Trying in 2014--Love Lengths, Life Lines

The lengths of love holding our family together on that dreary day in December had strands of patience, persistence and faith. Not just from us—but from the people around us, ranging from the gritty, caring educators at Grattan Elementary to all the friends and family who have helped raise Skyla to be independent and resourceful to the bus driver who brought her safely home.

And that formula of self-help, dogged hope and community support is largely how we held it together during the hellishness of 2014 overall.

It isn’t a new recipe for resilience. But the components have nonetheless amazed me with their intensity. As difficult, as dark as the days have been this past six months, they have met their match in moments of grace, generosity and courage.

Those start with Rowena. With her immediate plunge into the science of breast cancer and the range of possible therapies. I had an escapist streak this fall, wanting to cancel the reality of cancer by immersing myself in Lord of the Rings Movies and a Dan Brown thriller novel. But Rowena faced the scary facets of breast cancer head on, often sharing with me gruesome statistics and side effects of drug therapies.

Nor did she blink much when it came to the medical treatments. Despite some tears, she pushed through her fears of surgery and the pain associated with pre-operation procedures, post-operation recovery and chemo drugs.

Some of the procedures, by the way, were highly medieval, despite their modern technological trappings. For one biopsy, she was strapped to a table, faced-down, with her breast exposed through a hole. The entire contraption was then lifted into the air as the doctor walked under her and jabbed in a long needle. 

Even mammograms, whose name suggests a maternal, perhaps comforting activity, can be tortuous. I had no idea these images involved squeezing the breast tightly between two plates. To make sure Rowena’s tumor site was perfectly pinpointed, one mammogram meant compressing the breast to the point that fluid oozed out of her nipple—fluid that was a sign of cancer.

Rowena not only soldiered through all these physical and mental difficulties, but artist-ed her way through them as well. Our friend Joel once described Rowena as having “no left field.” And she applied that seemingly limitless sense of creativity to cancer.

In her journal, cancer became “Kancer Karl,” which also is a graffiti tag found in our Mission neighborhood. Kancer Karl had tagged our back door with his moniker some years ago, and Rowena now imagined that Kancer Karl—the breast disease—had come knocking. Rather than wear a wig as her hair thinned, Rowena opted for a black fuzzy bear hat that somehow provided the perfect accent to her fancy holiday outfit. And Rowena’s wordplay around cancer has kept us laughing with little gems like Chem’owena and “terribald” for how her patchy head looked.

The kids stepped it up as well. Julius threw some tantrums at the start of middle school, with its heightened academic and social pressures. But he found some sweet new friends and within weeks he was doing his homework and tracking his class progress online without parental prodding. He fit into a new, higher-powered soccer team and surprised me at times with his big heart. During dinner one night this fall, he declared, “If mom dies, I’m going to devote my life to finding a cure for cancer.”

Skyla willingly took on the ride-the-bus-home-by-herself challenge. She was voted a soccer co-captain and helped lead her team to a second-place finish. And she gave her mama lots of love. She asked Rowena for a cuddle in her bed every night, crocheted a wrist-warmer and necklace for Rowena for Christmas and after the lumpectomy and all-clear test results, made sure we all knew cancer’s place. That is to say, gone from Rowena’s body. “You don’t have cancer,” she said once. “You have chemo.”

Skyla’s hopeful comment was like a fiber spun into the yarn she was crotcheting into gifts for Rowena. Just a few words, but taken together with the other ways she cared for her mom, they cinched up our spirits. And that moment was woven into a longer, thicker rope of generosity and help, and many rope-lengths of love intertwined into a fabric that bound us up as the year drew to a close.

Fiber, thread, rope, fabric are miracles of nature and human capacity. How is it that soft, unsubstantial tufts of cotton or blades of grass can be transformed into strong cords, tough sails, sturdy bridges?

By twisting together, the single fibers form a strand, which can itself can be entwined with other strands. The fibers, it seems, have a natural affinity for each other. Long to wrap themselves around each other. And with a bit of prodding and plaiting they do so, growing stouter, longer, more resilient as they unite.

Just so, our family and the people around us spun their love into life lines last year. And the lines held.