Healing is always present for me. It is a huge part of my journey. I think of healing primarily as emotional and spiritual, although I have learned that with healing in those areas has come healing of body stresses as well. From time to time through the years I've had a role in accompanying others on their final journies on this planet. There had been a respite in this area of life, but at my age, that's never expected to last.
Cancer has come to our family--technically to my children's family, their father. Although divorced for more than 30 years, we have remained part of an extended family, sharing holiday celebrations with children and grandchildren. Tom's cancer has brought up feelings of "it's my job to fix this." I too often saw my role in our marriage as that of the fixer so now--the healer. I was supposed to heal Mother, I thought as a child. Those old feelings have resurfaced--coming to the forefront to be released at a deeper level.
That release brings a lighter feeling on one level and a more helpless one on another. We react differently. Our daughter, who lives here in Colorado, is planning to take her father and his wife to the beach this summer. That was a place we all enjoyed being together, a good spot for another kind of healing. Our son, who lives in Nashville and sees his dad often, is listening for the oncologist's prescription. He's walked the last months of a difficult cancer with a close friend so knows something of what is likely coming--and he'll be the one close by. Two of Tom's brothers are anxious to visit before he's really sick. That's his birth family's way.
I pray for as many kinds of healing as possible for Tom and our children. I pray for openness for the healing that's available to all of us, including Tom's wife of many years and her children. Each about ten years younger than ours, they got the better fathering.
Going deep isn't easy. It isn't the way we live. Our culture doesn't support introspection. We want a quick fix, not a journey. I'll admit that when I think of a good death, I think of a quick one or at least one that's mostly pain free. Not knowing what lies ahead isn't comfortable. Pain makes us want a pill, a shot. Being present to what is--that takes courage. I know that journey when it comes to emotional and spiritual healing. I know pain that comes from being with those feelings and the release and healing too.
I too know about watching a spot that could be cancer. I didn't have a doctor doing it with me like Tom has had. I pulled my bangs down over my forehead spot and went to France for six months. The dermatologist was alarmed when he saw the spot, was 95% sure it was melanoma, rearranged his afternoon schedule to do the surgery. I was lucky, he said. It was growing down a hair folicle and would have spread quickly. It was fast--diagnosis, surgery, pathology report, more surgery, all gone. I am reminded every six months when I go to the dermatologist for a check up and they say, oh yes, you had melanoma. Briefly I am present to cancer. Daily I am present to my spiritual healing journey.
My role in Tom's journey will primarily be to support our children, to pray and have my prayer groups pray, to follow from a distance. For me that's more uncomfortable than doing something tangible. I've been invited to his 75th birthday dinner at their home May 22nd, the day prior to grandson Will's high school graduation, since Tom's birthday's on graduation day. It will be an unusual birthday dinner--with lung cancer joining us at the table and with only our children and grandchildren present. (His step-children will be there this coming weekend.)
I have at times thought I might be a healer--not that I didn't recognize that God does the healing. But I thought of myself as perhaps having a contributing role. Looking through a different lense today, I see praying and being present to what is as my contributions--one simple and the other, presence, being a practice. Presence to being on the sidelines and yet involved--maybe that is what being with another's healing journey is.
The journey may be rocky, but there are always beautiful moments. Light may shine only on a tiny part of the path. Looking deeply won't be easy. And sometimes the path will climb steeply, with a golden glow appearing in the distance.
Prayers for the journey that we are all taking--and peace.
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