This afternoon I watched a heart-wrenching bio on Farrah Fawcett. Her struggle with cancer has been unimaginably tough, and the story was left unresolved. She's very sick. But she's alive. There's a thread of human triumph, a beautiful frail woman railing against a battle we've all seen. It's hard to reach my age (which isn't that old) without watching a friend or two fight that battle. Cancer is just way too common.
My friend is Pat. Two bouts with cancer while raising her teenage daughter alone. A scrappy lady, but the second cancer was pretty invasive and she chose not to fight it. Her daughter was nearing graduation and she thought she could hang on for her, at least through that milestone. So she just went on with her life. She worked as long as she could, then she went home. Then hospice came to her house.
There came a time when hospice wasn't enough. She needed personal assistance, people to help her out with everyday things. My church took on the job, taking turns coming to sit with her, helping to fix meals, general house work, that sort of thing. It got hard, though. The best of intentions get interrupted by peoples' own personal lives, and it grew harder and harder to put together a schedule of people to come through the week. You could see it was wearing on her, not knowing how she was going to get the help she needed. Her daughter, of course, was a big help, but she was still overwhelmed and needed the relief.
At the time our state had a program that would provide a personal assistant if your medical situation required that level of care. Not a medical person, just a general helper. Pat qualified for one. Really, it was what we were doing as a church, only for pay.
Since I was on the list of people who were coming over, she asked me if I wanted to do that job. It seemed a little weird, taking pay for something I wanted to do anyway, but you could see she really needed the peace of mind of just knowing somebody would be coming in because it was their job—she needed to be able to quit asking from week to week. She needed to be able to just count on somebody.
I was teaching ballet at the time and my summer schedule was pretty light, so I went to work for the state. I figured her peace of mind was probably more important right then than whatever eternal reward I was deluded enough to think I deserved—so I took the money and provided the peace of mind.
I discovered Pat had the same kind of humor I had. Her daughter had it too. We laughed a lot that summer. She and I became even better friends, and I got to know her daughter on a new level. It really was a heartwarming experience, those first few weeks. Her daughter and I fixed meals. I showed this teen the few tricks I knew about cooking, and she showed me some things I'd never heard of.
I'll never forget one day Pat decided she wanted soup. I knew she liked her soup from a can, the condensed kind, only she liked it with only half the water the instructions call for. So I started the soup to heating, went into the living room where she lived now in her hospital bed, and she asked if I would go ahead and butter the crackers. Butter the crackers!? I looked quizzically around at Pat and her daughter, and they soon realized I'd never heard of buttered soda crackers. They got a good laugh at my expense, which was okay because I like to laugh at myself anyhow. Her daughter went with me to the kitchen to show me what buttered crackers were. Together we chuckled and buttered enough soda crackers to satisfy both of them for the meal. I got to try some. They're not too bad, actually.
The time came when she was too weak to eat. The doctor had promised that adequate pain management would be the only treatment she would receive, as per her own wishes, but she would certainly get that. So she eventually just got too tired from the medicine to eat much. And the doctor said the food wasn't helping her body much anyway, any more.
One day we were eating lunch, and I remember watching her slowly raise her cracker to her mouth. So slowly. She got about three-fourths of the way there, stopped, and dropped her hand. Tried again. Halfway there. Stopped. Dropped her hand. Started again. Gave up. I went over and sat on her bed.
“Pat, do you want to eat?” She nodded slowly. I fed her. It may not have been doing her much good, but she wanted the food and she was fighting for it, and I thought she ought to have it as long as she wanted it and could swallow it. We went on like that for a while. Pat was so sick.
I had planned a trip east to visit a friend in upstate New York, and the time drew near. I wanted to postpone. I wanted to be there as long as she needed help, and really, inside, I wanted to be there for all the life she had. They assured me, though, that she would be fine, that her daughter had learned all she needed to know to take over for awhile, and I should go ahead and go.
The timetable the doctor gave seemed to indicate I had enough time to go for a few days, get back and say goodbye, so I took the chance. I packed my car and drove east. I drove all day and all night and into the next day. A friend was traveling with me, and she took a turn driving, but I was at the wheel when day broke and we got to the New York state line.
That's pretty country, just below the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. My emotions were way too close to the surface, and I remember as I drove into the rolling hills it was like there was healing in them, and I drank in their gentle beauty. I arrived at my friend's house, a good friend who also has the gift to heal, and the days were gentle and sweet. We talked and cooked and hiked and shopped. There came a time when it seemed enough healing had been done, and the hills were just hills again. And then the call came that Pat had passed on. So I got in my car and drove back, arriving with hours to spare. I'd promised to dance a victory dance at her funeral, and I did.
* * *
Personally, I think cancer is a horrendous thing. It's an enemy invasion of nature, not a natural process. It's a result of the fall of man, when nature went horribly awry and became vulnerable to such insidious killers. I resent it when people say it was God's plan. I believe He uses it to make His plans happen, but the fall of creation, which followed the fall of man, is what paved the way for it. And personally, I'd like to see it gone. And also personally, I'm glad we've got chemo and radiation, but I pray for the day when there's a better cure and people remember those treatments the same way they remember leeches and blood-letting.
* * *
Remember the fall of man? It's something little kids hear about in Sunday school. I remember it as a faraway, dreamy myth-like story. Something about the devil in the garden, the woman got deceived and deceived the man. God cursed men. God cursed women. God cursed the devil.
It happened at the dawn of human history, a stark tragedy, a man and woman who listened to a lie, made a horrid choice and changed everything. Thrust into exile, they lost everything they'd ever known and were forced to eek out a life in a fight with a newly fallen, weed-infested earth.
I remember memorizing the curse on Satan. We had to learn it because it was the first mention of Jesus.
“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
In the middle of this tragedy, this horrible thing, a promise. Someday, somehow, somebody down the line is going to make it right. The snake will get his. He might put a bruise on the hero, but he'll get a crushed head out of it.
And all the while I'd never really noticed the whole curse, the first part, which pertains to women in general.
“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman....” I finally did notice a few years ago, that this whole phrase comes before, and is separate from, the phrase about Jesus. It's a whole separate thing about the serpent and the woman herself. And I thought, first of all, about how women, almost universally, seem to hate snakes. Yup. No doubt. Most people aren't crazy about 'em. Indiana Jones hates 'em. Lotta men do. But even though you'll occasionally come across the rare woman who will tolerate or even like them, for the most part, women just hate snakes.
Then I eventually read a little bit deeper. “....enmity between thee and the woman...” And I suppose you've probably noticed that, through history, women have generally gotten some disgraceful treatment. I think it comes down to that enmity thing. Satan has it in for women in particular. Yeah, I know he has it in for everybody, but there's that verse that says he's going to be a particular enemy of the woman, and in history, I'd say that one's played out pretty much down the line, just like God said it would. And He DID say it. Anytime I've ever said anything about this phrase in the Bible, I've just gotten strange looks, but, I mean, it's a whole thing separate from the Jesus prophecy, and it's about SOMETHING, and it's there for a REASON.
So somehow today I was thinking about that whole curse on nature, curse on the man, curse on the woman, and curse on Satan. Bad day, that one was, with all the curses. It's got to rank up there as one of the worst days in the history of the world. And something else occurred to me, for the first time. Enmity goes both ways.
I think there's something about the way you call a prayer meeting and the women of the church turn up like a small army, ready to do business. You go into any church on any given Wednesday night and you'll probably see ranks of blue-haired ladies, dotted with a sprinkling of men. They're there, and they're ready to pray. And I think that's got to be a scary thing if you're Satan and your time is short.
There's this button I've seen going around on Facebook. You might have seen it. It's a little saying that goes like this: Be the kind of woman that when you wake up in the morning and put your feet on the floor, the devil says, “Oh, crap!”
Women as a gender have been beaten down, told we're nothing, medicated, lulled to sleep by a menial-task only policy, been glass ceilinged, been lied to, been cheated, been cheated on....I could break into a country song right here, but I won't. But even with all that, there's a dirty little secret that Satan doesn't want us to know: we're scary. We tend to be warriors and we tend to give birth to warriors. We're scary. Because enmity goes two ways.
Walter Wink said that history belongs to the people who pray for it. Anybody gets to pray, male or female. Just maybe the women tend to jump on the assignment faster, realizing that here's power that nobody can take from you.
* * *
So I find myself praying again about cancer today. I pray that a better cure for cancer will be found. I pray for that day when the chemo and the radiation will go the way of blood-letting and leeches, making way for new and healthier cures. I pray for people like Farrah who fight and are not willing to die, and for people like my friend Pat who weary of the battle and go gently into that good day. I pray for the day when creation is returned to the way it was supposed to be, an order of things that's almost lost to our race memory, but it was there, nonetheless.
I pray for my family and my church, for my friends, for my kids' school, for our nation and our leaders, and I pray like it matters, because it does, and because I can, and because when I do, I'm scary.
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