The road back is long

Short stories from me to you

As I recover from my latest surgery, I won’t be writing fresh essays here this week or next. But I wanted to offer a few words in a new place: recent writings from social media that readers have asked me to save and share. It’s lovely to see them take root here, and I hope you might savor them, too—again or anew. Thank you for your prayers and support as I rest and heal.

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Aftermath of an epic kitchen dance party to celebrate our shared birthdays.

“You should celebrate!” the oncologist tells me.

“Throw a party, maybe now, maybe when you’re all done. Something to bring closure. You did it.”

She is speaking of surgeries, how my body will be tired for the next year, turning all its energies toward healing what it still has to endure.

She is talking of treatment and recurrence, with numbers that are promising and a horizon long but in sight.

The small room is fluorescent-lit and awkward. The thin paper beneath me crinkles every time I move. The worn cotton gown is slipping off the sore shoulders I can’t lift. The wound vac is suctioned to my chest like leeches. Everything is odd and off, but all I can see are her eyes, blue and clear, telling me it is done, it is over.

In the span of weeks
the tense switched from present to past:
I have cancer / I had cancer.

In mere months
it took my body the same time
to create the tumor as to kill it.

In five years
we could say for certain
it is finished.

Will we celebrate? Over dinner again, water in our glasses, not wine. With sweet treats and the kids, eager and jumping.

In spring, or summer perhaps, still dreaming of parties. The backyard brimming with everyone we love, everyone who helped. Laughter and music and life, pulsing through all of our gorgeous bodies.

Outside the air is cold, enlivening the lungs with every inhale. But the light is golden warm, spreading like a dream.

I tuck myself back into bed, tired and worn, but as I close my eyes I still see hers: clear and blue and shining.

You should celebrate, she said.
Shouldn’t we all? To be here at all?

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Once in a while,
when you pass a woman, there is
a Look she gives you.
Not pity, sympathy, or concern. No,
it is knowing. She has been here.

The look is part prayer, part poem.
Half battle cry, half victory march.
All eyes, all strength and power. Joy, too—
you cannot miss the joy.
She does not smile or nod; there is no
need. She sees and you are seen.
You receive her gift.

She has been bald, scarred, scared,
too. She has lost sleep, dreams, years.
But still she is here. So are you.

The look is electric,
Eucharistic even.
Her body has been broken,
but she has not given up.
Neither will you.

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Today at church, a man I have never met before stopped me.

He looked at me from deep within his wrinkled face. He asked how I was doing. I noticed his hearing aids, so I spoke up loud and clear over my children’s din:

“I’m doing pretty well—thank you!”

So many beloved parishioners had already come up to inquire, to embrace, to send their love, and I was already so tired that I had to sit down for half of Mass, but how can you turn away from the care of the Body of Christ?

He was not done, and I knew it, so I smiled, and he went on:

“Cancer free?”

I nodded, lump in my throat. “Cancer free.”

“Thank God,” he sighed. “We have been praying for you.”

And when I tell you that I have been part of this church for 12 years and I have never seen this gentleman before, I am telling you that it is a wonder to be held in care like this.

Kids were tugging at my coat sleeve, restless to leave, so I gave a tired mom grin and turned to go—but he was not done.

“The road back is long,” he said, looking straight into my eyes.

I stood there, stunned.

He turned and left with his companion, both of them shuffling slowly down the hallway. I stumbled into the biting cold, his words swirling round my head.

How could he know, how did he say, how could he put into five short words the paradox of the place where I live right now—where everyone wants to celebrate but I am still healing, where treatment plods on with infusions and surgeries, where the toll on my body (and more to come) has changed me forever.

If there are any arguments left to be made for the life and goodness of the Christian community, let this be among them:

To let yourself be weak and weary among strangers and trust you will be held. To let the Body of Christ care for you when you believe you were put here to care for others. To let slow soft searing truths be spoken over you when you cannot see them yourself.

If you think you have never encountered the living breathing risen Christ, I want you to know that 90% of the time, he looks and sounds nothing like you’d expect. But he was there today, shuffling down the hallway, and may I never forget his words.

The road back is long.
May we never let each other walk alone.

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I can’t tell you how good it feels to be alive.

What I mean is this: I can only spend my days trying. Fumbling in my lint-lined pocket for flimsy words to string like beads, nouns and verbs of plastic when I want them to be pearls. But the slim letters we scrape together cannot pin down the fluttering butterflies of still-living: rising-falling breath in the chest, coming-going blood in the veins, thudding strumming hope in the heart when it could have been hollow hollow hollow hollow.

What I mean is this: the beauty of being is the secret beneath the truth, the mystery mineral vein in ordinary rock. A hidden current below city lights and country fields, the pulse of existence in essence, divine and dazzling.

What I mean is this: when you have wanted to not be here, or when your own frailty has nearly stolen it from you, any step you take After in the land of the living sounds nothing like the plodding pace of Before. You can wake up with laughter already on your lips: I am here. You can let go of the day’s failures: they matter not. You can sink into sleep like sacred release: we were made for rest, not rushing.

What I mean is this: death teaches far more than life, if you let it, if you listen. Few want to draw close, most want to run fast. But when you are forced to wrestle with fear and frailty, when you realize not a single sparse hour is promised, when the world cracks open and every plan you made clatters inside, when you have no choice but to let go into the abyss—

only then do you realize you were never
the one holding you up.

What I mean is this:

I hope you never have to know this.
And I hope you come to know nothing less.