March 6, 2015 - "Why"

What is your “why me” story? Which moment in your life did you find yourself seriously questioning the reality of your most recent unwanted “calendar appointment”? What had you digging through the recesses of your mind wondering what in the world you did to anger the “upper management” so much so that they sent you “reprimand”? It’s so easy, even to point of being comfortable, to go through life looking for the cause in such great minutia that if not found in rapid pace, the event is almost missed altogether due to our compulsion and addiction of finding blame. We've become a human race obsessed with knowing why. We feel self-entitled as an outright constitutional right to know the “why” so that we can, with great detail and self-righteous commitment, offer justification or blame.

I remember several such moments in my life where this saga of “why” came to my forefront. One was a particular breakup of my youth. I remember very specific and incessant thoughts of needing to know why I wasn't chosen over the other. I couldn't accept the outcome of rejection until I had analyzed the path into unrecognizable shreds of pitiful becoming self-absorbed, bitter, and paranoid of being “less”. It consumed me. In hindsight I can now see that not knowing “why” was almost more harmful to me that the reality of breakup. (I now know why and find myself so grateful God leaves some prayers answered in opposition to my own will.)

A second event carries a bit more weight. The room was very dim, I’m assuming out of necessity, but it cast an eeriness over the moment. I can still see what little light there was reflecting from the steel (?) arm, supposedly carrying the cure, craning above me in a parallel to where I lay. I lay below it naked on a rotating table of steel and discomfort shamelessly padded with bed sheets as a miserable excuse for padding. The light was cast in the room from the right side, steadily growing dimmer as it cascaded to my left. Linoleum tile created the floor below, and mirrored above the steel arm hang a checker board arrangement of 20x20 ceiling panels. The room lacked color. It was a blah collection of steel and beige scattered with a smattering of sterile this and that. A few steps away, behind a lead lined wall containing single square window was the technician, whom had just gotten me settled onto the mobile table. He evidently controlled the cure. Yes, a he (some days a different she), and yes me, naked on a table. A quick click of a remote control had him sending me and the table into parallels and latitudes. Over-estimating sent me right back into the direction I had come to a lesser latitude. Again, again, there. And then similar traversing with the steel arm above only this time there were red laser pinpoint beams shooting down from the steel arm. The beams were navigated this way and that to line up with tattoo dots on my chest, abdomen, under arms, chin. Then silence as the arm and my table end their romantic swaying dance. Over the speaker: “Ok, Sally, hold still, we are ready to go” followed by 8-10 seconds of this rhythmic clicking sound. I can’t believe I have forgotten the time count. Was it 8 seconds, 12? 15? And after you counted in your head the beats of the seconds you finally hit the moment when there was no sound at all. We were done, until tomorrow, when we would do it all over again in the exact same order as my mother sat out in the waiting room listening to horrific music (which she adored) and putting together jigsaw puzzles while she nervously waited my return.

Nothing about the moment was normal. Everyone else I knew of any merit in my current world was sitting in English class, and then algebra, and then French. No steel arm, no padded table, certainly no nakedness, and I’m absolutely sure cliffs notes on Keats or Thoreau, instead of invisible doses of radiation, were their cure. There was no sadness in that moment for me (that came earlier). There were no frustrations (that too came earlier). A previously abnormal moment, after 30+ days of such, was now a very normal moment for me, and even that was abnormal. But, on one specific day as I sat counting the clicks that the machine regurgitated into the stillness of the room, I recall for the first times in the past 2 months the word forming on my lips… “why?”. Why was I the one on the table? Why was I stripped down to nothingness lying on a table when I could be commiserating “if x = 1, then y = 3” with the rest of the sophomore class. There were plenty of “mean girls” that could easily take my place, right? There surely could be a better substitute for me. That was the mind of an immature 16 year old processing the events of the moment. I may have uttered the word “why” before that very moment, but I don’t recall it. I am also sure my parents had uttered the word “why” on some occasion of this trauma, though I wasn't privy to it. But now, for whatever reason, as I lay shivering on a padded mobile table while counting clicks, the word “why” became my here and now.

There sat a grapefruit-sized tumor in the center of my chest, to the right of my heart, several inches down in depth from the surface, nestled on my lungs like a nest holding its prized egg. I don’t know how long it had inhabited its space, but its picturesque likeness on the grayed-out screen left no denying its existence. I carried a scar of tumor biopsy at the base of my throat and a jagged seam reflecting spleen removal at my abdominal center line. These signs were there pointing me to the reality of the situation, but I could find no tangible merit or guarantee of the “why”.  And there the “not knowing why” sat…with me…in the darkened room…on a frigid steel table…under the talkative steel arm carrying my cure. And it sat. And it sat. Fully exposed just as I was in the center of the beige cube.

It’s as if we can question something out of existence. If we can discover and then in turn discredit the reason, then immediately, in response, the disastrous earth-tilting event no longer exists. It will dissolve itself into nothingness the moment the “why” is deemed faulty. If I could prove I was indeed not worthy of a lymphoma diagnosis, then at that very moment the tumor would recognize its mistake,  fill out forms of relocation, and make its way down interstate 40 towing all of its blood vessels and ick in tow. If I could prove I was on my way to model appearance, he would stick it out. If I could show, I was without fault, I would still have that employment. No tainted words, no broken friendship. Knowing the “why” would propel me into perfection. But nowhere on that CT scan of my chest was anything that remotely resembled “why”.  And no amount of pondering, digging, begging could produce it. How can I blame someone if I didn't know the “who” behind the “why”????? ARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH! And this consumed me for several weeks, each day as I climbed back up onto the table and under the steel arm.

I’m learning in my adult years that there can be great fault with this incessant discovery of “why”. The prodding and poking for the purpose of discovery, and in turn blame, carries little more than profound long-living bitterness. “Why” for the sake of blame, while it carries some relief initially, as time goes on, it equates each moment in life as a negative effect of cause. I admit there are moments when finding the “why” brings great revelation and truth, but in the case of blame it becomes a burden of worry and strife while we continue to obsessively plow our way to its discovery. I don’t want to discredit the value of knowing “why” when there truly is a fault of your own because you then have the opportunity to do self-growth in correcting possible a flawed behavior. I've had moments of that where I would have been much better off not uttering the harmful words to a friend. Recognize, growth, think with a heart of love before you speak. But in most moments of true calamity, I am finding the incessant and belligerent searching for “why” only duct tapes myself in paralyses in the moment, preventing me from embracing and overcoming better on the other side.

I was 16 and likely failed miserably at any form of triumph on this area. I fumbled the ball with each passing day becoming self-absorbed in the teenage years. But over time I did go on to accept and embrace having had a cancer diagnosis. It can bring about miraculous things if we let it. And even in death, it can bring about miraculous things for those around us, if they let it. That’s choosing the outcome instead of floundering in the “why”. It’s choosing joy over bitterness and blame. It’s encompassing light despite circumstance and despite the possible bitterness of “why”. I’m working to flip this switch in my thinking with greater frequency and success.  

So I ask myself again. What is my “why me” story? Which moment in my life did I find myself seriously questioning the reality of my most recent unwanted “calendar appointment”? What had me digging through the recesses of my mind wondering what in the world I did to anger the “upper management” so much so that they sent me “reprimand”? And I hope that as the years have gone by that I can identify less and less stories where the why even mattered at all. Instead of focusing on the forefront of my story of cause, I can instead relay in much greater detail the saga of joyful outcome.

Therefore
I ask you, surgery #6, what joy do you bring me next?