the other voice

My second cycle began this morning.

It's hard to say why the actual experience of going in for the treatment is so difficult. My nurse, Rachelle, was cheerful and easy to talk to. She went out of her way to make me comfortable, seating me in a reclining chair, wrapping me in warm blankets. I had packed several snacks, brought a book, I had a television available. The treatment itself was relatively painless. But there's something about sitting in the chair for two hours, receiving the injection, seeing other patients in their chairs receiving their injections. It's too much time to think.

For a few hours after coming home, I had this strange feeling of being divided against myself, going about tasks around the condo, looking and moving as I normally would, and feeling as if something inside me was screaming to be heard. I guess that's exactly it. Being in the chair for two hours calls forth someone inside me that I haven't listened to much over the last month, the person who badly, badly does not want to die. Along with the side of me who really is at peace and finding unexpected joy in the midst of this situation is another side wounded by the knowledge that there is no someday after I'm all done with treatments, no more hikes up Nevada Falls, no more bike rides up Whidbey Island, no more European vacations with Karla.

I can't allow this to be the voice that determines how I live out the time God gives me, but if I ignore it, it might at some point explode with a force that tears me apart. I have to listen to it, to hurt with it. Perhaps there's a way to make peace between the two sides; I can't really say that I've done so yet.

The student is no greater than his Teacher. Right up to the moment of his arrest, Jesus had not made peace between his obedience to the path ahead of him and his resistance to it. To some extent, he resolved the tension with the words, "Not my will, but yours," but even on the cross he expresses his sense of abandonment. It may not have been until he died saying "Into your hands I commend my spirit" that the struggle finally subsided. To imagine that I would come to some point of enduring peace that would carry me through to the end may itself be the kind of evasion that would eat away at my soul in a way that honest grief would not.