My New Favorite Season

Fall is my favorite season. This is a new development—summer has always been my número uno, with Fall a (very) distant fourth. I despised the shortening of days and the flagrant display of death and loss. As far as I was concerned, the brief and blazing gold of the ginkgo was the only redeeming moment of the season.

Three years ago that started to change. I was on a train on another continent, and after so many years in the land of perennial summer (and youth) I think I was more ready to appreciate the golds and browns. It was then that I began to connect the dots between the glory of a season that had always looked like death to me: and was perhaps more primed to look past the death of winter to the raucous life of spring.

I find myself in the week between all of the scans and the meetings with doctors. I do not expect any big drama, but only the walking forward on this road where we can choose whether to mark time by scans, or by the colors of the leaves, or by the liturgical calendar of the church.

The scans are scheduled and regular. They are very familiar, but there is always some moment in the process where I turn the corner from equanimity to trauma. Sometimes it sneaks up on me, but I am noticing that the waves often start crashing with the injection of one or the other contrast solutions. I reach out my arm, an I.V. port is started, and All The Things are pushed in. Often in these times I have heard an echo of John 21:5 in my head: here I was stretching out my arms, and going where I did not want to go. Tuesday I pulled the full text out in one of the waiting rooms and found:

Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” 19 (This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God.) And after saying this he said to him, “Follow me.”

What a beautiful and terrible thing to sit with on Tuesday. By what kind of death he was to glorify God. And after this, “Follow me.”

The stretching out of my arms for an I.V. is not death, of course. But it is part of a road marked by death. There is some trauma there, and some being led where I do not want to go. And so I am challenged to consider how, by weak parallel, I might glorify God in the experience. I hope to increasingly turn my eyes to the other sorts of death that might bring Him glory. Like maybe from Colossians 3:5:

“Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”

There is so much that is earthly in me, more insidious and more painfully rooted out than cancer. Reflecting on how death might bring glory to God is helpful, as is the promise that immediately precedes the call to put to death what is earthly, indeed what the “therefore” is referencing: “When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” These are the sorts of reflections that now come to mind when I see a ginkgo. Death and life and kinds of death and glory and time passing and future hope. On the way home from church today, I drove past the only one I know of in Santa Barbara to see how it was coming along. It has started to turn but isn’t quite there yet…so I will return and hope to catch it in its glory.

These are some of the reasons why Fall is my new favorite season. I no longer think of the gold and crimson of autumn as all death and loss. Instead I see them as a bonus gift that shouts, “Hey look! There is a death that means glory, and we are not going to let it go unnoticed!” Here is a celebration that points to and promises the beauty that is spring. One season is a death and the other is a resurrection, but they are both glorious. And both say, “Follow me.”

The Glorious First of June

Whenever June comes around, I have been put in mind of two things. My younger brother's birthday is the first--he was born 34 years ago this day (Hooray!). The second is a sea battle that took place between the British and French navies on June 1st--222 years ago. The battle is referred to (in English, anyway) as "The Glorious First of June."

With this year's June, however, I have been playing the "one year ago" game. The first half of June 2015 packed in a lot of action--so there is always something to process. June first -- the anniversary of the MRI and the phone calls with my doctor and the buying of a one-way place ticket to Los Angeles.

Late at night on June 2nd of this year, J and I stood in the kitchen replaying the events from exactly one year earlier--I will not give you the full blow-by-blow of my travel day, but even we had forgotten some of the drama. The switching of airports. The kid throwing up in the car. The switching of flights, again-- me on the phone with my sister while she looked up online to see if there was any option left to us that would get me into a doctor's office at Cedars-Sinai by 8am the next morning. She found it. I booked it. I made it. My luggage didn't. I crawled into bed at Jesse's grandmother's in LA at what was 5:30am on the East Coast. In the midst, so much drama and adrenaline. Looking back, so much to be grateful for. So many offers of help and so much generosity from others.  Mentally we bounce back and forth between the past and the present.

Yesterday, on a glorious first weekend in June, the local cancer center hosted a celebration of life called Viva la Vida (in conjunction with National Cancer Survivors Day). I got an invitation in the mail a few weeks ago, because although most of my care is with the team down at Cedars I did do my radiation treatment locally. At first I thought that it wasn't really for me. Not just that it wasn't the sort of thing that I would want to do; but that it actually wasn't really for someone like me. What does being a cancer survivor really mean, anyway? Who counts? And now that I am doing quite well it is all too easy to remember the dramatic plane rides and forget about the doors that opened with words like "multiple metastases" and "lobectomy" (lung, not brain). Doors that have swung shut again for the present. Who wants to dwell on mortality, anyway? But with now-closed doors there is also at the back of things the concern that I made a great big deal out of nothing. That perhaps this article was written for me: Report: Today the Day They Find Out You're a Fraud. And so accepting an invitation to a celebration for cancer survivors seemed like an assertion of status I don't really have.

Wait a minute? In spite of my fear of claiming something that isn't mine--or that I don't feel that I deserve--as I considered, I took a few steps back. I left the invitation on the refrigerator for a few days (ok, weeks?) and thought about it. I have had cancer. I have. It really happened. I was there. And then less of me was there. It so happens that my cancer doesn't match up with my idea of what qualifies as having had cancer (see Onion article, above, reflecting on a universal condition of man run amok). On reflection, though, I think that outside sources would corroborate that I have had cancer. And survived. So maybe this invitation was for me, after all?

Viva la Vida was also for friends and family of survivors. We haven't talked a ton about cancer with the kids, but they have borne this along with us. And so when I get an invitation that means free sports and lunch and face painting and ice cream and carnival games and crafts and magicians and hair painting nd live music, I decide that I am not going to take that away from them. That maybe it will be good for all of us to name what has gone down this year. And to say it has been hard. And to be grateful to God for getting us through from there to here.

Going to Viva la Vida together was one way to acknowledge that maybe I am doing so well because He has been good and has heard these prayers of ours, and of so many others--not because there was never anything really wrong to begin with. There was something very, very wrong. And for the past year (and who knows how many more?) that part has come untrue. Going into this weekend I realized that not acknowledging the depth of need meant not giving glory to God; meant taking for granted the place in which I now find myself. Which is a good place.


So we went. And we played. And I waited in the (seemingly) interminable line for face painting--twice. It is no small thing that I was able to stand on my own two feet for that long, friends. There were carnival games and an ice cream booth and a cookie booth and a popcorn booth.  Just walk right up, there for the taking--no questions asked. Everything a gift. Painting crafts and lunch and pink streaks in Pixie's hair and jewels on Nutmeg's forehead. Sunshine and sea breezes.

That sea battle I mentioned earlier? War ships have most of their guns along the sides. Instead of lining up his ships with their sides facing a line of the sides of French ships, the commander broke with contemporary conventions and instead ordered each ship to head straight into the line of enemy ships--and through. This meant taking heavy fire on the approach, followed by the ability to blast both sides at once. Into the fire and through. Fully engaged. The Glorious First of June.

Bud "won" the kite because he kept in the air for more than 10 minutes. He ended up letting out ALL of the string.

The Liturgical Calendar on Memorial Day

Here we are again at the end of May.

A year ago this weekend is when everything started to get crazy. When the control I thought I had over my life and activities imploded, and I started waiting for the phone calls that would tell me what I needed to do, or would be permitted to do, and when and where.

As I write, this year, today, the kids are all home from school. It's Memorial Day. They are cooking up some joint activity that involves costumes and bonnets and textiles pulled from neatly folded stacks. They are getting along and working together to realize some vision that I can't quite make out from back here in my bedroom. I don't dare step outside and upset the delicate balance of the magic that is happening.

When I look back on last spring, it seems magical to me, too: a time poised before the precipice. For the past couple of weeks I have been dusting off memories of last year in Princeton: "A year ago today we played football on Princeton's practice fields." "A year ago today we drove up to New York and retrieved Pixie from the cousins." "A year ago today it was so hot we drove down Quaker Bridge Road and bought a Slip n Slide and inflatable pool." (Quaker Bridge: because a Bridge. And Quakers.) That last is bittersweet: how I spent time running between stores, looking for the best deal on a sturdy pool that would last. When the next week I was out of there.

This summer will be a series of anniversaries. I am hoping that there will be time and space to process each in such a way that I can put things to rest and move ahead. 

I have often wondered about my propensity to mark time by specific fixed points. Does everyone keep in the back of their mind what they may have been doing on a particular day the year before? In some ways this makes the regular rhythm of day-to-day more terribly beautiful: an overlay of the past on the pattern of today. There may also have been a time when I would do the same with the future ("This time next month I will be_________"), although I have not been doing it much this year. Since last June the view ahead has been more opaque. For example,  J and I plan to take a lovely trip together soon. We have been planning it and mentally marking it with the hashtag #dontwaittocelebrate. And yet, it keeps sneaking up on me.  There has been little counting down of "this time next month" and last weekend I realized that I am afraid to look forward to it. If I get to enjoy it, great. If not, there will be no smashing to smithereens of expectations.

This feels safe, and yet doesn't quite seem to be the way I want to live in the world: waiting without looking forward. And so I want to pick up the church's liturgical calendar like a piggy bank of stored goodness, and shake it, and see what else it might have for me inside.

I can hear the drumming of Deuteronomy, the Gospels, Paul: "Remember!"

"...you shall not be afraid of them but you shall remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt, the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs, the wonders, the mighty hand, and the outstretched arm, by which the Lord your God brought you out."

"You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this today."

"He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.”

"Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel, for which I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound!"

And so of course I think that the church's calendar invites us to remember. To revisit again and again the things that we need keep before us but are liable to forget. Perhaps not all of those are things in the past. I am coming to think that the calendar is a pointing forward, as well. Around and around the years, seemingly marking time and yet (like a corkscrew) moving forward. Reaching out and pulling the future in.

And so as I revisit and remember this summer, I hope to see clearly God's goodness to me in the past: the ancient past, the recent past, the past year. But also to have a clearer vision for where he may be taking me, us. To somehow mark that he knows the plans he has for us: the gift of a future and a hope.

The Road to Character

Friday morning, David Brooks is coming to speak at the college across the way. I am trying to decide whether I am going.

Seeing his name in print puts me in a tailspin--that vermilion cover, the silver bookmark. I took it with me while I waited, and then I left Hillsborough radiology without it; after realizing this I turned around in the Applebee's parking lot to go back and collect it.  I read it as I waited for the very first of the series of tests that would eventually lead to the diagnosis of recurrent, stage IV cancer. Upon my return the staff found it for me at closing time on a Friday. On the way out I took a call from my doctor in the parking lot. We talked about the plan for Monday--an MRI, the possibility of needing to return early to California. So much unknown. Then I drove back out to Applebee's to meet the family for dinner as we celebrated the end of the homeschooling school year. I was done teaching.

Saturday morning we took the train into Manhattan as planned. We went to the top of the Empire State Building, not as planned, but as a surprise treat.

It was a clear day and we could see so far out ahead, in all directions. The breeze and clarity were a gift as I fought to keep my vision from closing in toward the focused tunnel it was becoming, even then. Later, we got on the A 8th Avenue Express by accident and went all the way up to 145th street. How we laughed at ourselves. And then back down, 64 blocks (on another train). We walked and museum-ed and picnicked in the park and later went downtown.

Saturday we played and Sunday we went to church. I stood at the front and read off-book from the first half of Isaiah 6.

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!” 

When I went back for the MRI on Monday, I took the book back with me. As I waited, I waded through a section on suffering. I read:

"...Suffering gives people a more accurate sense of their own limitations, of what they can control and not control. ..Suffering, like love, shatters the illusion of self-mastery...It teaches that life is unpredictable and that the meritocrat's efforts at total control are an illusion. 

Suffering, oddly, also teaches gratitude. In normal times we treat the love we receive as a reason for self-satisfaction (I deserve to be loved), but in seasons of suffering we realize how undeserved this love is and how it should in fact be a cause for thanks. In proud moments we refuse to feel indebted, but in humble moments, people know they don't deserve the affection and concern they receive."

I remember pausing, thinking that I was going to need to remember that.

I was soon called back for my MRI and later drove back to our home. As it turned out, the ink wouldn't be dry on the radiologist's report before I had an airline ticket back to Los Angeles for the following day. I spent the evening packing up what I could of our year in Princeton; the book was not able to come along. After finally getting to my turn at the top of the waiting list for it at the Princeton library, it was to be returned unfinished, along with the other books from my nightstand.

In the scope of the mourning that I have done, unfinished books seem such a little thing. In many ways they are. My year has been such a one as to accrue many similarly seemingly inconsequential losses (and just a few larger ones)--the sum of which happens to be nothing more or less than the loss of life as I was expecting, planning, assuming it to be. Whatever that was.

There are pros to this, as well as cons. Unfinished books are not the same as unfinished stories. Now when I head out to drive carpool I often mutter or shout "Living the dream!"--stealing a line from my sister--because I am so grateful to be doing what I am doing, and for the hope that more days are coming. There are twists and turns in the road, and that is something we all have in common. "This is not the end, but it is the road." And it goes on.

Brooks was right; I have been deeply grateful for many things. I think I will go tomorrow, after all.