Season of Blessing (37 page)
The cough
that Sylvia developed in September was another clue that the chemotherapy wasn't working to stop the cancer. When the time came for her next round of scans, her fears were confirmed. The cancer had spread to her lungs.
The doctor changed the chemo once again.
Sylvia hardly noticed when Harry quit his job at the hospital. Suddenly he was with her every moment of every day, by her side when she retched into the toilet, helping her walk through the house when she was too weak to do so on her own. Every ounce of Sylvia's energy went into her survival. There was none left for conversation or thoughts of despair or worry of any kind. She just concentrated on getting through one moment at a time.
Soon her breathing got shallow and raspy, her fever spiked, and she lay for hours without the energy to open her eyes. She had a vague awareness of Harry bustling around her, putting cold compresses on her head and neck and arms and chestâ¦
Harry's frantic voice into the phoneâ¦neighbors touching her and talking to herâ¦
Limp as the doll that Sarah used to carry around as a child, she felt groping hands, stethoscopes, an IV going into her arm.
Then they rolled her into an ambulance. Harry held her hand and prayed over her for the long, jostling ride.
Sometime later, Harry sat helplessly in her hospital room, listening to her breathe beneath the oxygen mask. Urgently, he searched his Bible for some word from God, some sign that he was going to pull her out of this and heal her. It was God's way, he told himself frantically. Didn't he like making things look grim, so that it was clear a miracle had been done? Wasn't that what he'd done when Jonathan and his armor bearer had over-taken the Philistine army? God had thrust confusion into the Philistines' hearts, and they had killed each other. And when God was raising an army with Gideon as the leader, hadn't he sent everyone but three hundred men home, just to show the world that they hadn't done the work, but God had?
If cancer was their enemyâand it most definitely wasâthen maybe God was letting it look as grim as it could, so that he could do his miracle.
So Harry searched the Psalms for some word from God that he would deliver her, some sign that he would not make her suffer any longer, some indication that she would be restored.
But he found none.
When the doctor came by the room, Harry jumped to his feet and confronted him. “She's dying, isn't she?”
The expression in Dr. Thibodeaux's eyes gave him no hope. “She's very sick.”
Harry wanted to put his fist through the man's face, grab him by the collar and tell him to get out of here and find a cure. He tried to keep his voice steady. “You've got to do everything you can to keep her alive. If you've heard of any kind of treatment that might work, any kind of clinical trials, I want to know about them. Alternative treatments. Experimental drugs. Anything.”
“I've been looking, Harry, just as you have. But she's very, very ill, and this is an aggressive cancer that we haven't been able to stop. It's growing and spreading too fast.”
Harry's lips compressed tightly across his teeth. “She can't die. Do you understand me? My wife cannot die. Not yet.” But even as he said the words, he knew that the matter was out of the doctor's control. He might as well be waving his fist at God.
“We'll do everything we can for her, Harry. You have my word.”
There was nothing more that Harry could demand of him. It was too late for medicine and science to work in Sylvia's body. It was going to take a true miracle. Only God could heal her now.
But for the first time, Harry had to face the fact that God might choose not to.
From the depths
of fevered unconsciousness, Sylvia felt as if she floated at the bottom of a warm ocean. There was no pain there, no drugs, no time ticking awayâ¦
A bright light shone through the opaque depths, and she swam toward it, but as hard as she swam, she got no closer to the light. It wasn't time.
Still, that light shone like an escape hatch through which she would soon passâ¦
And for the first time, there was no dread. Beyond that light her Father watched and waitedâ¦
Home beckonedâ¦
She was not forsaken, but anticipated.
She was not abandoned, but summoned.
Soon
, a voice seemed to say from that light,
but not yet. There's more for you to do
.
So she stopped swimming and floated there, limp and docile, as she began to rise to the top.
When they got the fever down and gave Sylvia a transfusion to get her blood count back up, she began to return to full consciousness. “How in the world did I wind up here?” she asked Harry.
Harry got onto her hospital bed and lay beside her, stroking her face. He'd spent the last two nights sleeping on the couch in her room, and fatigue had crept over him like a life-eating fungus. “An ambulance brought you.” His eyes misted over. “I thought I'd lost you.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Yeah, that bad.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “Harry, I'm going to die.”
The statement surprised him, and he closed his eyes and shook his head. “Don't say that,” he whispered. “Please don't say that.”
She touched his face, stroked her fingers across the stubble. “I have to, Harry. You know it's true.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his lips together.
“Honey, it's okay,” she whispered. “Don't cry.”
This was all wrong, he told himself. He was supposed to be telling
her
not to cry. She was the one who hurtâ¦
He steeled himself and forced his eyes open. “I'm supposed to be telling you that.”
“But why? You're the one who'll be left when I go. The greater pain in this is yours. I'll just be going home.” A tear rolled across her nose, and he wiped it away.
“Remember the night after we met with the surgeon, and we talked about the elders laying hands on me? Remember how we said that whatever happened, we would know that God had heard our prayers, and had chosen to answer according to his will?”
Had he really said that? Had he meant it? Had he even known what he was talking about? It had been easy then, at the beginning of this, when she wasn't so ill and there was so much hope. But now⦓Why is this his will?” he whispered. “It seems so hard.”
She kissed his wet cheek. “It's not hard, Harry. Remember how you told me that, whatever happens, we know that God loves me even more than you do?”
He nodded.
“He does, you know. He's there making a place for meâ¦waiting for meâ¦He loves me, and he loves you. And I'll bet he's weeping with us. Hating that our hearts are broken. Hating that we can't see the big picture that he can see. But he loves us, Harry, and we can't doubt that.”
“So what do we do?” His voice was rising in pitchâ¦he wasn't going to be able to hold strong for her. He felt like a brokenhearted child who'd just learned the meaning of death. “How do we handle this?”
“Medically, we keep fighting. Spiritually, we start accepting.”
Harry let out a shaky breath. “I thought I could do that. But now I wonder how that's even possible.”
Sylvia's eyes twinkled as her dry lips stretched into a smile. “When I take the chemo, I sing praises. It gets me through the fear and the sick feelings and the dread. It keeps me focused. So that's what I think we should do, Harry. I think we should sing.”
No, not that
. He didn't have a song in his heart. It was too heavy to work up a tune⦓I can't, Sylvia. I can't sing right now.”
“Yes, you can,” she whispered. “Come onâ¦sing with me.”
He sighed. “I'm tired, Sylvia.”
She stroked his thinning gray hair. “I know you are. You can rest in a minute. After you've sung one chorus with me.”
He knew she wouldn't relent, so reluctantly he said, “All right. Pick a song.”
He had hoped she'd, at least, pick a slow oneâ¦one that reflected the sorrow in his heart. But she didn't. Instead, she chose the upbeat “Shout to the Lord,” and started to sing softly, coughing intermittently as they went. He joined in weakly, trying to mean it, trying to make his mind focus on the Creator of the universe who could have healed Sylvia but hadn't.
By the end of the song, her eyes smiled with a serenity that he wished he had. But he feared he'd never know the feeling of peace again.
David and Brenda came to the hospital as soon as they heard that Sylvia had emerged from the fog of fever.
Brenda held David's hand as they made their way down the hall to her room. She glanced at his face, and saw in his misty eyes that he, too, was struck with the memory of their child lying so close to death in this very building.
They reached Sylvia's door. “Let me peek in and see if it's a good time,” she whispered, and David stood back, waiting. “I don't want to disturb her if she's sleeping.”
She cracked the door open and saw that the drapes were open. Sunshine streamed into the room, and she saw Harry sitting on the couch and looking toward the bed.
Instead of the sick silence of machines, she heard a song. Sylvia sang quietlyâ¦in her thin, raspy, breathless voice. “When Christ's sweet face I seeâ¦the suffering shall flee⦔
Brenda caught her breath and stepped back. She put her hand over her heart and turned back to David. “She's singing!” she whispered.
David took a step toward the door, and listened.
“My trials will be worthwhileâ¦when His face I see.”
Brenda stepped inside, and Sylvia began to laugh at the sight of her.
David stood outside the door, unable to follow just yet. He stepped to the side and leaned against the wall, trying to contain himself.
How could Sylvia sing?
Joseph had been like that, too. As he'd grown closer to death, he'd grown closer to his God, and what seemed like passing into the end had only been a beginning to him. It was that way for Sylvia, too. He couldn't fathom how she could sing about cancer in her breast and bones and liver and lungs being worth it allâ¦It was something he couldn't get planted in his mind.
But the truth of it was growing clearer every day. If there was ever a time in life when spiritual things were clear and the mind and heart were at their peak, he supposed it was when a person was about to die. He wondered how he would face it. He knew there wouldn't be a song in his heart. There would probably be anger and bitterness, helplessness and despair.
Unfamiliar tears trailed down his face, and he looked from side to side, then quickly wiped them away before anyone could see.
Then drawing in a deep breath, he made himself go into the room.
Brenda stood beside the bed, speaking to Sylvia in a soft voice. “Harry was your knight in shining armor,” she said. “When you were so sick, you should have seen him spring into action. We were all there, trying to help him⦔
Sylvia saw David entering the room. “Oh, David,” she whispered, and reached out for his hand. “What a joy to see you!”
Again he found that it was too hard for him to speak, so he only held her hand with both of his and tried to smile.
She looked tiny in the hospital bed, with an oxygen mask that should have been over her mouth but now hung under her chin, an IV running out of her arm, and wires and monitors running from her body to machines around her bed.
He couldn't escape the certainty that Sylvia was dying, and there was nothing that medicine or technology could do about it.
For the second time in his life he wished he believed in prayer.