Enlarged Hearts

This week finds one of our small town’s own in the international headlines.  Kayla Mueller, humanitarian aid worker and prisoner of the Islamic State, was killed during airstrikes against her captors by Jordan’s military over the weekend.  The airstrikes were to avenge the death of First Lieutenant Moaz al-Kasasbeh, who was burned alive while trapped in a cage.  The barbarity of al-Kasasbeh’s death and many others at the hands of Islamic State militants has sickened anyone with a heart and a conscience.  Kayla’s death brought the atrocities of the Islamic State to our town’s doorstep.

Prescott is small enough that even though I didn’t know Kayla, I know several people who did.  Our town’s size seems defined by this single degree of separation – just big enough that we don’t know everyone, but small enough that we know-someone-who.  From all accounts, she was a woman with enormous spirit and courage.  She was the type of person who embodied selflessness and who revealed humanity’s best through her actions while helping those who faced humanity’s worst.

As I’ve looked out at my students this week, I’ve felt a sense of unease and dread as I’ve noted the more idealistic among them - those students who have large enough hearts to believe that they can indeed make a difference in what appears to me right now to be a cruel and dark world.  There are shadows reaching across our planet that make me tense and anxious for my daughters’ generation.  And yet I’ve also felt wonder and great hope as I look into the eyes of my students.  I think of that damn starfish story that makes me tear up every time I even reflect upon it in spite of how cynical I feel.  To paraphrase Dr. King, only light can illuminate darkness.

I’ve read Kayla’s letter to her family several times and I’m blown away by the courageous and gracious heart it reveals.  And I am grateful that she existed and that her kind appear, like angels, to those in the most desperate of situations.  “Where is the world?” the people of Syria asked her.  She didn’t have an answer.  We cannot know much of Kayla’s work in Syria, and yet we can imagine that she brought some measure of comfort, and perhaps even joy, to those who needed it most.  Her death does not make sense to me, and I cannot fathom the despair of her family.  In spite of the horror I feel at her senseless death, I can’t help but also be grateful that there are others like her, others who will be inspired and moved by her story to do good, others who will remind us of our humanity by giving of themselves and shining their light into the darkness of the abyss, even if but for a moment.

The Whole Sky

We often mark our time here on earth with the words before and after:
before I met you...
after we were married...
after graduation...
before we had children...
before he died...
2013 did not begin in an auspicious way for me.  In fact, on the last day of 2012 I received news that swirled me up into an eddy of doctors’ visits and medical tests and procedures from which I am still quite literally recovering.

Just over a month ago I was diagnosed with a very early stage breast cancer in my right breast.  Something that no one mentioned about being diagnosed with cancer is that the first suspicion is just the beginning.  From there, you’ll be asked to run a gamut of tests that confirm or deny other suspicions.  You will be given lots or little information, and then be asked to make huge decisions.  Three weeks after my first cancer diagnosis, it was revealed that the same cancer was also lurking in my other breast, simply missed by at least two other doctors.  And on February 15th, my mother’s 76th birthday, I underwent bilateral mastectomy.  All of the cancer was removed and the sentinel lymph nodes of both sides were also free of cancer.  I am well on the road to recovery, but it will be a long process.

And so now I find that I can demarcate my life as before cancer and so very gratefully as after cancer.  There are certain aspects of my life which are irrevocably changed, altered permanently.  But not all of this change is bad.

Before, I saw the world as full of potential, for adventure, for travel, for knowledge.  But it’s not until you hear certain words spoken in reference to yourself or a loved one, words like cancer, that you really feel the presence of other potentials.  Abruptly, possibilities like pain, suffering, and death - your own and that of your loved ones - loom darkly on your own horizon.

Hearing a doctor say that you have cancer is like being thrust under water.  Quite suddenly, there is no longer enough air in the room.  And the world, as you once viewed it, no longer has the clarity it had before.  The word cancer attaches itself to nearly every thought, obscuring most of them.  I can only speak of my own experience, my own diagnoses, which are highly curable.  I can only imagine that these feelings are multiplied exponentially if your prognosis is more grave than mine.

If this can happen to me, my wild brain laments during the long dark nights, then what else is possible?  What horrors are equally likely to be visited upon my husband, my daughters, my loved ones?  These potential dangers ambushed me at night.  I’ve known for quite some time that I’ve lived a life relatively free from loss and tragedy.  I know that I was grateful for that.  It was as if, with my diagnoses, for the first time, my eyes were open, able to see things that have always been there.  These potential dangers lurk under shadow but are keenly visible with my new-found vision.  There is no way to unsee this.

But something else became discernible as well.  I truly never realized how much I am loved.  I never consciously felt love swaddling me, as a friend put it she wanted me to be cocooned with love.  I had never sensed love’s full capacity to buoy me up in spite of feeling tethered to a heavy darkness.  A string I could follow to lead myself out of the cave.

So many people have expressed admiration for my courage, remarking on how brave I am.  I don’t really know what they mean by that.  I once defined courage as being aware of the dangers that exist and carrying on anyway.  I still believe that.  But the instinct for self-preservation is pretty high, whether you are on a risky mission in Afghanistan or making decisions about cancer treatment.  I only did what I had to do in order to ensure that my life could go on pretty much as it had before.  Anyone would find the same reserve of intentions if and when you are faced with challenges.  It is not until you look that challenge in the eye, though, that you will know how strong you are.

My brother John, a cancer survivor himself who is married to a cancer survivor as well, said to me early on that cancer would test me in ways I couldn’t imagine.  This has been absolutely true.  He also said that he wouldn’t give his cancer back because it made him a better person.  I know exactly what he means.  My entire world has come sharply into focus since I resurfaced from my initial plunge underwater.  Some things that seemed important have faded to irrelevance.  Others, which seemed intangible are now palpable.  The greatest of these, of course, is love.  Hafiz, the 14th Century mystic said,

Even
after
all this time
the sun never
says to the earth,
"You owe me."

Look
what happens
with a love like that.

It lights the
whole
sky.

Please know that your kindnesses through deeds and words do have an impact.  Do not be afraid to love, for it is the only way to extinguish darkness. 

 

 

Surge

You awake in the fog of after
which obscures all that was before.
It’s palpable, like sheets

binding you to a nightmare.

You are flung into a stifling, scratchy
grey, suffocating from a lack

of space, an abrupt knowledge

of finite.  It is too much.  You form the words 
but they emerge like sounds on a slow

reel, heavy bubbles popping

under their own mass.  Disoriented, tossed
about, you are throttled again

again again toward fear’s maw

from each crest and trough.  You flail,
turning, driven below and forced

to the surface where you gasp.

But then you hear other words, another
voice that is within but isn’t either.

You cannot float if you are struggling.

And so you release, you give
yourself up, not down, and you let yourself
be carried.  It is then that you begin

to focus, to see the hint of light that
did not yet exist in that moment before night
ends and something else begins.

You watch, in awe, as dawn streaks

the sky with color, a steady warp from east to west
and you realize you are no longer adrift

or alone, but buoyed by a love that

surges like a wave, carrying you back to shore, no
longer ensnared.  Your feet touch

soft sand, terra firma, and you step

forward to greet the day with the quiet
hope that only dawn can bring.