The Peace That Comes From Knowing
I removed the question mark in the title. It’s not an uncertainty any longer. And it’s not so bad. I’d rather know the name of my enemy so I have a chance to fight it.
For all of my life I’ve enjoyed nearly perfect health. Oh, an annual cold maybe and a couple of bouts of bronchitis. But this 76-year-old body has never known serious illness, and there are so many diseases out there. They make warriors out of the most ordinary human beings. Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle, the place that finally isolated and found my cancer, is a mecca for these warriors. Now I will be joining them.
I am at a place in my life that seemed out of reach for me. I never dreamed that I would ever learn to be truly happy, growing, as happiness must, from the inside out. This is where I am now, having spent the past decade working on my demons—we all have them—and replacing them with good, orderly direction (GOD). I write a weekly blog about my spiritual recovery, and my cancer diary, though humorous at times, is heavily weighted to reflect that.
There are over sixty different kinds of lymphoma. The ones that are the most common often have the highest success rate because they have found more ways to treat them. Then there are the uncommon forms of lymphoma that they don’t know much about because they appear so infrequently. The fates have given me the latter variety, T-cell lymphoma, which is rare. There are a few protocols that they use to coax it into remission, but the cancer tends to recur and the long-term success rate is low. About 30% make it to five years. And then there are clinical trials…
This is a new challenge for me. Gene and I spent over twenty years crisscrossing the continental United States, hiking in most of the national parks. We weren’t mountain climbers, even when we were much younger, but we did scale what was left of Mount St. Helens in 2002. It was his second climb, but my first. And oh, what an achievement it was for me, scrambling over those boulders, sinking into fine volcanic ash to finally reach the top. I was so exhausted at the time that I announced,
“Never again! No more mountains to climb!”
Well, life has now presented me with another one. When I meet Saint Peter at the gate, whether it’s next year or ten years from now, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I didn’t fritter away my life avoiding difficulties and the interior growth that comes from facing them. The truth is, of course, that I would be passing on this particular challenge if I could. I’m not a saint. But once again, I’ve been faced with a problem that I didn’t have a choice about. So my work now, Saint Peter, is to rise to the challenge. I’m not ready for you yet.