Below is a monologue that I wrote and performed at our church at the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend services. I admit it is edited from it's first form...that was a more intimate look at my own feelings surrounding a dear woman and friend who is dying from breast cancer in reality...full of information from an intimate conversation I had with her and my own frustrations, fears and grief in the way I am dealing with her illness and imminent death. The words below are raw enough and gave me enough difficulty during performance. The only words there not my own in reality are 'I don't understand this faith...' because I do, but the rest accurately depict how angry I am and how grief-stricken.
"I was sitting in the kitchen when
she called me. They’d found a mass on her kidney. She wasn't worried about the results of the
biopsy, probably benign she said. Now a year later she is down one kidney and
the tumour has grown back. Twice the size. Chemo doesn't work on kidney cancer.
A few months ago over coffee she told me she just wanted a few more years to
see her kids married off and settled … now it’s unlikely she’ll get more than a
few months. I am racked with grief before she’s even gone – and so bloody angry
… at the doctors for not knowing enough, at the injustice of it all, and with
God and … and … and … sometimes even with her. She’ll sit across from me and tell me how
blessed her life has been and she has no anger. And that she’ll take what days
God has given her and praise Him with her dying breath and be thankful for it
all, for every moment. And when I shake my head and tear up and say, ‘How can
you say that when you are suffering with this insidious disease … while it’s
sucking the life out of you?’ She just smiles and says, ‘Because it’s a win/win
situation. For a little while I’ll suffer and while I do Christ is with me. When
I die, I gain heaven and I am with Christ … for eternity.’ I don’t understand
this faith, but I look in her eyes and I see it plain as day … "
There is such an urgency in me these days to let my dear friend know how much I love her, how I ache and pray for her family for the loss they will surely have to endure...not the least her dear husband. I selfishly want to see her once more, hold her hand and pray with her once more. I want her to know what an influence she has been in my life, how I've treasured our conversations, her wisdom, her mere soothing presence, her vivacity...even though I am sure she knows that. It would be a selfish thing to visit with her now though as it would steal precious hours...minutes...from those most intimate with her. So I grieve distantly, even knowing the place she's going to, she will not want to return from. And in my self-pity I moan that I will be left behind to deal with grief. I am not unfamiliar with it, having lost my own mother to cancer just five years ago. It's debilitating and pervades every moment from the first and then infiltrates random thoughts forevermore...raising it's bruising head over and over, though with less frequency.
Many...many, many, many...share my grief and in that there is some solace...and something for me to do...to comfort others, to share stories, to love others through it. And to know that my dear friend might be looking on from the much toted 'better place'...I know that it is much better than just better. And one day I'll be there with her...and that is the only thing that makes the grieving bearable. How does any bear grief without faith? I am thankful I don't have to.
