After You Read

You have just read He Leads Us to His Death.

At the end of the last chapter, Darrell and I drove away from the pathology appointment knowing the surgeons had not gotten all the cancer. “This is not our only reality or truth, hon,” he told me.

I wanted to believe him. I also wanted to make one particular reality untrue. I wanted the cancer gone.

By Christmas, Darrell was already behaving as though it might be his last. I could not bear that possibility. He spent money we couldn't afford. I tried to starve the cancer by replacing our beloved Christmas biscuits with almond-flour hockey pucks. We were looking at the same reality and living inside it differently. Neither of us knew what would happen next.

Trying to Save Him

I fought for Darrell with everything I knew. I researched cancer cells and treatment protocols. My prayers became fierce. I commanded his body to fight. I had seen impossible things happen before: my lupus had gone into remission. Darrell had recovered after his spinal cord injury. Jeffrey had accomplished things we had once been told might never be possible. Our marriage had survived a collapse I once thought might destroy it. I had reasons to believe impossible things sometimes happened, and if ever I needed another impossible thing, it was now.

The oncologist gave us hope. I brought him my research. We waited for an expensive new drug to arrive. Then Darrell developed terrible pain beneath his ribs and into his shoulder. I researched the nerves in that area and suggested a chiropractor. The chiropractor took one look at an X-ray and wouldn't touch him. There was cancer in Darrell's cervical spine.

February and March became a blur of pain, morphine, doctors, scans, treatments, friends and family. Darrell kept receiving people. He laughed with them, prayed with them and sang with them. When his brothers visited, he cried afterward because he had seen how much they loved him.

But he was suffering. His body was disappearing in front of us. He looked at himself in the mirror one day and said what neither of us could deny: he looked terrible. He was embarrassed by what people saw. He was in excruciating pain. Once, when he caught the expression on my face, he said, “Stop looking at me like I am dead already.”

He wasn't.

Still Here

There was so much Darrell still wanted. He wondered what our new grandson Luca would be like. Would he be musical? Athletic? Creative? Funny and quirky like his grandfather? He wept over Sarah and wanted more time with her. Jeffrey wondered how he would live without the man who had quietly become his safety net. Brian wrestled with questions about God that had no easy answer.

Darrell wanted to live. He also seemed increasingly able to be present to the life he still had. He played games with friends even when he knew he would pay for it in pain later. He sang through radiation treatments. He raised his hands in a room full of exhausted cancer patients and announced, “Victory!” I remember worrying about the other people in that room. Their experience might not feel victorious at all.

That was Darrell, though. He wasn't trying to construct a philosophy of dying for anyone else. He was living his own life in the way he knew how. For a few weeks, the radiation relieved his pain. He began walking through the neighborhood again. Then the relief ended.

When Doing Could Not Do Enough

The cancer spread through Darrell's abdomen. The scans showed tumors filling his belly. The treatment I had originally brought to the oncologist was finally started, but by then the cancer load was much greater. My mind filled with regret. Had we missed our chance? Had I failed to advocate hard enough? Had someone failed to listen? Was there something else I should have known, found, demanded?

Then, at a follow-up appointment, Darrell asked his surgeon for a prognosis. She answered him: “This is what is going to take you from this world.” She didn't know whether that meant this year or five years from then. It was the first prognosis anyone had given us.

I still prayed for a miracle. But the cancer continued taking things from Darrell. His body began filling with fluid. I knew enough from my late-night research to understand what that could mean, though I said nothing to him. Eventually the palliative care team came. We had turned them away before. This time, we listened.

They used words we had spent months trying not to hear: hospice, imminent, death. They told us plainly that Darrell's treatment was no longer intended to cure him. We decided our children needed to hear the truth too.

About Life

The next day our children came to Darrell's hospital room. At first they were themselves—talking, teasing, telling stories. Then the palliative care doctor and nurse entered, and the room changed. They told our children that their father was dying.

Sarah reacted first. Darrell said he wanted to go back to our home in the mountains one last time, and she blurted, “So you're just going to die in the mountains?” After the medical team left, Darrell gathered the children around him.

“We are not going to make this about death. Come on guys, we are going to make this about life.”

He didn't tell them the doctors were wrong. He didn't promise them he would survive. He told them how much he had loved his life. He talked about their adventures together and what he had learned from his failures as well as his victories. He told them to live. Then he told them what he most wanted to leave them: joy.

One by one, our children told their father what he meant to them while he was still there to hear it. I watched Darrell lead our children toward his death by calling their attention to the life that was still in the room.

I Am Going to Miss You

Knowing Darrell was dying did not make me stop trying to save him. One day he could get out of the bath by himself; the next day I had to lift him. One day he could manage the stairs; the next he couldn't. I kept trying to feed him until one day I asked why he was never hungry. He told me he wasn't, but he didn't want to disappoint me.

Something in me heard him. Cancer had reduced his stomach until he could barely eat. My need to do something was asking something more of the man I was trying to help, so I backed off.

I still imagined miracles. I moved them around in my mind until I found one that could survive even death. Perhaps Darrell could die, go to Heaven and come back. We made a half-serious pact about it. He would ask for a heavenly passport. I would be waiting. I wasn't ready to stop imagining a way for him to come back to me.

Less than three weeks before he died, Darrell was listening to “I Can Only Imagine” with tears streaming down his face. I asked if he was afraid. He shook his head. After a while, he asked what I was thinking.

“I am thinking I am going to miss you.”

He pulled me toward him. I was careful not to touch his torso because he hurt so badly. I hovered over him, cheek to cheek, and sobbed. I could not change what was coming. For that moment, I could be there with him inside it.

Making Room

We had been staying with our friends Bill and Nancy because Darrell needed to remain near his treatments. As his condition worsened, I began looking for temporary housing. I couldn't ask my friends to take on what might happen next.

When Bill and Nancy discovered what I was doing, they stopped me in their kitchen. I finally said the words: What if Darrell died there? Bill told me that if Darrell died in their home, it would be their great honor to have us there.

They didn't tell me Darrell wasn't going to die. They made room for us.

A few weeks later, we celebrated Jeffrey's birthday. Darrell was too weak to come downstairs, so we moved the party. Food, family, laughter and our granddaughter Evangeline's determination to organize everyone came upstairs. Darrell lay in his recliner listening to all of it.

After everyone left, he began talking about what he had heard: the laughter, the joy, the love moving between our children. He called them “echoes of love.” He told me to encourage them to make the effort to be together. He talked about each of them—what he saw in Brian, Jeffrey, Sarah, Chase and Margarita. Then he talked about me. And eventually he talked about grace.

He said there had been a time when he had looked too hard into the mirror at himself. There hadn't been enough space in his head. He had thought everything had to conform to his own image. Now he understood something differently. There was so much to hear if he could make space.

What Is Still in the Room?

Darrell was dying. Nothing in this chapter makes that less true. His joy did not make the cancer less terrible. His faith did not make his pain less real. His desire to make the remaining time about life did not mean he wanted to die. He grieved what he would miss. He suffered. He wanted more time. And I kept trying to save him long after part of me understood that I might not be able to.

Suffering was taking from both of us things we could no longer control. I don't want to tell you that suffering does this for a reason or that relinquishing control reliably produces wisdom. I don't know that. But I can see what happened to us. As there became less we could control, there was sometimes more room simply to be present to what was still there: a husband and wife, children, friends willing to open their home even to death, a birthday carried upstairs, laughter coming through a bedroom door.

The terrible thing was true. It was not the only thing in the room.

Looking back, I can see that I was often held inside Darrell's capacity—and inside the capacity of people who loved us—before I could hold all of this myself. Sometimes, before we can hold more ourselves, we are held inside someone else's capacity.

If grief is filling the whole room today, you might simply notice:

What is still here?

You don't have to make what hurts less true to notice what else is true.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

What is still here?