Below is a(nother) dusted-off post from 2011. In 2011 my mother was still alive and living at home. She clearly had dementia and her body was slowly failing on her. My father was her main care-provider, but that summer was hard on him, too. With all that was going on, I helped out as best I could.
Mom and Dad — summer of 2011
Last Thursday we went for the follow-up visit for my mother’s bladder biopsy.
The baby-faced doctor handed my father the pathology report. “It’s bladder cancer, just as I suspected,” he said.
He continued speaking, “It’s high-grade papillary urothelial carcinoma.” I could see the words on the path report in my father’s hands. “The cancer hasn’t spread past the lining of the bladder. There is no invasion into the muscle or the subepithelial tissue.”
When he began discussing the treatment options, it was truly a discussion. He listened to our concerns, answered questions, explained, and listened some more.
We finally reached the point in the process that I was anticipating (and dreading).
My mother is now incapable of making decisions, especially decisions like this. She can decide what she wants for lunch — usually something involving marmalade. She can decide what she wants to wear — usually the same thing she has been wearing for the past three days. She can decide when she wants to take a nap — often. She cannot make an informed decision about her health care.
My father has always shown the utmost respect for people and guarded their dignity. I knew my father would want to include my mother in the decision-making process. When the moment came, my father turned to my mother and said, “I suppose we need to ask the patient what she would like to do.”
I started to pipe up, “Dad, I think we’re at the point when you need to make these decisions for Mom,” but my mother interrupted.
My mother, with the utmost clarity, said, “I don’t think I understand what’s going on. I trust whatever you decide.”
Hallelujah! If the angels weren’t singing in heaven, they were singing in my heart!
I hadn’t known to pray for this, but this was an answer to prayer.
The rest of the visit was a piece of cake. We made the decision to simply wait. At 83, any treatment may have been worse than the disease itself….
I had forgotten so much about that time period. The bladder cancer turned out to be a red herring. So many other things made that season hard. Had I know what lay ahead, I would have said that I was not capable of any of it.
But I was.
God makes our path a little windy so we can’t see what’s around the next bend. Perhaps if we knew, we wouldn’t want to go on.
Today, January 13, 2017, I can look back and say, Thank you, God, for getting me through those years. It makes it easier to trust You on the road I’m traveling now.
Painting at the Fenimore Art Museum: Village Post Office, 1873. Thomas Waterman Wood
I stood in a very long line at the Post Office yesterday.
Post Office line definitions for a small town:
No line = go directly to the counter
Brief wait = someone already at the counter
Line = someone waiting, someone at the counter
Long line = 2 someones waiting, someone at the counter
Very long line = more than 2 people waiting in addition to the person at the counter.
Yesterday, when I first got there, a young couple was at the counter mailing several packages. They held whispered consultations with each other about every package. I think the cost was more than they expected. When the clerk announced, “That’ll be $79.50,” they looked at each other briefly before she swiped a card and they were done.
I still had two people ahead of me, but three or four people now stood behind me in this very, very long line.
The elderly woman at the front of the line approached the counter. She placed two packages on it.
“This one is FedEx,” the clerk said. “I can’t take it here, but you can mail this other one.”
“What?” the woman asked.
The clerk spoke slowly as she repeated in a louder voice, “This package goes to FEDEX. You have to take it down to THE COMMONS. But I can help you with THIS PACKAGE.”
I couldn’t hear what the elderly woman said, but I watched the postal clerk’s face soften.
“Let’s look at this one,” the clerk said, holding the FedEx mailer. “I don’t handle these but I think we can figure it out.”
She read aloud the instructions on the FedEx slip.
The man behind me groaned and left.
The woman ahead of me looked at me, shrugged, and followed him with her eyes out the door.
“You need to sign HERE,” the clerk was saying, “before you put it in the DROP BOX.”
The elderly woman said something.
“THE COMMONS,” said the clerk. “You know, THE SHOPPING CENTER SOUTH OF TOWN.”
The woman nodded and asked something.
“THERE’S A DROP BOX. YOU JUST HAVE TO PUT YOUR PACKAGE IN,” the clerk explained.
The door opened and closed several times over the course of this, each time bringing a wintry draft. I could feel the people behind me shuffling their feet and shifting packages between arms.
The clerk was remarkable — so pleasant, so patient, so unperturbed by the growing line. She took care of the package that was being mailed postal service and reminded the woman again where she needed to take her FedEx package, before turning her attention to the next person.
In this year of “Leaning In“, I knew that I needed to be more like the postal clerk. Too often I have been like the man who left, feeling the tick-tick-tick of time slipping away.
I don’t have time for this, I tell myself — but, really, what is so pressing?
Life is too short to rush through it.
Yesterday I learned something from an elderly woman who didn’t understand the difference between FedEx and USPS, and a postal clerk who took the time to help her.
The bigger story of our lives is constantly being retold is smaller stories every day.
For example, my journey to Laity Lodge was series of steps which I could break down thus:
Car ride to Binghamton
Bus trip to NYC
First bus to Monticello that broke down
Second bus that safely delivered us to Port Authority
Waiting at LaGuardia
Shuttle to LaGuardia
Waiting in LaGuardia
Flight to Charlotte
Hurry through Charlotte airport from one plane directly to the boarding line for the next
Flight to San Antonio
Shuttle to hotel
Night in hotel
Ride to car rental agency
Meeting up with friends
Drive to Laity Lodge
Stop for Texas barbecue
Time at Laity Lodge
Rest
Refreshment
Music
Laughter
Solitude
Fellowship
Drive back to San Antonio
Flight to O’Hare
Traversing the tunnels of O’Hare
Flight to Syracuse
Ride home
Each step has at least one story, complete with plot and interesting characters.
Sometimes I’m running. Sometimes I’m waiting.
Sometimes the bus breaks down or the flight is late.
Sometimes richness surrounds me and I am a partaker in a great feast.
Sometimes desert solitude surrounds me.
Sometimes my companion is a friend who laughs easily and shares their story.
Sometimes my companion is a stranger drinking screwdrivers to soothe the anxiety of flying.
Although I may look back on those four days as one trip, they really were a series of smaller stages, interactions, minutia. High points, low points, tension, and joy.
Peter Guber said it this way:
Every journey that is successful has culs-de-sac and speed bumps. I carry a wisdom gene through my life through the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Maggie bolted out the door this morning when I went to sit on the deck for my quiet time. She loves laying in the cool morning grass.
When she was a puppy, I had to be vigilant about watching her because she would take off chasing a squirrel and end up three blocks away. Or worse, she would (re) discover the stream and splash up and down it becoming a muddy mess.
Now, she’s much more mature and self-controlled. She runs out, lays down in the grass, and waits. I’m never quite sure what she’s waiting for, and I can’t break myself of the habit of being vigilant over her. So I sit on the deck and watch her while she waits in the grass.
I read and pray and watch her. And she waits.
This morning Maggie suddenly perked up her ears, and her head, and her whole body, alert to a visitor in our yard. Off in the distance, under an old apple tree, a wild rabbit hopped, lippity-lippity, along. It was also enjoying the dewy early morning grass.
Maggie, at the very least, would have loved chasing the rabbit. The rabbit seemed oblivious to its danger. It nibbled the grass and hopped around the apple tree.
Maggie, tethered only by her own self control, watched its every move.
And so the little non-drama played out for a good half hour. Maggie was a good dog. Though she watched, she never made any move to chase. She showed the same self-control that I’m attempting to exercise around sweets these days.
The rabbit, though, the rabbit fascinated me. Unaware of any danger, so engrossed in its little patch of clover and the few green apples that had fallen, it didn’t seem to see the dog watching its every move.
And I got to thinking, how often am I like that rabbit? I lippity-lip along in my own little world, unaware of those who want nothing more than to destroy me, or, at the very least, make me run for my life.
But therein lies a bigger truth.
Maggie can run fast. When our neighbor got a Doberman, we were very happy to discover that Maggie can outrun the Doberman. Not that we want her to have to do that. It’s just nice to know that she can.
Still Maggie could not have closed the distance between herself and the rabbit fast enough to catch the rabbit. So, in fact, what looked like a dangerous situation for the rabbit really wasn’t dangerous at all.
And I think that is true for me as well.
Sometimes I see the scary monster and am immobilized by fear.
But God is always watching, and He has equipped me for whatever comes.
Perhaps I misjudged that rabbit, too. It wasn’t quite as heedless as I thought. As soon as Maggie rose to her feet to join me in the house, the rabbit scampered to the safety of the brush.
For a good half hour, though, it had enjoyed the coolness of the early morning in spite of the presence of a predator. It didn’t live in fear.
“You need to sign HERE,” the clerk was saying, “before you put it in the DROP BOX.”
Hot Dogs and Marmalade 