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.
3 comments:
Beauty, hope, and strength. Your solid pack of four is filled with it!
So nice to read of the strength and individual ways of support of your entire family, and especially to hear that Rowena has chemo, not cancer...
So beautiful, Ed. Love the Skyla truth that Ro has chemo, not cancer. Brilliant. Thanks for weaving your love.
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