Life is a Mixed Bag

The reason I haven’t been posting for a while is that my husband’s cancer grew worse — a very good way to put things — grew worse.  He has a very aggressive cancer that the doctors are calling an undifferentiated squamous cell carcinoma.  What we experience is the very rapid growth of this cancer, and its resistance to both radiation and chemo.  After nearly dying from the cancer treatments my husband had surgery to remove the cancer from his facial area.  He finally came home without a nose, and with a rather dramatic graft on his face.  We were told that they got all the cancer from that location.  We returned for more PET scans, and discovered that the cancer had spread to his lung and abdomen.   It was also showing up again in his face.  When faced with the options my husband chose to stop the treatments.  Now he is in hospice care.  He was pretty well up through New Year’s Eve, but since that date has progressively gotten weaker.  The cancer is proceeding as rapidly as expected, darn it, and he has reached the stage where he is no longer able to get out of bed without a lot of help.  My time is filled up with caring for him.  I wish I could stay in the realm of denial, but reality keeps shaking our world.  He is dying. 

On the other hand, the book I started writing in 2006 has been published, and I am getting ready to participate in a Book Festival at Seattle University on February 13th.   This work of mine has come to birth, and there is new life here, and a pull toward the future.  Endings and beginnings — such is the stuff of life. 

You can find out more about the Book Festival by going to the web site for the School of Theology and Ministry.   My book is titled All Creation Waits.  The Unfulfilled Promise of Christianity.  This blog came about because I was working on this book, and started dialoguing with it, and with others.  It is an odd feeling to be celebrating the release of this book at the same time I am saying good bye to my husband.  We have been married nearly 40 years, and I don’t like that he is dying one bit.  He has been so supportive of my work.  I am going to miss him dreadfully.  It doesn’t matter that we believe in an afterlife, and that he will be going to God.  What matters is that he is leaving me, and I already miss him, and so the tears come. 

Life is such a mixed bag of joys and sorrows, and here I am experiencing both joy and grief at the same time.  How odd, terrible and beautiful is life.