These are some hard times.
There’s no other way to say it. In the last six months, my mom’s cancer has progressed aggressively. My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. We lost our chance, probably forever, to have another child naturally.
In the last two months, my mom’s cancer has progressed to the point where she cannot tolerate any more treatment. She has been hospitalized three times and is in assisted living right now. I have flown back four times to see her. It’s a day to day, week to week situation right now.
My wife’s cancer has returned, and though it’s still early stage, we’re looking at another surgery, long term systemic treatment, and possibly chemotherapy/radiation on the horizon. We’re raising a four year old in the midst of all of this. It feels like life is hitting us all at once right now, and we’re just trying to get through every day. I feel like I am perpetually bracing myself for bad news, living in a constant state of anxiety that a sudden call could come, day or night, or an unexpected diagnosis rendered that can turn my life upside down even more than it already is. There are some dark clouds over us right now.
—
I think we all do this exercise to some extent where we imagine how we’ll react when we face tragedy or hard times. But nothing really prepares you for how you’ll actually react. I feel weak in many ways–like a double failure of not being able to be there for my mom all the time and not being able to be there for my wife and daughter when I am away. I feel stronger in other ways, strength that has surprised me. I feel like I’m at a major inflection point in my life, the biggest one by far, and that things can really go in either direction — spiraling into sorrow or rebounding into better days ahead. In a weird way, all of the self-reflecting, self-analyzing, self-exploring I feel like I’ve been doing for the past five or six years is shedding light on the paths ahead of me. It’s not that I feel confident that I’ll make the decision to choose happiness, hope, and optimism. It’s also not true that I feel the urge to go down a dark hole. Rather, it’s an awareness that those are the two paths in front of me, and it’s up to me to make that choice. Sounds easy, right? Pick the path of optimism, and be a story of redemption and inspiration. Throw yourself a parade for overcoming the tough times.
But, it’s not that simple. In fact, it’s very hard. Incredibly hard. Moreso than I ever realized. I see more clearly how hard it can be in this world to make the right choices. I think in non-tragic times, we look on, with an ignorant admiration, of stories like a basketball player who plays in his or her first game after experiencing a family loss; or redemption and comeback stories of people once astray picking themselves up and dusting themselves off to make themselves anew. The husband who loses a spouse. The parent who loses a child. A family’s economic devastation with a job loss. We want to hear about the resilience of the human spirit and shed tears of joy and inspiration when we hear stories of people marching through hell and making it the other side. But not everyone makes it through hell. I feel like I truly understand that now, that for every celebration of triumph over adversity, there is a parallel timeline, or more heartbreaking, parallel stories of people who did not make it through.
I understand with a new level of clarity now, how hard it is for the single mom to get on a bus and go to her minimum wage job after she receives a breast cancer diagnosis. How hard it is for a child to stay focused on school, opportunity, choosing right over wrong, when things at home are going crazy. The emotional strength and fortitude you need to sit through appointments, where “cancer” is thrown around like it’s nothing, and you have to stop yourself from going to the bad places. Tragedies are no longer things that just happen to other people. It’s just pure luck that it didn’t happen to you. And for that, we should be grateful every damn day of our lives, every single moment we have to be together. For not being bitter at a world that seems to just keep going, unaware of the shit-storm that you’re in the middle of. Choosing optimism is hard and it is not inevitable. It’s a knifes edge, and the inertia of the two paths in front of you is equal. You can fall on either side. It’s a matter of what is within you, and what keeps you going, that stops you from doing that. I feel like I am at a point in life where I’m facing a monumental choice on which path to choose, and that the rest of my life will be defined by how I respond in the next several months.
I feel like my life in someway is a microcosm of what’s happening in the world around us. We are in the last stages of this horrible pandemic, a year of social norms and fabrics being torn apart. I watched a zoom funeral of a family member, something I never thought I’d do. Weddings cancelled. Schools delayed. Millions and millions of families losing loved ones or not seeing loved ones. I feel like collectively as a society, we’re going to be dealing with the psychological scar of this pandemic for a generation. It feels like we’re also collectively on a knifes edge, and to choose optimism and hope requires a fortitude for us to dig down and find out who we are.
I feel like I am in the midst of a spiritual awakening. Too many things have happened over the last few weeks and months, and I don’t believe that they are coincidence. If you asked me a year ago about God, spirituality, religion, I probably would have given you some cerebral response about combining east and west and adapting a balanced and pragmatic spiritual approach to my life. Now, I believe with all my heart that God has a special love for me, and I am going through these things to give me a stronger spiritual purpose.
A few weeks ago, my brother called me and told me to come home immediately. My mom was in the hospital and she had another seizure. The doctors thought that she might have a couple days left. That morning, after having just returned the night before on a cross country flight from seeing my mom, I booked the fastest flight back home. I flew from SFO to Charlotte since it was the best non-stop flight available, and I had an intention to rent a car to drive the 100 mile trip from Charlotte to Columbia. Low and behold, when I got to Charlotte, all of the rental cars were gone. There is apparently a national shortage of rentals.
So I called a Lyft. The last Lyft ride I took as an employee of the company. I called the driver when he accepted my ride request, and I told him that it’s a long trip, I’d give him extra if he’d take me the whole way. He agreed. And when I got in the car, I just really bonded with this guy. He felt like a brother to me, like I knew him from another time, or more strongly, that he was meant to be there to pick me up. We talked about a lot of things in life, including everything I was going through, and he gave me those words: “you’re going through everything not because God doesn’t care about you, but because God has a special love for you.” God has a special love for me. It was something I needed to hear, and when he said it, it just felt like it was true. I can’t explain it. I haven’t had moments like that before, but recently, going through everything that’s happened, I am having moments like that all the time.
Another story: about two months ago, we tried an embryo transfer. My wife had just finished surgery, and we were given the clear to try for another child before she resumed systemic treatment. All of our hopes for child number 2 were on that embryo. We did the transfer, and then I went home to see my mom who was hospitalized. I spent a week with her, and then came back, expecting to find God’s miracle blessing us with a successful transfer. The story played out cleanly in my head. I went through a traumatic experience with my mom, but I’d return home with God’s blessing, and would be given the gift of life.
But that didn’t happen.
Jess and I were in Golden Gate Park, just finishing a Ferris Wheel ride with our four year old when we got the call. I was expecting to get the call when our car was paused on the top of the wheel, overlooking the city, with the joyous words “you’re pregnant!” The Ferris Wheel ride felt like a coronation waiting to happen. It was a beautiful day in San Francisco–a perfect day for a poetic divine intervention to prove to me that the world is beautiful and that the things that I want will come true because we deserve it.
Instead, the ride ended, we were sitting on the grass when the call came. I saw the heartbreak in Jess’s eyes and knew in an instant. A similar heartbreak we experienced six months earlier, when the radiologist called us on diagnosis day with the three words: “you have cancer.”
After getting the call about our embryo, we lived with that news for about a week and made plans to try again. One last time for God to hear our prayers. Until we found out a week later that Jess’s cancer had returned. Well, not actually returned, but residual/left over from the last surgery. Treatment had to be started immediately. The option to try for another child was and is off the table.
I looked for answers. Why was this happening? I still don’t really know.
But there is one thing I do think about: what if we did get the good news we were hoping for when we were at the park, and what if the cancer was found right after that? What if we had to make a terrible choice of giving up our baby? What if God knows what we’re strong enough to handle and what we cannot, and spared us from that emotional toll? It’s not a complete answer. And it doesn’t make the pain go away. But in the midst of that devastation, I still found God’s hand present.
I don’t know what the purpose of all of this is. But I do believe there is a larger purpose at play. I have been reading, praying, studying, mediating extensively, particularly on the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddhist teachings of moderation or “The Middle Way.” And I have a copy of an NLT Bible on my dresser.
I feel like I am understanding these teachings more deeply than I ever have. The notion of samskara, raga, dvesha, karma, dharma, and being. As I am experiencing anticipatory grief for my mother’s declining health and dual anxieties over my father’s ability to manage and supporting my daughter and wife through the upcoming treatments, I am learning a lot about the nature of grief and anxiety (at least form a Vendantic and Buddhist perspective). I am learning about the nature of the Self according to these philosophies. I don’t feel like I have the answers, but for the first time in my life, I feel like I have the questions to ask, the right questions that could lead me to the right answers, or at least to answers that will give me comfort and purpose. Answers that can root me in some sort of way beyond the world we’re in right now and that can sustain and change me once this winter of despair has passed.
I believe this all has a purpose. The next few weeks and months will be the toughest of my life. I know that, but I don’t know if I’m ready for it. I hope that I am. But what I do believe is that I can choose the path of optimism and hope, and not the path of darkness and despair. It won’t be easy, but I will try. For my daughter. For my wife. For my family. To honor my mom. For my duties– my swa-dharma. And my dual duties of the broader para dharma to the world at large and the specific apara dharma for my personal stage of life and responsibilities.
In the end, life is not about what happens to you. It’s about how you respond to what happens to you.
I know this now.
fiftyonemarathons 