Loose Strife

I’m not sure why I’m writing these days. Or not. I’ve been too busy, too tired, and not very motivated to write. During the day, if the kids are at school, I’ve been outside keeping the woods from encroaching into my fields, or running errands. When the kids are home I spend my time feeding, refereeing, bathing, dressing, reading. After the kids are in bed, I often work with Laura to get her fed or washed up. Then I’ve got dishes and the like. And then it’s well after 10 o’clock. I think about writing a blog post about what’s going on with Laura, but there’s so much happening at different levels that I can’t decide what I really want to say. The story piles up as the days proceed. And I don’t really like the idea of writing a lot of bad news to helpless, hopeful readers.
I’m not complaining at all about my routine. I’m just explaining why I haven’t written for a week. Indeed, I want to say how incredibly fortunate we are and how light in many ways our burden is — with time and resources and help from so many to spread the weight. Every time someone asks me, “how are you doing?” I think about where I am among the imagined levels of suffering and I pause because I know, relatively speaking, it’s easy going. My wife is dying of cancer. But there are the metastatic cancer patients who are single parents, who are sole bread-winners struggling to meet financial needs, who have no or poor insurance, who are alone. Life sucks. But I really don’t have anything to complain about.
Yesterday I was listening to a radio program about children of guardsmen serving in Iraq for years on end and I thought that’s hell — an achingly slow emotional separation from your father or mother, coping with the daily fears of war inflicted on your parent. And that’s just minor suffering compared to those living inside war zones, those desperately hungry, or those struck down by the truly horrendous afflictions.
No, Laura does not have ebola. Instead, she is buffered by the most generous community of friends imaginable and by a big, deeply loving family that means everything to Laura and that has responded by giving everything in return. Instead, we live in a slice of paradise on earth where the land cradles and the people embrace. Instead, she has weathered the tidal progression over the last 14 months and repeatedly caught the breaks to lap up the luxury of a simple life of family and beauty in both the grand and small. Instead, she has skilled doctors and nurses that come to her door and comprehensive insurance that has never balked.
And still, Laura is dying of cancer and for her it’s an awful mix of sadness and pain; it’s a miserable, grievous, unjust stab for me, our children, her parents, brothers and sisters, and all the family and friends who love her so much. It is wounding. It is both personal and far reaching.
If this is modest suffering, but still so painful, then the sum agony in this world is beyond comprehension. if this is modest suffering, but still so painful, then there can be no justice. If this is only modest suffering, but still so painful, then the mercy you plead for us all has fallen on deaf ears.