, in the fact that she has unwavering faith in God’s goodness and mercy despite her circumstances. And I’m sure there are so many other women and men out there fighting cancer, who can share a similar testimony. I thank God for these brothers and sisters that, through their journeys, encourage and inspire the rest of us to continue to do better, to love more, and to honor God no matter what, because He is worthy and has a plan and purpose for each of us. My prayer is that this song can serve as a reminder of the hope, joy, and strength we have in God, in light of the trials we face.

Your fear and pain is my disguise

Over the summer I have posted various chapters from my blog book, PTSD and Cancer:  Lost, alone and afraid.  Many people have asked me what my response has been from those who have either found my blog via Face Book or through search engine terms, ie. “googling.”  This isn’t a super stat blog but it certainly is serving it’s intended purpose.

I am receiving notes and emails from individuals thanking me for posting an honest, open and raw account of depression and cancer – Christianity, depression and cancer.  Just as I had hoped, survivors are finding through my story that what they are experiencing post-treatment is not “unnormal” and that they aren’t “going crazy.”  In reading their stories, my heart hurts for them as I relive what they share with me.  For some survivors, I wish I could hug them and hold them and let them cry and later talk, talk about what we feel we shouldn’t be talking about because “everybody tells me I should be thankful and grateful that I am cancer free.”

My continued prayer is that in a survivor’s quest to learn more about post-treatment depression they will find my blog and read my story and find the hope and peace they so desperately are looking for.  Yes, our strength comes from Christ our Savior, and in my weakness called depression He was always there whether it be through a secular counselor, a book, a web site or a cancer support group.  I really was never alone and I am here to tell you – you are really never alone.

The following chapter is what I might consider one of my most provocative chapters.  I hear often, very often, how once a patient is done with treatment their life fills with busyness, busyness to the point of distraction.  Is it better to distract yourself after treatment pushing your cancer experience behind you or should you stop yourself and reflect on what you just went through and allow the emotions to surface that you so successfully buried?

January 5, 2010

I didn’t think I would make an entry so soon.

As I was writing this morning, my writing revealed a truth.  I was disguising my pain and fear by “helping” other cancer patients and survivors.  I was “helping” them by listening to them and talking with them about their suffering.  I made myself available to them because, subconsciously, I desperately wanted them to answer my questions about my suffering.

Since exposing my true weakness and becoming more transparent with people, some have questioned my decision to completely drop out of “things.”  I know volunteer work places attention on others and not self.  After this morning’s journaling, I know I am in the right place by not filling my time with “things” but taking the time to explore me.

January 5, 2010

I am accepting my cancer, it did happen and it wasn’t a cold virus and over in 10 days. It was an unbelievably surreal, dreamy time in my life. I might mention that again and again as I accept this illness.

So far in a year and a half, I haven’t quite found myself. I came home from SLC a much spiritually deeper person. My one true anchor through all my treatment was my faith and hope in Jesus Christ. Once home and back into a routine, that intimacy and concentrated time was interrupted as the early morning turns into a day of activities.

The landscaping of our yard was a great distraction from having had cancer just months before. To be outside with growing strength and renewing energy, the sunshine and tackling one acre of “dirt” was a healthy challenge for me. Feeling strong and working on this project was like spitting in cancer’s face.

After my SCT, I expected to spend the first year of recovery fatigued and weak. I was shocked at how quickly I recovered and how my strength and stamina seemed to grow stronger daily. I was doing pretty well and I was feeling pretty well.

Literally, when we just finished the landscaping and we were enjoying the beauty of our labor, the flowers and shrubs, and the bounty of our labor, the cherries, I fell off the ladder and broke my leg. I had a lateral break in my tibia, my tibia plateau decompressed and I tore my ACL off of the bone. Surgery rebuilt all that was destroyed. My leg was reconstructed with plates and pins.

In all my years, I never felt such pain. It was overwhelming. And not only was it overwhelming, it was exhausting! The fatigue hit me like a Mac truck. The great majority of my healing was from the end of July to the end of October. The ache or discomfort and my limp lessened all through November and in late December, I noticed what remained was a slight limp.

This accident and recovery distracted me from my cancer. My thought and energy was on my leg. Toward the end of my healing, I began to spend more and more time thinking about my cancer.

I was in complete remission and my leg was better so I began to focus my attention on other people who had cancer – I had this driving passion to help them.  I met with cancer patient/survivors personally.  Most often they wanted to hear about my experience. I also attended our cancer support group and actively contributed to our discussions.

If I couldn’t physically be with people, I participated in on line discussion forums and I volunteered to be a telephone mentor through the Bone Marrow Unit at Huntsman. I was distracting myself again, all my thought and energy was expended on other people. It was an odd time and one I am now exploring.

I think I was superimposing my fear and pain on to others by disguising it as “helping” them get through their fear and pain.  In an odd way, I wanted them to answer my questions about me.  I wanted to ask them three questions. One, if the cancer recurred how would you determine what action to take? Another type of chemotherapy that makes you feel sick and crappy or another form of treatment? How would you choose quality of life verses quantity of life? Dying more quickly and naturally or a prolonged death being kept alive by drugs and transfusions? Two, how/when do you know enough is enough? (kind of the same as one) And three, discuss the reality of death and dying. I thought I was being helpful to them but really this was all about me, me and my curiosity and my grasping for answers to these questions.

I believe before my anxiety and stress manifested, I was becoming more and more obsessed with these issues and perhaps even a little manipulative with others. I wanted to make my problem their problem, I wanted them to answer my questions. I wanted answers and really nobody could give me answers. As my frustration grew, my doubt grew; I began to feel guilty and I felt ashamed. I realized I was not as strong as I thought I was and I had not overcome the psychological aftermath but was feeling the vortex pull me down again. I wanted answers but nobody could give me answers.

Why, after a year and a half was I still suffering? Shouldn’t I have overcome all of this by now? Does anybody else struggle like me? Do they think of these things? Doesn’t anybody talk honestly and openly about these issues or do we always have the “hope” that possibly some new drug will come along to save us? Stupid questions, selfish questions especially when there are women I know dying from cancer. Stupid, selfish questions – I should be grateful I am alive and in complete remission.

And I broke. I am not strong, but I am broken and afraid. I hurt and there is this deep, deep pain hiding in me.

 

How should a Christian die? “Walking like Steve . . .” by Dan Cooley

“O death, where is your sting? O grave, or death, where is your victory?”

“That, the sting of death and the victory of death has been removed like a bee that stings and loses its stinger, he goes away to die, death has lost its sting.  It has been stripped. It buried its sting in Jesus Christ and He conquered death both for Himself and for all who believe in Him.  And therefore the sting of death which is sin is removed.  And so we do not fear death, we anticipate death, we may have a reasonable fear of the way in which we might die.  None of us wants an excruciating or painful approach to death.  That’s kind of a normal thing to resist that.  However, in God’s wonderful purposes those times of very great difficulty, people dying that way, are often the times of the most marvelous dispensation of God’s grace.”  (What Happens When a Christian Dies?, John McArthur)

How should a Christian approach dying?  If we have truly released our possessions in this world and find our hope and treasure in Christ alone, then we should not fear death.  However, how does praying for healing fit into all of this?  Should we pray for healing or should we welcome our coming eternity and future glorification?  Is it better to pray that we stay in this world or to relent in saying, “whatever the Lord wills”?

My friend, Esther, watched her brother die from brain cancer, glioblastoma.  He didn’t pray for healing but said, “I will walk the walk God has for me.”  Steve believed in a greater glory in submitting to what God had planned for him.  As the cancer progressed, the greater glory was not in Steve’s physical healing but in God’s complete healing for him, standing in the presence of God, wholly healed, wholly complete, wholly glorified through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

WALKING LIKE STEVE

by Dan Cooley

“Those who walk  uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death.”  Isaiah 57:2

When my friend was diagnosed with a terminal illness, he taught me about dying, and living well.

Steve couldn’t die.  He was young, with two teenage boys at home.  As a geologist, he practically lived outside, and looked perfectly healthy.

But one Friday, Steve came home early from work.  He had a bad headache.  Sunday he had a seizure.  Monday he went into the hospital for tests.  Thursday we heard the results:  three inoperable tumors at the brain stem.  They gave him eight to nine months.

But surely God would heal him.

POINTS OF CONNECTION

As a pastor, I had no idea what to say to Steve or his family, or even how to pray in light of his diagnosis.  Sermons you can plan for, but not a friend’s terminal illness.  And Steve was certainly a friend.

A few years ago, Steve and his wife joined a small group of us for an eight-week Bible study.  We met at our house over chocolate-chip cookies and coffee.  During those times Steve and I discovered that we had more in common than just our church.

We were both pastor’s kids for one thing.  Both of our parents went to Moody Bible Institute, and were involved in the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches.  As a result, both Steve and I were raised with strict family rules – no movies, dancing, cards, rock-n-roll, or even fashionable clothes.  “Come out from among them and be separate” meant “if they are having fun, then leave!”

Thanks in part to our bizarrely parallel upbringings, we became good friends.  Steve was fun.  He had a first-year (1985) Toyota MR2 sitting in his garage.  We talked about getting it running.  He and his wife Janet had dated in that car.  The brown trim matched her eyes and they just couldn’t bring themselves to sell it.  Steve was frugal though, and couldn’t justify spending money on parts.  But it was fun to talk about it all the same.

AN UNCOMMON PRAYER

While visiting at the hospital I told Steve that I didn’t know how to pray for him.

“Just pray I will walk the walk God has for me,” he replied.  Throughout the days that followed, Steve never asked for healing.  He didn’t mind us praying for it, but he seemed to believe it wasn’t the path God had for him.

Steve didn’t fear death.  He feared dying.  he was afraid of the difficulties that cancer and its treatment might require.  His greatest desire was that he would “walk the walk”.  He wanted to die well, to leave a strong legacy for his boys.  He did, and he left one for me too.

We recruited a few guys to help take Steve to his radiation appointments in the following months.  My day in the weekly rotation was Tuesday.  During our time in the car, I struggled with how to talk about the future, about his boys and wife, about the process of him leaving us.  Knowing I’m better at fixing cars than awkward conversations, Steve often helped me out.  On our first trip he went through the list of songs he wanted at his funeral.  This was difficult, but our conversation the following week was downright bizarre.  Janet was driving; I was sitting in the back.  Steve spoke from the passenger seat.

“Hey Dan, know what I found on eBay?”

“No idea.”

“Urns, Dan.  The coolest urns ever!  There’s this guy in Washington state that makes them out of maple wood.  Beautiful.  They are half the price of what a funeral home charges, and you can specify how you want them made.  I think I’ll order two, so Janet will have one too.”  Janet was crying, but Steve kept going on about the urns.  The next week Janet took Steve to radiation alone.  I fixed the MR2.

Steve had a favorite scripture passage during this time, one that was not familiar to me at the time.

“The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil.  Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death.” (Isaiah 57:1)

So far, he was walking uprightly.  That was his prayer.

JESUS THE HEALER?

Steve was diagnosed in September.  The following January I began to preach a sermon series on the life of Christ.  As part of the series I had a friend from our church speaking on “Jesus the Healer”.  I thought that Clay, a hospital administrator, was well equipped to tackle this topic.  He was equipped in more ways than I expected.  As he was preparing to preach, Clay called me with an idea.

“Hey Dan, I have an idea for my “Jesus the Healer” sermon coming up next month.  I wanted to run it by you.”

“Sure, what is it?”

“Well, I’d like to interview two people for the sermon.  First, I’d like to interview someone, who through answers to prayer, was healed.  Second, I’d like to interview Steve.  We don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’d like to get his take on his experience since September and especially how he might deal with his not being healed.”

I never would have had the guts to interview Steve about this.  But Clay did.  I said yes.

They filmed the interviews and showed parts of each during different sections of the sermon.  From the screen Steve quoted Isaiah 57:1-2,and stated that his goal was to “walk the walk God had for him, be it healing or death.”  That May, Steve died.

LAST SONG

The night before the morning Steve died, I was in his room, again not knowing what to say.  After praying with him I went into the bathroom where there was a post-it-note stuck on the mirror.  In Janet’s writing it said, “I give all to God for Steve’s best path.”

Four days later we had Steve’s memorial service.  Thanks to Clay’s interview, we were able to play a video of Steve.  In his own voice, he told us what was most important to him in his dying days.  He talked about being proud of his boys and of Janet.  He talked about being proud of following God in finances – that Janet had a house and cars paid off with financial security.  His boys were able to hear their dad say what was the most important in life was to “walk the walk God has for you”.  And that “Those who walk uprightly enter into peace.”

On that last night, before reading the note in the mirror, we decided to put some of his favorite songs on his iPod, to play in the room with him.  When I grabbed the player, I was curious to hear the last song he had been listening to.

Out of the speakers came Van Morrison in mid tune,

“…Standing in the sunlight laughing, Hiding behind a rainbow’s wall, Slipping and sliding, All along the water fall, with you, My brown eyed girl, You, my brown eyed girl.  Do you remember when, we used to sing, Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da…”

I turned around.  There was Janet with her big brown eyes.  She was crying again.

THE WALK

Sermons you plan for.  Dying can blindside you.  When the diagnosis came we were all shocked, but Steve kept his cool.

Steve was a bit cynical about church life, but never about Christ.  He had been walking the walk throughout his life.  His family was provided for.  His boys loved Jesus and wanted to follow their dad in his faith.  The house was paid off.  His wife had walked with him through the hardest walk in his life.  They demanded nothing from God but instead totally surrendered to Him.

I realized if I am to “walk the walk” I have a lot of catching up to do.  Steve set the bar high.  But then, that’s how real men walk.

All I want to do now is to “walk the walk”, so I, too, can rest in peace.