BENEATH THE SKYLINE

THREADS OF HOPE IN THE MYSTERY
A Journal of Three Weeks

Deborah Good

Entry #1

Two days ago, my life changed. It was 3:55 p.m. on Wednesday, January 26. I was standing next to my dad, who lay on a stretcher in a hallway at Washington Hospital Center. Dad had been in severe pain for about two weeks, and after many doctor’s visits and several diagnoses—the current one being a bulging disc and pinched nerve in his back—we had brought him to the emergency room because of a fever. A mysterious fever that could not be explained.

So here I was, 3:55 p.m., preparing to leave the hospital to catch a train to Philadelphia, where I have been living for two years, when Doctor Noel approached us. The CT scan taken two hours earlier, she said, showed a large mass on his left adrenal gland, and spots in his lungs and liver. Cancer.

Entry #2

On her way home from the hospital yesterday, my mom was behind a truck when she heard a strange honking. Is that truck making that odd honking noise, she asked herself, or are there really wild geese nearby? She looked up, and there they were: Wild geese in perfect V formation were flying very low over the row houses of northwest Washington, D.C. And she was grateful.

Mary Oliver’s poem "Wild Geese" hangs on my friend’s wall, and now inside me. Our family read it to each other in the hospital several times. "Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine," we read. "Meanwhile the world goes on. . . . Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again."

Entry #3

My eyes hurt from all the tears and lack of sleep. I am still reeling. They say everyone copes with these things differently. Apparently one of my coping mechanisms is to busy myself with practical details. I call my uncle with the day’s update. I e-mail a family friend who has offered to coordinate our meals, which start appearing in our refrigerator every few days. I shovel the snow off our back steps.

It feels good to be doing something. Maybe it’s my attempt to create order when all else is out of my control. I wonder if it looks like I’m on top of things. Really, I am breaking.

I cope, too, by getting myself plugged into the sprawling people-web that surrounds us. Every night, I check e-mail—my parents’ and my own. "You are in our thoughts constantly," writes one friend. "Has anyone offered to help with laundry yet?" writes another. "Do you have a field we could plow? A barn we could build?"

By the time I graduated from college, I had heard the word community so often it was enough to make me roll my eyes. But this week, community has felt more real to me than ever before.

Throughout his life, my dad has consciously nurtured the communities to which he belongs. He understands that goodhearted people don’t simply decide to up and change the world by themselves. He believes that when we intentionally bring people together, we create the space for ideas to grow, for groups to decide to do radical things—like start schools for troubled kids in inner-city D.C. or retreat centers in mountainous West Virginia—and then provide support for each other when things get rough.

The communities of people my dad has helped to cultivate are now walking with us, sending countless cards and emails, doing our grocery shopping and laundry. We are surrounded by love and by the desperate prayers of many people.

Lesson of the moment: I am not a little autonomous being, deciding this and that about my own life without interference. I am a thread in a tapestry of people, and should I ever forget my interconnectedness with the world, I will be lost.

Entry #4

It feels like a death sentence. And part of all of us knows that it probably is. What do you do with such a thing?

In seventh grade, Mr. Hughes, my homeroom teacher, succeeded in making an impression on all of us who sat before him, intimidated by our first day of junior high school. "You’re all going to die someday," he told us. Indeed we will. The difference between me and my dad, then, is that he has a better idea how he might go.

My dad says death is not something he’s thought enough about. Perhaps most of us could say the same. And tonight, I consider writing about death—as an idea, a scientific process, a theological concept—but I find myself wanting to write instead about mystery.

I have been reading up on adrenocortical cancer (ACC). I can tell you where the adrenal glands are located in the body and that ACC is most likely to spread (or "metastasize") first to the lungs and liver. I can tell you that only one in two million people get the disease and that the drug most commonly used to treat it is called Mitotane.

In the end, though, no one understands why some bodies respond to the drug while most don’t. In the end, no one knows why the cancer kills some people and leaves others to live a few years longer. In the end, we know so very little. Our bodies remain mysterious even in the twenty-first century. My little threads of hope rest in that mystery.

And when we each breathe our last, I have to say, honestly, I really don’t know what happens. Clouds and angels? Eternal inner peace? Absolutely nothing?

I happily allow others their certainties about the afterlife—heaven, hell, neither, both, something else altogether. I prefer living with the mystery of it all, with an almost childlike curiosity about what will be there, on the other side of that quiet passage.

Entry #5

It’s Valentine’s Day, and our downstairs neighbors decide to provide a candlelit dinner for my parents. They bring up flowers, tall candlesticks, and place settings for two. It’s beautiful. After the main course, Mom calls me to say that Dad has gone to rest for a bit, and now she sits, staring across the table at an empty chair. "No, no, no. Don’t do that," I tell her. She decides to go to the computer and write an e-mail.

Entry #6

We do not know what tomorrow will bring. Nor the day after. Meanwhile, I will be here, next to my dad, holding my mom, afraid, angry, and praying my heart out. Meanwhile, I believe that all of everything—atoms, cells, and galaxies—spin in the arms of Love and Grace, and that most everything else is mystery. "Meanwhile, the world goes on. . . . Meanwhile, wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again."

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is with her parents in Washington, D.C., indefinitely as they brace for the fight ahead. She invites your prayers for her dad, Nelson, and welcomes your emails at
deborahagood@gmail.com.