Fly a Little Higher

by Laura Sobiech

  It was one of the countless moments when God reached His hand down and rested it on my shoulder. Like the rainbow we had seen on our way home the day of the biopsy two and a half years earlier, it was a promise that He would be there when I really needed Him. All I had to do was ask and watch.

  We got Zach into the clinic and the doctor did an exam. After several minutes, Zach began to feel better, the nausea dissipated, and his color began to change from a dusky gray to a more natural pink. We considered checking him into the hospital, but Zach refused; home was where he wanted to be.

  Sixteen

  IT WAS THE SECOND WEEK OF JUNE, AND THE SCHOOL YEAR WAS coming to an end. Zach hadn’t been able to finish junior year with the rest of his classmates because of his radiation schedule and, frankly, he just wasn’t well enough. He’d spent a good portion of the last two weeks sleeping and feeling really crappy. The day after he almost passed out in the car, the radiation had started to ease the pain, but the trade-off was that it left him feeling like a very old man.

  I’d taken that Saturday afternoon to go visit my folks and spend a little time by their pool. I needed a break and was itching to get out of the house, and since Rob was home with Zach, I decided to take advantage of a few free hours. I figured Zach could use a break from my hovering as well. I was constantly checking on him and asking if he wanted something to eat; he hadn’t eaten anything of substance in several days.

  I came back home around five o’clock in the afternoon to find Zach lying on the couch in the living room, the afternoon sunshine draped across him. I set my bag down, kicked my shoes off into the closet, and sat down on the armrest at the end of the couch.

  “Hey.” I rubbed the top of his foot. “How are you doing?”

  He glanced at me, then quickly averted his eyes and brought his hand up, resting his fingertips on his forehead to shield his eyes. He was fighting tears and couldn’t speak for a moment.

  My heart sank. I knew the physical struggle was getting to him, but emotionally he seemed to be handling things well. Over the years he’d had a few moments of doubt and sadness, but nothing that laid him out flat for long. Now, though, with the latest news, it seemed despair might have a better footing and the realities were finally catching up with him.

  “Come on. Tell me what’s going on,” I coaxed. I was terrified of what I would hear. In my own struggle to figure out how to deal with the beginning of the end, I wasn’t sure I would have any words of comfort left.

  “I just don’t know why my friends or anyone would want to waste their time hanging out with me,” he said as he finally let the tears flow. “What’s the point if I’m just going to die anyway?”

  His friends had always been good about coming to visit him when he was too sick to leave home. But it was finals week, and they were busy with their studies and all the other activities that teenagers find themselves caught up in. Zach was stuck at home lying on the couch, feeling sick and lonely with plenty of time to think about what he was missing. His friends’ busy lives stood in stark contrast to his.

  Now despair tried to sneak its way in. I paused for a moment as I searched desperately for words to comfort and guide him. But no words seemed adequate. He was beyond all the life experience I had to offer. He was dying, and I couldn’t soothe him with words of encouragement because there weren’t any that didn’t sound trite.

  In the end, it was plain old parenting that took over. He didn’t need me to come down into that hole with him. What he needed was a pep talk, something solid to pull him up out of the hole he was in so he could fight the lie that his life was worth nothing as it tried to worm its way into his heart.

  “So, you think that because you’re terminally ill your friends should just dump you?” I was in lecture mode. “Why? Are you less interesting than you were two weeks ago? Because I’m thinking the whole terminal thing makes your life a whole lot more interesting.” I was building steam. “You aren’t just some useless lump, Zach. You have just as much to offer them as they have to offer you. And even if you don’t know it, they do.”

  The tears had stopped as he listened. The “snap out of it” tone in my voice had caught him off guard, but he was responding the way I’d hoped he would; it was what he needed to yank him back to who he really was. He wasn’t the mopey kid who let cancer get him down. He was the kid who fought back and did things in spite of his disease.

  Emboldened by his response, I continued.

  “Would you jump ship if one of your friends were going to die?” It was a weak spot that I knew would seal the deal. He loved his friends dearly and was nothing if not compassionate, which was probably one of the reasons he was having a hard time bringing them down this road of suffering with him. But he needed to see that part of loving someone meant allowing him or her to stick with you, even in the darkest of days.

  “No,” he responded sheepishly.

  “Okay. Then don’t assume the worst from them. They don’t deserve it.”

  I stood up and walked to the kitchen. As long as he was listening, I might as well get him to eat something. “You haven’t been eating enough. What kind of smoothie do you want?” I pulled the yogurt from the refrigerator.

  A moment later he joined me in the kitchen and sat down on a stool at the counter. I opened the cupboard door to grab the blender and paused for a moment. With the door blocking his view, I took a deep breath in and let it go. The emotional weight of what he was going through was huge. I felt like I’d caught him just as he was about to fall over the edge. He was sick and tired, but he was okay. I was exhausted.

  “Blueberries sound good,” he replied.

  I smiled. They sure did.

  “SO, IS AMY BACK IN TOWN YET?” I ASKED. SHE’D BEEN OUT OF TOWN for a week at the dance competition. Zach had stopped feeling so sick and friends had started coming over again, now that school was done, but I hadn’t seen Amy stop over yet. We were on our way to the clinic for a CT scan of Zach’s chest. He had completed three weeks of radiation on his hip and needed a follow-up physical, but he’d also been having some difficulty breathing so the doctors wanted to check out his lungs.

  “Yep, she got home yesterday and we are going on a picnic today at eleven.” It was eight o’clock in the morning. “When do you think we’ll be done with this appointment?”

  “It shouldn’t be more than two hours. It’s just a CT and checkup. What are you bringing to the picnic?”

  “I don’t know. She’s packing it. We’re going to a park by her house,” he said. “They better be on time today or we’re leaving early. I’m not waiting around,” he threatened. “Why are we going to the U again? I don’t get it. We already know it’s bad. It seems like a waste of time.” This picnic obviously meant the world to him. I’d never seen him this antsy; he was usually so laid-back. It made me smile as I remembered the excitement of new love.

  We pulled up to the hospital like we had hundreds of times before. We had the CT first, then made our way up to the clinic on the ninth floor and waited for the doctor to come in to do the exam and give us the results of the scan. We’d already had a month to get used to the worst news we could expect, so I wasn’t terribly nervous about the results; it was just another hoop to jump through. Whether the tumors had grown or not seemed irrelevant at this point; we already knew the worst was coming.

  Zach sat on the exam table anxiously looking at the clock. He was especially irritated because he had forgotten his phone at home and had no contact with the outside world. The oncologist and the nurse practitioner opened the door to our room, and the expressions on their faces were serious.

  “Well, Zachary. I’m afraid, dear sir, that you have a collapsed lung. A quite impressive one at that.” She delivered the news as she pulled her stethoscope out of her white lab coat pocket.

  “How do you feel?” she asked. “Your mom said on the phone that you were having some difficulty breathing.” She tugged his shirt to indicate for him to take it off.

  Zac
h peeled off the white T-shirt with “Pants” written across the front. He loved the irony. “It hasn’t been that bad. Just a little shortness of breath when I do stairs or have to walk long distances. It’s really no big deal. I feel fine.”

  She listened to his lungs, then stepped aside to let the nurse listen as she pointed out the difference in sound based on where the scope was placed. It was a teaching moment. Collapsed lungs didn’t show up in the clinic very often.

  “You’ll need surgery to repair it, and we’ve talked to the pediatric surgeons. They have to work their schedules around a bit, but it looks like they can do the surgery early this afternoon. You can go right over to the hospital, and they’ll check you in.”

  I watched Zach, the expression on his face betraying what was going on inside his head. He was in no mood to put up with silly things like collapsed lungs. He had a date he needed to get to.

  “Can’t we just schedule it for another day?” he pleaded. “I feel fine. It can’t be that big of a deal.”

  “Actually, Zach, it’s very serious. Your lung is leaking air into the pleural space, the space between your lung and rib cage. That air has nowhere to go and, as a result, is pushing your lung over and putting pressure on your heart. If we don’t do the surgery immediately, the air will continue to leak into the space and could cause some very serious, potentially deadly problems. This is a medical emergency, Zach. I’m so sorry.”

  For the first time since his diagnosis, Zach was angry. He had finally started to feel better after spending the first month of what was probably his final summer in pain and feeling sick. He just wanted to spend the rest of it enjoying life. Now he would have to endure another surgery and days in the hospital. But worst of all, he’d have to miss his picnic with Amy.

  He was devastated.

  Zach couldn’t remember Amy’s number, so he had me call Sammy who, in turn, called Amy to tell her the news. On the other end of the line, Amy broke down into tears. It was real now. Cancer. There was no more pretending it would quietly take a backseat in their lives. It had crawled up and planted itself firmly between them, a nasty little thing that refused to be ignored.

  Amy would have to learn how to live and love while letting go.

  So would I.

  Seventeen

  June 2012

  THE HOUSE WHERE I GREW UP WAS SITUATED JUST A FEW YARDS from the railroad tracks that ran through my hometown. The loud rumbling and the click, clack of the racing train made the whole house shake. I remember waking up to the blaring horn and the deep rumble that reached all the way through my body as the six o’clock train would roll by. It wasn’t a pleasant way to wake up, but it was something I had grown used to.

  In the days that followed the devastating news that Zach was terminal, I would wake up in the morning and, for a few seconds, feel the peace and contentment of our home. But it didn’t take long for the rumbling to start. I would first feel it in my chest, then it gradually made its way to my fingertips and toes. It felt like the six o’clock train from my childhood. The rumbling would gradually change over to tension as the nightmare I was waking up to would slowly enter back into my consciousness.

  I relished those few moments at the beginning of each day, when sleep hadn’t quite given way to the new day, before I remembered what it was we would have to face. The moments before the rumbling would start.

  I’d been through this kind of thing before, at different points in Zach’s battle. When we would get disappointing results, it was like being shoved from behind by a bully who lurked around the corner. We never knew which scan would hold bad news, and it always seemed to catch me a little off guard, and I’d have to pick myself back up from the blow.

  I began to get used to it after a while, recovering from the enormous stress of the horrifically bad news. But there was always a physical response that faith and prayer couldn’t head off or take away. When bad things happen, your body responds: your heart rate goes up, your mouth tastes like metal, and you get very tired but have a hard time falling asleep. That’s just the way it is; you simply don’t have much control over it.

  I remember early on in our battle, I had posted a message on our CaringBridge site about feeling this stress before going in for a thoracotomy. I noted that Zach was pretty nonchalant; he’d had the surgery before and knew what to expect and knew he could manage the pain. “Thoracotomies. Meh. They’re no big deal,” he would say.

  But his sixteen-year-old-invincible-boy way of thinking didn’t allow him to see the bigger picture. He didn’t see the war, only the battle. I was more concerned about the results than the actual surgery. Was the new chemo working? Was it killing the cancer? If it wasn’t, then we were running out of ammunition, and that meant losing the war.

  A woman who had read the post made a comment in our CaringBridge guest book implying that because I was feeling the stress of the situation, my faith was inferior and less genuine than Zach’s. I was furious! How dare she make that implication? I didn’t disagree that Zach was strong in his faith, but to suggest that mine was weak because I was stressed about my child dying seemed utterly ridiculous, and cruel. For Pete’s sake, Jesus was more than a little stressed when He was faced with death. Was my response that much different? I deleted her guest book message and blocked her from visiting our site again.

  But her message caused me to reflect. Not so much on my faith—I had lived most of my life believing in a loving God who sent His Son to redeem us and show us the way to heaven—but on where to place my hope.

  I had gotten messages from people through CaringBridge and from family and friends that they were fervently praying Zach would be cured. They had their hearts set on a miraculous healing that would glorify God, and they prayed daily for it. Their hope lay in the healing power of God.

  I wasn’t so certain.

  I knew God wanted us to pray for what our hearts desired, but I had witnessed others who had walked a similar path to ours and had placed all their hope in a physical cure. They spent all their energy praying for a miracle, and when their loved one still died, it left them with their faith shaken. They had been so convinced that if they had enough faith, they could move God to conform to their will.

  I wanted desperately for Zach to be cured. I wanted him to have a future where he would graduate from high school, go to college, marry, and have children. I wanted his children to crawl up onto one of my kitchen chairs and ask, “Grandma, why is this chair all scratched up?” And I would tell them the story of how their father had to wear a special brace after he had his hip replaced and it scratched the chairs. I wanted to tell them about the miracle God performed. That God had touched their daddy’s hip with His mighty hand and there was so much love in that touch it caused their daddy to limp, just so he would never forget that powerful love.

  But I struggled with praying for a miracle of physical healing because I wasn’t sure that was God’s plan for Zach. I believed that a person’s suffering is a powerful thing when it is united with Christ’s, and that it can become a powerful channel of God’s grace into the world. I knew God must have allowed cancer into our lives for a reason, though I wasn’t certain what it was.

  I wrestled with what to pray for, and I wrestled with where to place my hope. I knew God was asking me to trust Him, but that meant giving up Zach. How could I do that? I felt like Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac. While I wasn’t wielding a knife over my bound son—cancer had already done that—in my soul I still had to choose.

  Let God do it His way, or beg Him to do it my way.

  Trust God or not.

  Place my hope in something higher. Or not.

  So, there I was, at that moment in time. We had run out of chemotherapy. There was nothing left. Without a miracle, Zach would die within a year.

  I sat, gliding slowly back and forth in the comfort of my favorite rocking chair. I had lulled babies to sleep and dreamed of their bright futures in this chair, and now I had to contemplate what it would be like to
lose one. All the memories of years filled by the spirit of that beautiful boy swam in my mind and left my heart to ache like arms that clutched a weighty treasure for a long time. How could I let go of this son who brought so much joy into our lives and into our home? What would our family be like without the child who made everything run smoothly just by his peaceful presence?

  They were a team, these children of mine, and they worked best when together. Zach was the hub, the touchstone in the family whom everyone could connect with. It wasn’t that Alli, Sam, and Grace didn’t get along—they did—but it was Zach who brought them together. He brought an enthusiasm for life into a room that drew the rest of us out of the daily grind to join him.

  The morning sun shone through the windows that lined the wall. The dappled sunlight danced on the floor at my feet as I contemplated the hole that would be left in our family when Zach was gone.

  Who would hash over life’s big questions with Alli? Who would Sam talk to about physics and the mysteries of the universe, and who would share life’s secrets with Grace? Who would walk in the door at the end of the day and yell, “Ma! What’s for dinna?” in an obnoxious and poorly executed New Jersey accent? Or sit on a Sunday afternoon and watch the game with his dad?

  How could God ask this sacrifice of Zach, who loved Him more and better in his short life than most who are given a lifetime? And how could He take Zach from Rob and me? We had done things the right way; we had done our best to live faithful lives by serving Him. Wasn’t that enough?

  My heart was raw from the struggle. I was tired and broken with tears streaming down my face.

  “What do You want from me, Lord?” I questioned. “What do I pray for? How do I pray?” I begged.

  And then, a scene I had contemplated hundreds of times as I had prayed the rosary over the years filled my mind. It was a vivid image of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was kneeling and in agony. He turned His face to heaven and opened His mouth and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).