Wednesday, February 19, 2014

The Report




I speak my friend’s email report aloud this evening, a tough sentence. Cancer. Surgery. Aggressive chemo.  Nausea.  Debilitating fatigue.   Mouth ulcers. 

 “You could fall to despair pretty quick in those shoes,” my husband says.

His invisible words hang in the air, dangling as if splashed across the front of a huge, imaginary supermarket tabloid.  They summon a response from me, and yet I am tongue-tied.  

He’s right, I tell myself.  I watched my childhood best friend fight a similar verdict for two years.  She suffered.  I helplessly watched her suffer.  It was hard to say good-bye.

His words.  They fill the room now. This is too much.  Too binding. Lord, have mercy! 

Another reality enters boldly - filling space, swelling like an emergency airbag expanding in a car.  The words surrender to it: HOPE.  I cling to it, to the Author of it.  We will persevere, we will not lose hope.



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