Frailty

I saw a friend yesterday. My friend is terminally ill. (I needed to say that out loud.) We have known this for some time. They have not given her a time frame or a “time-stamp” as she calls it, but we know that she will get progressively worse. There is much unknown in the timing. At some point, when she is sick enough, she will be put on a list for an organ transplant which she may or may not receive. This standard of “sick enough” is based on some objective measurement of counts having to do with blood cells and function and enzymes, all of which sounds like total gobbledygook to me because all I know is that my friend is very sick.

My Wedding Day: Mom, Me, Kimberly

She is a close friend, and she has been there for all my major milestones. We share our recovery from drugs and alcohol, blessed freedom. She introduced me to my husband and raved at me like a lunatic about what a wonderful guy he is and I better not let him get away. She did my make-up at my wedding and has seen us have our two boys. She is my go-to person when I feel like a lunatic, and she pulls me back from the cliff of self.

She has good days, and she has bad days. There are the days when we talk about the heavy things, and there are the days when we don’t go there. But it’s always there, underneath, lurking, that heavy dark thing that you can’t wish away.

 On one of her better days, we talked about denial. It went something like this:

Her: “I know I’m in denial. I’m in denial and it’s just sick what my brain is doing. It’s like I look in the mirror, and I’ve lost all this weight, and I feel good, and I look pretty good, and I just have these flying thoughts that maybe the doctors are totally wrong, maybe it disappeared, maybe the illness is still out there somewhere and not really right here attacking my body like they say it is.”

Me: “Yeah but aren’t we all in denial? I mean, about everything bad really? It’s like, you’re sick, so it’s in your face where you can’t avoid it, but the truth is that I could still die before you do. We have no way of knowing, really. We’re all dying, and we’re all living like we’re not because we don’t know how to do it any other way. We can’t possibly live every moment in some impossible state of preparedness for that which you can’t prepare for. So you’re not really strange in that.”

I live in denial about my own death sure, but in that conversation I realized that I live in denial about her death too. The hard thing about seeing her yesterday, was that for the first time, she looked sick to me. Her eyes looked tired, her skin a pale, the whites of her eyes with traces of yellow, her face wearing the grimace of pain. Her walk was slow and tender, and she was fragile in a way that I have never seen her before.

It is ever-so-startling when these moments of reality come crashing in on our denial, isn’t it? In a moment, sickness and death became a present reality to me instead of something from which I could continue to hide from, safe up on my intellectual mountaintop.

But God’s light shines into the darkness. Through this illness with which she suffers, we have been brought to a new point of friendship, one where pretenses are dropped and masks are flimsy at best. The important things now take precedence, and everything else is non-essential. There is now a simple love between us which is not fogged up by veils of character defects, attitudes, shortcomings, and differences. I guess reality is much more clear that way.

I know, I believe, and I have seen how God uses even the ultimate weapons of evil – sickness and death – to draw us closer to Him. As my favorite quote from Corrie Ten Boom goes, “God’s light shines the brightest in the darkness.” She wrote that in reflection of the presence of God with her while she suffered in a Nazi camp during WWII.

So there is hope and blessings in this part of our journey together too. Just in a different way, maybe in a way that is more real and more spiritual. Sometimes things are just heavy and sad, and there are no clichés, no memory verses, and no one-liners to take that away. 

We spend almost all of our time on earth trying to pretend away the heavy sadness, so when it’s really in our face, I think it’s okay to just call it heavy and sad. I know that so many of us are now, or have been, in this heavy and sad place with the people we love dearly.

All over scripture we learn that we will indeed suffer in this broken world, but that God will comfort, and in turn we will comfort each other by our experience. The promise of suffering and comfort are inseparable, we cannot share in the one without sharing in the other. We share in both the light and the dark. 

“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. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.” 2 Corinthians 1:3-5

I have found comfort in knowing that I can throw my big questions up to a bigger God. O God, why?  And I trust Him, even though He doesn’t answer me with the imparted wisdom which I so desire. Because I either trust Him or don’t, questions and all. And I don’t believe He requires me to be without questions. I guess if He does, I’m in big trouble.

What I do know, is that suffering is par for the course in a life full of the human condition, the condition which points all the more clearly to the need for the Savior. When it is darker, He is lighter. When I am frail, He is love.

So the frailty of my friend brings forth my frailty, but praise be to God who gives us the perspective to remain teachable and open to blessings even as we suffer and share in the suffering of others. He is the great comforter.

April 28, 2010
My first son is born and meets Kimberly.

 My thoughts today are simple and a bit sad: pray for my friend, won’t you?  Pray for her physical pain and her mental pain. Pray that she has peace within her relationships and with God.