32. The Quiet Voice of a Father

She is not an attractive young woman. Her face is all I can really see, and it is puffy. Not puffy like chubby, or like a medically challenging acne-case puffy. More like allergic to bees and fell on a nest puffy. Her whole body is heavy and, well, the same kind of puffy. She is bundled in blankets and strapped to one of those bright yellow Stryker gurneys, a bed on wheels that one rides around on when one is injured or when one cannot even function well enough to sit up in a wheelchair. I can't tell if she arrived by ambulance, stranded on the gurney waiting to be admitted, or if she came from home on it, living with that yellow Stryker day after day, arriving at Admissions, having been unloaded in the parking garage by her father, pushed into the admissions waiting room by her father. Waiting on her back, unable to move, she was making guttural noises with a nasal accent through her puffy face. I looked quickly her direction as I walked into the same waiting room to be checked in for a surgical procedure of my own, and I glanced away just like everyone else in the waiting room, so I would not be caught staring.

I was 3rd in line, the Stryker behind me and out of view, but my ears were wide awake. And what I heard was the tender, quiet, comforting, and gentle voice of a patient father speaking very slowly and in a very low voice to a much-loved daughter. I could not tell if he was reading a story to her, or if he was making it up as he went along to entertain her, but he had leaned in very close to his daughter's puffy face and would slowly form a sentence, one separate word at a time, carefully and precisely annunciated, and then his daughter would chuckle in that nasally way.

Had the daughter been frightened? How old was she and how many other visits to the hospital on a Stryker had she endured? How much pain was she in? Was she as mentally challenged as she appeared, and were her mental challenges the source of significant outbursts of emotion when calm could not be maintained, or if lost, regained only with terrific effort or medical intervention? Fear is painful and paralyzing. It overwhelms reality and blurs the face of God to the one who has embraced the fear. Perfect love casts out fear. How kind of God to provide this young woman a father who understands that. I was humbled.

I heard "Next!" and proceeded to the Admissions window, where I checked in for a surgical procedure that comes with its own set of potential fears, and yet at the very front of my consciousness is a phrase I have come to love in the Orthodox Church, "For He is good and He loves mankind."

Cancer comes with so many potential causes of fear that it would be overwhelming for a mere mortal. Now I've often joked with false bravado and manufactured conceit for the sake of laughter, but I am serious when I say that cancer will overwhelm a mere mortal. CS Lewis is quoted as saying "I have never met a mere mortal" by which he is communicating that we all have been created in the image of God, that we all can be participants in God's divine nature. We are all capable of embracing His goodness and love to such a degree that we experience His energies, his communicable attributes, his peace and love and calm and ultimate Oneness with Him, His Presence. To be perfectly connected to Him.

Remember, Jesus suffered physically. Beatings, bleeding from multiple puncture wounds encircling his head, verbal attacks from people who were paid to know better, being right but dying for refusing to recant, bruised from head to toe, nailed to a cross and left to provide entertainment to onlookers in His dying hours. In physical anguish, yet forgiving, even asking His Father to forgive those who had perpetrated this vile act in their ignorance. Compassionate, providing forgiveness and absolution to the thief dying next to Him who had repented. Thoughtful and compassionate to His own mother as she watched Him die, knowing she was already a widow, and now her only son was dying, wanting her to be cared for physically in His absence He asked "the disciple whom He loved" to treat her as his own mother and care for her.

That is what the absence of fear looks like in suffering.

A mere mortal however is one who has not submitted to the Almighty and goes it alone. A mere mortal has real fears when a PSA number, previously at 0.1 starts to rise, slowly at first, then rapidly all in one month. A mere mortal will not be calm when he discovers that the excellent insurance plan, enjoyed over a long career spanning nearly 4 decades, has a "lifetime maximum" of only $500,000, a number pitifully small in the face of $17,000 quarterly Lupron injections with the potential of an additional daily pill regimen to the tune of $9000 per month. Bone scans tell the story about how far the cancer has progressed, but bone scans are expensive. Bone pain is another indicator though, but a mere mortal will fear the pain and also fear the cost of relief in the form of radiation treatments to kill the pain. But radiation kills everything else also and leaves the patient with further compromise to the immune system, internal scar tissue, and more.

A mere mortal has reason to be afraid.

I thank God I am not a mere mortal. He is that loving Father who has leaned in close to my ear, speaking to me carefully, quietly, reducing words to a cadence and tone that reaches my heart. He has written a Story, and is explaining that Story to me in terms simple enough for my mind and body to receive. Yes, my body is being slowly crashed, sort of like the way I used to downhill ski - traveling at speeds beyond my skill, displaying the elegance of a baby giraffe trying to stand up for the first time. A final crash is inevitable. It will either be a trip through the saplings of compromised organ function where each event slaps and hurts until I come to a dead stop against the mother tree, or I'll venture into the roped off area and ride an avalanche of simultaneous failures into the canyon below where humanitarian help is simply not enough. But I am not watching the crash. Rather, I am listening to the story He is whispering to me.

His quiet voice has shouted down my fears.

I am reminded of my weaknesses as a young father. Always impatient, often irritable, lacking compassion. I remember a time when my daughter Ashlee was a little girl and was being inconsolable. She had been in trouble and the lack of closure and reconciliation had destroyed her peace. She had been sent to her room where she cried and cried and refused to stop. My anger at her for destroying my own peaceful evening did little to help. Finally I repented of my own self-centeredness and decided to show love and mercy to her. I went in to her room where she was and picked her up, carrying her to our room where I held her close and spoke gently to her while stroking her hair. She calmed immediately and went limp in my arms.

This week we were in Texas with the Dunn family to witness their reception into the Holy Orthodox Church, a beautiful event. The night before our flight home, our oldest granddaughter McKinlay was crying incessantly and not going to sleep. She is quite dramatic, as I had witnessed her "practicing" crying as she played in the back yard earlier that day! Her tears at night were real, though their cause might have been manufactured, but I remembered Ashlee as a little girl and my heart went out to McKinlay. I sat on the edge of her bed and spoke softly to her and stroked her hair. Our daughter Stephanie came in and sat next to me as I stroked her daughter's hair and we talked as McKinlay first stopped crying, then settled into a quiet and restful sleep. The bed McKinlay sleeps on now is the same one Ashlee and Stephanie used growing up, and Stephanie said, "Dad, how many times have you sat on the edge of this bed at this time of night just like this?"

This was a sweet end to a visit, and a sweet end to a day in which I had an as yet unexplained loss of consciousness, probably the result of dehydration, the fighting of a cold with less than perfect immune system, and taking a pain pill different from what I normally would take. A perfect storm that now means I require further evaluation before the surgery can proceed. Worse, the loss of consciousness triggers an evaluation by the DMV even though I was not driving, would not have been driving while on medication, and was too sick to drive, the sickness leading to the loss of consciousness.

"The best thing of all is to surrender to God's will and bear affliction having confidence in God. The Lord, seeing our affliction, will never give us too much to bear. If we seem to ourselves to be greatly afflicted, it means that we have not surrendered to the will of God. The soul that is in all things devoted to the will of God rests quiet in Him, for he knows of experience and from the Holy Scriptures that the Lord loves us much and watches over our souls, quickening all things by His grace in peace and love. Nothing troubles the man who is given over to the will of God be it illness, poverty, or persecution. He knows that the Lord in His mercy is solicitous for us. The Holy Spirit, whom the soul knows, is witness therefore. But the proud and self-willed do not want to surrender to God's will because they like their own way, and that is harmful for the soul." - St Silouan the Athonite

Stephanie sent this quote to us while we waited at the hospital yesterday. It is appropriate and timely as this episode is far from over.

There is much to fear for the one who has not embraced Christ.

There is nothing to fear for the one who has.