As our family started praying for my sister-in-law, whose breast biopsy came back positive a few days ago, I got another message.
One of the wonders of the Internet is how easy it is to reconnect with people whom you knew back when.
One of the wonders of continuing to be alive on this planet is learning how, when you once care about another human being, however much, wherever they may go forth to in this life, you wish them well in it all. And that that never stops. Ever. The caring only grows more important, even when it takes you by surprise because you simply hadn’t had occasion to think of the person in years. But they matter, and they always will.
I spend very little time at Facebook: this is where the bandwidth real estate is my own. And yet, forgotten password or no, somehow one old friend after another showed up and there it was.
And so I got asked today by another Churchill grad, someone I’d known since elementary, how life was now. It stumped me. How was hers, too? How on earth does one sum up 18-50? Got married, had kids, and in my case, wrote a book? If you add up my four kids’ ages, that’s 96 Mom-years; that could get a little wordy. By mentioning having systemic lupus and Crohn’s both? Nah, that’s just the background noise. Tell her to read this entire blog back to front? (Spare her!)
It may not have been the best answer, but I responded saying I’d always wanted to be a writer; published now and off to a good start. And then it seemed the best way to sum up the whole rest of everything else was simply to link to the story of the man with that Stanford Blood Center t-shirt on. The everyday trip to the store. And yet.
The context that had brought us together was the group “Pray for Chuck Heidel,” a tall kid who’d teased me in junior high math class but a kid who by late high school had transformed into the downright decent, good person he’d been all along, as most kids do. He’d been a member of a champion football team that had included Brian Holloway and Jeff Kemp: I was by no means part of the jock scene, but we had a crop of decent people among ours that defied stereotypes. One of them, I said to at the 20th reunion, “I don’t remember much about you: but I remember that you were always a friend to anyone.”
Chuck was recently in a bike accident and was airlifted to the U of MD Trauma Center. Unconscious. Paralysis. Blood clots. Intubation. As I read the reports of what he’d been enduring since then, I kept thinking, I had that in January. I went through that in February. I had that three weeks ago. Part of me wanted to tell his family that his voice will sound normal within two weeks because he didn’t try to talk while he had that tube down his throat–he was unconscious then. Part of me wants to make jokes about hospital food while jumping up and down that he can swallow again. And he lifted a glass to his lips!
There was his daughter’s awe at her father’s example of asking the family to gather round him to pray for the patient next door, in worse shape than he.
And that, I could tell her as a patient, is how one copes. By finding a way to bring forward the best in oneself, the faith if we have faith, our goodwill in all circumstances, looking for any way of serving those around us in order not to have the bodily damage hog all the attention.
Because the love never stops. The caring never ends. It only grows with each new experience.