Your Victory is My Victory.
Chemo 13 starts today! And only four days of Ick this week—I talked Dr. Butrynski into whittling it down. By Friday afternoon, Ifosfamide and Etoposide will be a thing of the past, forever.
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Many years ago, when we first moved back to Boston, I passed a homeless woman in Harvard Square. I’d gotten used to the spare changing shtick of the men, but seeing a woman shocked me a little, threw me off my guard. I wasn’t prepared to see my own kind huddled and begging, not in this country, where most of the beggars are men. Is that terribly sexist?
I gave her a dollar, or maybe five. To this day I am more generous with women homeless than with men. I guess it is sexist. But there’s a line in a Wendell Berry poem, “ so long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men.” I have felt cheated and lied to much more often by homeless men than by homeless women (and in my line of work I meet quite a few), and even though they are lying out of desperation, and certainly deserve whatever I will give them even if they might use it for the solace of drugs and alcohol instead of the solace of bed or food, I still feel better giving money to women.
It is a strange thing, to be a minister in a city church fielding some obviously made-up story from an aggressive homeless man, and to know that you are the one with most of the power (mental health, financial, turf, etc), but still to feel like he has the upper hand (size, muscle mass, passive or active threat of violence, the long history behind you both in which men have more of almost every kind of power than women) and to resent it for him very much.
Anyhow. The point was not the giving of the money to the homeless woman. It was the woman’s response. She said,
“Thank you for noticing me.”
Without any calculation or artifice. She said it spontaneously, and almost crying. Her words are etched into me as surely as my lung surgery scars. “Thank you for noticing me.” The money was not what she valued. It was the being acknowledged by another human being. I realized how many people, driven by secret guilt at their own stinginess, or fear, or judgmentalism (which all come down to the same thing), must have passed her that day pretending she didn’t exist. And it didn’t take her long to begin to think that maybe they were right. How hard it is not to collude in the reality that everyone else invents for us!
I’ve talked a lot in this blog about the blessings cancer and chemo have brought into my life. But there are a few things it’s taken away from me, and some of them I’ve been too ashamed to admit. One, that I want to confess now, is how hard it’s made me against some kinds of suffering. One is panhandlers. I’ve always had mixed feelings about panhandlers, probably because I grew up with an alcoholic who but for some timely support in qualifying for SSI Disability as well as family members who never abandoned him no matter how he behaved, probably would have ended up on the street. I see my stepfather in all those guys cadging spare change, with a piece of cardboard telling their sad story, trying to win your sympathy.
This hardness of heart, which I’m not proud of, has been there to some degree for a while, but my cancer diagnosis exacerbated it. I’d see perfectly (to my eyes) able-bodied, middle-aged white guys (or in Davis Square, young dreadlocked white guys) sitting on a wall, smoking and waiting for me to turf over some money to them, and I began to want to holler at them, “What’s YOUR problem? It’s not like you have CANCER.”
If my diagnosis has made me harder toward spare changers, it has made me softer toward other people with cancer, and especially toward people with other kinds of illnesses, chronic illnesses, people with MS or diabetes or Parkinson’s—people for whom the pain or worry or altered abilities will not go away when surgery or chemo or radiation is over, but who will wake up every day for the rest of their lives wondering what they will or won’t be able to do that day because of their diagnosis.
What I really wish is that my own diagnosis would make me more compassionate toward EVERYBODY who suffers anything. Regardless of whether or not I think their suffering is worthy, or self-inflicted, or whatnot. There are plenty of people who might think I got cancer because of stress, or workaholism, or unrelinquished anger, or unfinished emotional business, and who might say I need to get up off my spiritual ass and get to work.
I want to be like Sara, the woman who cleans our house—or shall I say, the woman who ministers to my family through her house-cleaning chaplaincy, and is worth her value in marriage counseling by taking away 95% of Peter’s and my reasons for fighting.
Sara is a woman of tremendously profound and durable faith. She’s an Assemblies of God Christian, and full of hymns and love, which pour out of her all over the parsonage when she’s here, and linger in the air when she’s gone.
She has been praying for me fiercely since I was first diagnosed. Sometimes she leaves me little post-its with her faithful encouragement on them. Here is one she left me—it sits above my desk, next to a picture Carmen drew of what I will look like when my hair comes back in (this is from her Pilot Precise V5 period):
Months ago, Sara said something to me that I haven’t forgotten. She stands 4 inches shorter than me, I think, but is such a powerhouse that I felt like she was eye to eye with me when she took my shoulders and said this, “Molly, your victory is my victory.”
That is one of the deepest and most mysterious Christian truths, I think. It is the heart of communion, in which the ego-walls between us human beings collapse and we are revealed as all belonging to the same body. It is the heart of baptism, where the ego-walls between us and God collapse, we acknowledge our status as children of God, and we share in Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection—we follow God where no human has gone before.
It is the Christmas story, where Jesus comes down from heaven and takes on human form, game for whatever may come. It is the Easter story, where ‘made like Him, like Him we rise’ from the dead as the old hymn goes, and we learn to laugh at Death forever.
This might all sound like religious gobbledygook, but if you’ve ever had a Moment during your nephew’s baptism or while taking communion after a long absence from church, if you’ve ever let your guard slip during Christmas Eve or sunrise service and suddenly felt a lump your throat, you know that what I’m talking about is as real as anything.
Your victory is my victory. There is no “you” and “me” and “God” anymore, all tidy and separate, there’s no my cancer and her homelessness and God’s cool remoteness and your ability to sit there at work or at home and read these blog entries. There’s just all of us together, staggering toward victory.
Another thing I’m not proud of is the terrible Judgy Judger that lives inside of me. One kind of people I judge the most, interesting considering my hardness of heart against (some of) the homeless folks I meet, is people who spend their gold on what I deem to be silly or superficial or downright immoral, considering there is so much suffering and want in the world.
So Judgy Judger reared her head when I was in the locker room at the gym the other day. My gym in Medford is full of mostly young, mostly attractive, mostly white people. On this day, there were two young women getting dressed after their workout. I overheard one of them saying to her friend, “The facial cleanser was $150 but she gave it to me for only $70! Can you believe it? How do you like my new amazing blue headphones? Do you like them? Hey, do you want to go to Vegas in March? Dave wants us to go. I don’t know how I’m going to afford it but I’m going to go.” Maybe if you didn’t buy $150 facial cleanser, I thought…
I mostly can’t believe we live in a world where $150 or even $70 facial cleanser exists. Especially having just heard on the radio, moments before overhearing that conversation, that Haiti only received 2% of the foreign aid it was promised after the earthquake.
Anyhow, I was already kind of burning at their conversation, and walked over closer to the women so I could paint on my eyebrows in front of the mirror. Neither one even glanced at me, though the space was small and I was hard to ignore.
Maybe their ignoring was the result of long practice, a way of allowing strangers to have their privacy in a busy locker room. But I couldn’t help but feel, already fuming, that their act of ignoring me was intentional. Not an eye flicker, not a pause. “Don’t notice the bald woman without eyebrows. Whatever you do, DON’T SEE HER. If you notice her, she’s real. And if she’s real, then we live in a world where thin healthy young white women get cancer, and then I might get cancer. So just don’t acknowledge her, and it won’t be real.”
As I walked away, I noticed that one of them was wearing a Dana Farber marathon team tee shirt. I don’t know what that meant. It seemed ironic to me at the time. But then, you never really know what people are about.
I thought of all this. And I remembered the homeless woman from Harvard Square, from years ago, and how many people had passed her by before I, probably vulnerable to the Holy Spirit for a split second, stopped and gave her a dollar. And how grateful she was not for the dollar, but for the acknowledgment by one human being of another.
And I said a silent prayer for her, wherever she is.
My suffering is your suffering.
And my victory is your victory.
I give to just about every homeless person I pass now. I do it because I noticed, fairly recently (why did it take so long, when as a city dweller I pass homeless people just about every day? Because I, too, was stuffing and hiding and afraid, just like so many other folks), that when I didn’t give, I felt terrible after passing the person by. And I began to notice that when I did give, I never, ever felt that I had done the wrong thing.
I might have mixed feelings, giving cash, I might wonder if they would use my buck to do themselves further harm, but I wouldn’t have the sick, ashamed feeling (or the self-righteous feeling that is usually only masking shame) I almost always had for a few fleeting seconds when I ignored them. So, you might say I give for my own sake, my own well-being. But God is sneaky that way. She’ll use lots of tactics, like enlightened self-interest, to get us to be more human with one another, to love as we want to be loved.
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Chemo VIPs this week:
Tio Bret, who is in town from sunny California (proof of love: that so many people among our family and friends are willing to come HERE from California during months like November and January), and wrestling Rafe and telling stories on demand to Carmen, and making piles of tortilla espanola and papas bravas and albondigas
Chemo drivers extraordinaire Toni, Chelsea, George, Kathy T and Peter
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