I was on my way out the door to work when she asked me at the end of our messaging dialogue “when will I stop crying?”.
Wow. I wasn’t expecting that one. That one is a big deal and
a sign of just trying to get above water. I put my bag on the floor and sat
down on the bed to give her my full attention. I’m the first to admit I don’t have an answer
for that. She has found herself with a new diagnosis in the family and it is
really rocking the world as they know it, and she finds herself smack in the
middle of the early stages of that. I reassured her that it will happen, but
the when is hard to determine, certainly person-specific, but don’t be
surprised if it isn’t any time soon and to trust in that fact that there is no
shame in that. I am 3 years out from mastectomy, which didn’t even have a
diagnosis, and I still sometimes cry when I think back on the intimate moments.
I don’t have permission to speak in detail of her story, but it’s a doozy for
her family in the here and now. She’s really just an acquaintance, but that
didn’t stop our dialogue and her confiding in me the suckiness of the
situation. I reached out a few weeks back when I heard the news and she reached
back ….and then our conversations progressed into more substance.
If you have been following along you might have seen that I try
to be a “silver linings” kind of gal. It’s never absolute, but it is at least
frequent. I simply know and trust that God has something greater for us in
store in any given situation. He is the master of making a smack-your-lips-delicious southern-living-worthy
kind of casserole out of onion peels. By no achievement of my own, but most likely
rather an outpouring from Christ, I just naturally get that. It doesn’t take
the sting out of the moment, (life still hurts and it hurts something fierce) but
it surely helps my mindset in ways I can’t capture with any kind of justice here. And it helps ward off “worry” which can be disastrous
in circumstance. Simply put for me: Chaos is a moment when God can start dishing
out some of the very best blessings in life that ordinary everyday life just didn’t
bring. I've written of this on several occasions but it can be said again that blessings
are almost universally nestled in the aftermath of circumstance. They carry different magnitudes and frequency, but I seem to find they are almost always there. Sometimes easily
found, other times only visible to the trained eye and therefore often
completely overlooked. It’s not that those blessings remove the awfulness (the
event has still happened), but they have a way of making the awfulness more manageable
and in some times are of such magnitude that “awfulness” is all together stripped
out of the adjectives used in retrospect to describe the event. While
traversing the landscape that landed in your lap, you just may find something so
wonderful that you refuse to give up the landscape because without it the
wonderful would never exist. I have that
trained eye, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that gift, but I also know
that is rare and something to be cherished. I’ve also discovered how hard it is
to transfer to other people, particularly when they are right in the middle of
their moment. And in that, I find myself
hurting for people who don’t have this trait. I’m determined to be a
silver-linings mentor at any chance, but I must tred carefully as the cycles of
heartbreak and grief can bring about much healing and therefore often need to be
traveled first to make the silver-lining discovery even possible. I’m training
myself to simply “be there” as a friend in their moment first, and let God bring out of that
whatever may come next.
We ended our most recent dialogue with me revealing how
incredible life with Ron is because of the tried and true moments that occurred
during the mastectomy. I have moments with him now that everyday life just
simply wouldn’t have brought. And how for that reason alone mastectomy carries
so much gratitude for me. I could say the same for lymphoma. I think of a
particular moment when my sister climbed in bed with me in the middle of the night
(or had she gone to bed with me at the get go?). There we sat in the dark side
by side (when she could have been back in her own room as she had done for
every year of our life before) with me staring up at the ceiling for what felt
like an eternity not really saying anything, but the action of her choosing to
be beside me spoke all the silent words we would never have said out loud. -
My mom just gave me additional details of this specific night being my first night home from a two week hospital stay and they were scared to let me out of arms rech, so my sister dove right in, to ease their mind, to stay with me upstairs in my room..the baby moniotor a friend gave us babysat us both while my sister and i laughed at the awareness we could chat all night to keep mom and dad up. Or another particular moment in my parent’s room in the middle of the night with mom on one side of the bed, me on the other and my dad climbing in the floor next to me (just as Ron did 25 years later), because I was having a particularly difficult night following anesthesia. Three friends sitting in my booth in the middle of restaurant, all of us in tears at my mastectomy announcement, and a waiter very likley not knowing how in the world he is going to get the water back to these crazy women at that table. Some people simply regurgitate the moment stating the facts - someone climbed in bed next to someone else who was having a difficult moment. Others find the hidden gems underneath. These are the silver linings that carry you past the awfulness into something that waters your soul for the future.
My mom just gave me additional details of this specific night being my first night home from a two week hospital stay and they were scared to let me out of arms rech, so my sister dove right in, to ease their mind, to stay with me upstairs in my room..the baby moniotor a friend gave us babysat us both while my sister and i laughed at the awareness we could chat all night to keep mom and dad up. Or another particular moment in my parent’s room in the middle of the night with mom on one side of the bed, me on the other and my dad climbing in the floor next to me (just as Ron did 25 years later), because I was having a particularly difficult night following anesthesia. Three friends sitting in my booth in the middle of restaurant, all of us in tears at my mastectomy announcement, and a waiter very likley not knowing how in the world he is going to get the water back to these crazy women at that table. Some people simply regurgitate the moment stating the facts - someone climbed in bed next to someone else who was having a difficult moment. Others find the hidden gems underneath. These are the silver linings that carry you past the awfulness into something that waters your soul for the future.
I don’t know what her silver linings in this
particular family moment will be, and I don’t know when the tears will subside
though she is desperate to know, but I do know the moment will become less intense
and the blessings are going to be discovered. They are probably already there,
just waiting to be seen for what they are, but for now there’s a whole lot of
shock and grief and unknowns of a diagnosis that have to be traversed.
“Holy, Holy, Holy is the
Lord God Almighty", even when things seem to be falling apart.
