The Beautiful Ugly

“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or
reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on
thinking about the fact that you suffer.” C.S. Lewis

September is Pediatric Cancer Awareness month.  It’s a time when we find every possible way to say that most cancer babies suffer and many die horribly, and if by some miracle, they escape that terminal diagnosis; they’re often scarred for the rest of their lives in every imaginable way.  To say that there’s not enough research and there’s not enough money and there’s not enough action.  Not nearly enough.  Not ever enough.

It’s almost impossible to turn around this month without having the spectre loom and stare back at you through the eyes of a small child gone long before siblings or school or marriage or children of their own.  In September, this dark, middle-of-the-night thought for the parents of a living cancer child becomes a large and constant shadow as we actively stare into the eye of the storm for a whole month of days.  Oh, it’s there every other day of the year, but in this month of months, we set aside the business and life that crowds it out and stare it down in all it’s wretchedness.

There are many days I’ve wanted to write, but it’s difficult to write about the truly awful moments because there is no easy way to articulate what it feels like to the human heart to restrain the child you bore and swore to protect as hands breach his skin with needles and tubes and he screams and begs you to stop, but you can’t.  There is no easy way to describe the helplessness of walking down a hospital hallway and seeing clusters of white coats and scrubs in huddled consult while family members sob with their heads in their hands and the next week; an empty room, or of watching a three year old being wheeled away from you by an anesthesia team and hearing his cries fighting through the haze of drugs that slow his mind because he won’t remember in an hour, but right now, he knows they’re taking him away and he’s scared even though he’s assured you many times not to worry because he’s going to be brave.  Seared into my brain, these moments and many others like them are so dark that my heart physically hurts and the only true articulation of the emotion is a gut-wrenching scream.

In light of this, is it ever possible to be happy…no, find joy after you hear the words “There’s a large mass“?

I believe with all my heart that it is!  If there is no joy to be found and shared, then there is no purpose in our suffering and we live in needless agony without end.

My ultimate joy is the knowledge that a day is coming when there will be no more tears or pain and death won’t exist anymore.   A day when women won’t cry with empty arms and children won’t know the sound of broken, powerless adult sobs next to their hospital beds.

And until that day of no more, I am given small treasures as I walk through the ugly.  The moment Chase laughs and jokes with his doctors, the time he grabs the nurse’s arm and kisses it, the times I lean down to tuck him in and he tells me he loves me and that I’m his favorite mommy, the moments I watch him walk and talk and run and eat and remember after being told that he may never do those again.  All of these moments are beautiful and undeserved treasures in the midst of the shadows, and sometimes, we even capture them on camera, so that someday, when we wake from this blur, we’ll look back and remember that there were moments of beautiful.

I am not naive.  My taking joy in those moments in no way indicates a lack of understanding of the cancer horror.  My response is not static or stoic.  I feel the pain deeply, but I must choose the joy because there is purpose in our suffering and that is what I pray to continue to seek every day…

Moment by moment.

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”  1 Corinthians 13:12