Undone

by Michele Cushatt

  By the time the elevator let me out at the parking garage, the pain radiated through my throat and down my neck, causing a throbbing pain I couldn’t push back. Urgency pushed me toward the safety of my car, and I nearly ran to get there.

  Door opened and closed. The world on the outside, the girl on the inside. Then, sitting in the driver’s seat of my car in the dark of the parking garage, I lowered my head against the steering wheel and cried.

  I couldn’t have been more than seven years old the day I discovered that Santa Claus isn’t real. And, by default, every other magical character I’d ever loved. The Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny. Knight Rider.

  The truth had been inkling in the back of my childlike and questioning mind. Always practical, I usually could piece together the clues of any surprise to discover it before its revelation. Mysteries were made to be solved, and I loved the unraveling of them.

  Until afterward, when, mystery solved, I discovered my insight had cost me my imagination and anticipation.

  Such was my experience with Santa Claus. I wanted to know the truth, and so I asked my parents for it outright. “Are you and Daddy Santa Claus? Are you the ones who do the presents?”

  I stood in my parents’ bathroom, watching Mom curl and tease her hair. I could tell by her expression that she didn’t expect my question. I was too young to be asking it. Always a woman of truth, she delivered it.

  “Yes, we are.”

  And that was the end of my belief in the jolly red dude. But I didn’t expect I’d miss him as much as I did.

  A cancer diagnosis worked a similar revelation. Before I heard the doctor’s words, saw them written on my medical chart, my life passed in holiday, full of presents, feasting, and happy children. I lived ignorant to the drama so many others had already experienced. Divorce had awakened me to the reality of suffering, of the fact that the unexpected can happen, even if you work so very hard to prevent it. Still, cancer remained far off, without the reach to touch my life. I ate healthy, exercised, took care of myself. Besides, I’d achieved my quota of hard things, hadn’t I? Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, right?

  Then, like solving the mystery behind Santa’s magic, I discovered the morbid reality behind the magic of life.

  Lightning is no respecter of persons. Cancer and illness, accidents and death can and will interrupt the holiday. Sometimes more than once. And one day, maybe even today, it will all end. For every one of us.

  Of course, I knew this. But now I knew this. It scared me. Before November, I didn’t question my life or longevity. After November, it was all I could think about. Like the girl who wanted to recapture her belief in Santa, I wanted to go back to my precancer ignorance. The knowing was far too big a weight.

  Behind all the fear, grief was the driving emotion. It took me awhile to understand this. I downplayed any loss I felt because I believed I had nothing to grieve. I’d been given good news, hopeful news. But even those with the best-case scenario, those who carry a positive prognosis in their pocket, can’t return to the innocence enjoyed before cancer entered the picture. It’s too late to unknow the truth.

  As I walked through grocery stores and department stores, I watched parents and children, husbands and wives. I noted how they laughed at one another’s jokes, how they argued and conversed, played and teased. I watched the bliss of their ignorance, the way cancer didn’t touch every single aspect of their ordinary. My tongue moved over the incision, I noted the tightness and twinge of pain, and I envied the magic of their still-mysterious lives.

  While “normal” people went through “normal” days, I grew obsessed about cancer-control. While waiting for biopsy results, I ate organic food and drank filtered water. I avoided Diet Coke, trashed the Splenda, and refused the occasional cherished glass of red wine. Anything that might be cancer-causing put me on high alert.

  After attending an NBA ball game one night, Troy and I exited the Pepsi Center behind a couple of men who lit up cigarettes the moment we stepped outside. So paralyzed by my fear of more cancer, I held my breath while walking behind them, to a near faint. When I had to take a breath, I covered my nose and mouth with my coat.

  Paranoid? A bit. Ridiculous, yet real.

  I’ve talked to countless other cancer survivors, of all extents and varieties. The one commonality we all share is the unexpected grief. Even when we’re given a good shot at a long life, even when we have great doctors and the hope of positive outcomes, we experience a deep and profound loss. Cancer is a thief, stealing what we didn’t even know we had until it was too late. The innocence is gone, replaced by an acute awareness of the dark flip side of life.

  For many, including me, that grief looked a lot like fear.

  It took a confrontation to finally set me free.

  Another day had passed with no phone call or answer. The waiting for biopsy results wore me down. I paced the hardwood floors, dropped to my knees in my closet. The fear routine had become routine, the sick feeling in my stomach far too familiar. I wanted it to end. I wanted to go back to October, before I knew.

  Inconsolable, I retreated to my bedroom. I didn’t want my boys to see my fear. It embarrassed me, shamed me. I wanted them to think me strong.

  Still, afraid of being alone, I leaned my head out the door and called my husband to me. Again.

  “Troy, can you come here a minute?”

  I heard him walking, steady, taking one stair at a time. When he opened the bedroom door, his face showed no trace of the anxiety I felt. He didn’t share my despair, nor did he fear for my life.

  It ticked me off.

  “How are you so calm? Why aren’t you worried?”

  We’d had this conversation before, and I’d peppered him with the same frustrated questions. I knew it wearied him, but he never let on.

  “Because you’re going to be fine. I’m sorry you have to go through this, but you’re going to be okay.”

  Fear blinds. I couldn’t see any reason for his peace. So I resisted his attempt at reassurance with another sharp and pointed question.

  “But what if? What if I’m not okay? What if the worst-case scenario happens?”

  Last time I’d checked, Troy wasn’t God. He couldn’t make promises about life and death. He couldn’t control the outcomes. I slung a little snark and waited to see what he’d do with it.

  Then, sitting together on our bed, he spoke the words that finally broke fear’s chokehold on me: “If you really believe what you say you believe, Michele, then it’s only going to get better for you from here.”

  Whoa. I didn’t expect that.

  I didn’t expect to be reminded of the faith I’d claimed since childhood. To be challenged to either believe it and live it, or let it go.

  If I really believe . . .

  Did I believe what I claimed? For years I’d professed a solid and sure faith, to my husband and children, neighbors and friends, and in venues and on platforms in front of hundreds of strangers. I talked about God as if he were real and powerful and interested in his children. And I talked about heaven as my ultimate vacation destination. But somehow I’d let cancer turn God into Santa Claus, a childish fantasy and a work of fiction. I still believed in him. I just didn’t believe him. I didn’t count on him to be the powerful, rescuing, interested God in the middle of my crisis. Mine was a belief that looked good on paper, but didn’t work itself out in reality.

  And flimsy belief gives birth to fear, not courage.

  Troy’s question was a valid one, a difficult one, and one I needed to answer. I could either hang on to fear or hold on to my faith. But I could not hang on to both. As I sat on the bed next to my husband, I felt his question — and its implications — work its way into me like the key to a rusty lock. I wrestled with it, worked it around in my head until I felt the pop of the lock and myself set free.

  Yes. Yes, I believe.

  Just the thought, those three words held in heart and mind, warmed me slowly and surely like the first s
wallow of Earl Grey on a cold day. Hope gets the final word in my life. From the moment I chose Jesus, life trumped death. But somewhere in my thirty-nine years, my love affair with this life had eclipsed my anticipation of the next. Living had become my idol, more the object of my worship than the Lifegiver himself.

  It’s a difficult tension, living with one hand embracing earth and the other reaching for the eternal. To think only of heaven is to miss out on the gift of life. And to dwell on this life is to miss out on the grandeur — and anticipation — of what is yet to come. Instead, I needed to see heaven and earth through the lens of the other. Only then could I embrace the glorious hues of both.

  I huddled in my bedroom, still fragile but far less afraid. I’d been given the gift of a single life, one I was to embrace, celebrate, and receive with joy. But the end of the gift was never meant to be the end of the story. Only the beginning of one.

  “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”12

  CHAPTER 8

  The Strength of Empty

  Heroes didn’t leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn’t wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else’s. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.

  — JODI PICOULT, Second Glance

  CANCER WORKS LIKE A BUG LIGHT. ANNOUNCE A DIAGNOSIS, AND similar stories and scenarios swarm your direction.

  “My brother was just diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer. They don’t think he’s going to make it.”

  “My mom was cancer-free for years. Then it came back. It was awful.”

  And my personal favorite: “My friend was diagnosed with the same kind of cancer as you. He died a few months ago.”

  Thank you. Super helpful.

  Emails, Facebook messages, phone calls, and texts. Day after day, the stories swarmed. My heart wanted to pray for each need, wanted to reach out to each person who suffered. Many had prayed for me, had pushed past their discomfort to reach out. Prayer and presence had carried me through.

  But the swarming overwhelmed me. Not the encouraging, hopeful, uplifting stories so much as the doom and gloom ones. I never made a big cancer announcement, didn’t post anything publicly, online, until more than a year later. But those close to me knew, and word spread. I’d joined the cancer club, willing or not. Once people heard, they shared their club-member stories. Cancer creates unusual alliances.

  Paul said, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.”13 I believed this to be true, even anticipated the day when my regrettable experience became a nice, neat story I could pull out like a Hallmark card offering to those in a hard place.

  But I couldn’t do it. Not yet. I still felt raw, fragile, so very weak. I didn’t know it then, but I was still in a post-trauma state, my emotions and thoughts on high alert. On the flip side of the initial adrenaline and intensity sat a steep decline into grief and loss. I vacillated between the two, and all it took was the mention of the word cancer for me to be launched back into high alert.

  In addition to the cancer stories, I received countless offers of advice and certain cures.

  “Don’t eat sugar. Cancer loves sugar.”

  “It’s the pesticides. That’s why cancer is epidemic right now. Organic. It’s the only way to go.”

  “Take this vitamin. It’s a cure, even if the FDA doesn’t approve it. And be sure to start juicing.”

  And don’t forget to eat a pound of broccoli at every meal, turn around in a circle twenty-eight times, and chew gum while standing on your head and rubbing your stomach.

  Whoa, baby. I appreciated all the well-intentioned counsel. For a while, I ate broccoli, avoided sugar, took vitamins, and nearly took out a second mortgage to buy organic food. All healthy choices. Regardless of the anticancer potential, I knew it was good for my body.

  But it also fed the fear monster. I worried about drinking tap water, certain the treatment chemicals were dangerous. I fretted while taking long walks outside, afraid Denver’s air pollution upped my chances of a recurrence. I wondered whether my hair spray and hair coloring were loading my body with toxic chemicals. Each day became an impossible maze of decisions that could take me either toward or away from cancer. Crazy-making.

  For fifteen years, my parents lived in the suburbs of Chicago. Every time we went for a visit, we trekked into the city to visit Navy Pier and maybe catch a Cubs game. But before we’d load up in the car, Mom or Dad checked traffic, to see about “gaper delays.”

  “Gaper delays?” I asked the first time. “What in the world is that?” Sounded like a rash.

  “You know, gapers. People who can’t take their eyes off a car accident. They hit their brakes, trying to get a look at the carnage. It backs up traffic.”

  The thought horrified me. And yet, when we drove into the city, we almost always encountered a gaper delay of some kind.

  My life as a so-called cancer survivor created a gaper delay. I couldn’t move forward because of all the conversations and stories that slowed and stopped, pulled me back to fear. Well-meaning friends wanted to know my prognosis, pain levels, and outlook. They expressed concern for my significant weight loss, commenting on my sunken face, the dark circles under my eyes, and my baggy jeans. Others gave abundant advice. Still others wanted to dump their personal heartache on someone who understood.

  I loved that they cared, appreciated all the good intention. But all this cancer talk created a couple of problems. First, talking itself was a problem. To answer the endless phone calls and questions caused pain and cost valuable healing time. Second, I was sick and tired of being sick. I didn’t want to talk about cancer anymore. Instead, I wanted to pretend it didn’t happen, package it up like a donation to Goodwill and drop it off for someone else. Cancer sat like a black hole in my history. I wanted to move forward, reclaim the life I’d enjoyed before I got sucked into the nightmare.

  Everywhere I turned, however, cancer showed up. Do you know how many commercials advertise cancer treatments? How many movies have a character with cancer? Facebook is a gold mine of cancer survivors and stories. A great place for support and connection, but a field of land mines for a girl who wants to live.

  Gaper delays. I couldn’t move forward.

  That’s why, as I prepped to return to the speaking circuit, I decided to keep my cancer story to myself. I would avoid talking about my health at all costs. I couldn’t handle the swarming.

  I’d had a couple of small speaking engagements in January and February. I smiled, nodded, did my job without any indication that something horrific had happened. It worked, for the most part. I could pretend for those brief public appearances.

  But March brought my first large speaking engagement. The Hearts at Home Conference. Six thousand moms gathered on the Illinois State University campus in central Illinois. I’d been asked to deliver two sessions two times each to hundreds of women.

  The invitation came months before my diagnosis. I’d been thrilled at the opportunity. This was my first big break. I imagined it could help propel my speaking platform unlike any other speaking engagement before.

  But then everything changed two days before Thanksgiving. I no longer cared about platforms, big breaks, and making a name for myself. I just wanted to live. To be with those I loved. And I definitely didn’t want to talk about cancer. It’d already stolen enough of the spotlight.

  I
almost canceled the engagement. I’d become a woman afraid to leave her home. I limped through each day, needing Troy’s reassurances moment by moment. The thought of flying to another state and being in a room with thousands of strangers overwhelmed me. I wasn’t sure I could do it.

  Then the unexpected happened. Again. Not a major crisis, but the camel’s straw that made his load too big to bear.

  Exactly one week before the conference kicked off, I noticed a tooth starting to ache. I’d never had a toothache before and didn’t know what to think. Maybe I’d bitten down on something wrong. Then again, I’d had months of mouth pain. Maybe this was another side effect of all the trauma?

  By Saturday morning, two days later, the pain turned unbearable. A visit to a high-priced, weekend dentist confirmed the problem: an abscessed tooth. I’d need to see a specialist about a root canal. But they wouldn’t open again until Monday. To get through the weekend, he prescribed an antibiotic.

  “You should feel better in twenty-four hours,” he said.

  He was wrong.

  What followed was a long and extremely painful forty-eight hours. By Monday morning, I awoke to an abscess that would make the strongest stomach turn. I paced, in agony, cell phone in hand, waiting for the strike of eight to call the endodontic specialist’s office.

  By early afternoon, I was a new woman. My first root canal. And contrary to the stream of horror stories I’d heard before, it brought nothing but relief. After four solid days of excruciating pain, I could finally rest.

  Only one problem. All the mouth drama had rubbed raw the surgical area that hadn’t fully healed. Plus, I now sported yet another open wound where the abscess had been. In forty-eight hours, I’d board a plane to central Illinois and six thousand women who loved to chat. Four speaking sessions. Hours meeting attendees at a book table. And once again, I was eating pureed food and unable to talk.

  I’m convinced God has a sense of humor. No doubt about it.

  I told him he needed new material.