Tonight I’m thinking of my friend Doug, fighting cancer, tumors like conspiring thugs filling his brain and lungs. Ten months of undetected growth. And he so weak when he has been so strong. Mike and I saw him mere months ago, sitting casually in his front room in the evening, the warm glow of the lamp casting soft shadows. The next morning Mike and I would set off alone across the desert to come to Oklahoma. After a long day of packing, I felt overwhelmed and scared, mourning the change, filled with a sadness that I felt no confidence would be filled by the strangeness of our new life. Doug sat across from us in an overstuffed chair, his legs crossed, offering Swiss chocolate for consolation. We talked of the books we’d been reading, and about our families. To the best of my recollection, he told us this story he’d learned about his great-great grandmother who journeyed to Montana in a covered wagon in the dead of winter. When her husband left to get supplies, she lived for weeks with her two small children and a stray Indian boy in their tired and abused covered wagon. One night a storm shook their wagon until most of it had blown away. Left with no other choice, she bundled her children as best she could and they walked through the blinding insanity in search of her uncle’s dug-out, which she knew to be some miles away. The Indian boy took the hand of the two-year old and they forged ahead while she struggled behind with the baby. The small boy and her toddler arrived miraculously at the crude dug-out and a group of men came for and found her lying in the snow. Listening to Doug talk, I felt calmed. I felt like maybe I could be a strong woman who could face my own small challenges. Doug always had a way of doing that. Offering these stories that were gifts to me, making room for hope in the cloudy space of my mind. I mourn for him tonight and for his pain.
This summer our neighbors gave my boys and me several black swallow-tail caterpillars. We watched their green and black mouths devour bunches of parsley leaves like machines. We watched them swell and become fat. And then one day, one caterpillar bowed his head and looked to be in prayer for days. The next I saw him he had suspending his body with a fine silver thread that wrapped around his soft back. A subtle acrobatic feat. A breath of air between his still body and the parsley stalk. Several days later, from his stillness he began to shudder, a rhythmic motion that moved down his thick form. His soft skin broke and then moved in waves down his length, scrunching up like an old sock until it dropped to the bottom of the jar. A sleek green chrysalis emerged, crenelated with yellow, a pod filled with primordial caterpillar goo that would rearrange, cell by cell, into a new creature. A winged thing.
I’m not saying that Doug, whether this cancer eventually takes him or not, will become a beautiful butterfly through his suffering. I’m not saying that life is a process of metamorphosis and change that makes us better or new, that this pain is a purposeful tool that God wields to enact some great change. I frankly don’t know if that is how things work. Though the metaphor is old, I am saying that even though our bodies and minds may be bruised and broken, even though so much can be taken from us and we feel suspended in moments of great and painful stillness, eventually, He who suffered death to end all pain will make us rise again. Like winged things. Our great, colored wings lifting into the warm and dappled sunlight.
