Dan's Thoughts

Trish #31 - July 11, 2004

I am going to try to get to bed early so I can sleep tonight. Last night, I didn't get to sleep until 2:00 AM. Now, that's no one's fault. I have no right to indulge in self-pity at your expense, especially if I am not taking care of myself. I did think I should say a little something about caretaking, though and how being in the role I have assumed so radically changes everything about one's life. An illness is not the isolated experience of the one who is sick. When an illness or another kind of trauma affects a person, it afflicts the entire network to which that person belongs. Trish had the aneurysm. I, the rest of her family, her church and her workplace got hit by the ripples of pain and disruption that ricocheted from her affliction.

This trauma first afflicted the periphery of my understanding. I was with Trish when she stopped breathing and the doctors told me I could stay with her if I could handle it. So I stayed and held her hand as they put in the respirator and all the tubes and catheters and so forth. They asked me step to the other side of the curtain at times, either to spare me -- or perhaps because of some hospital policy, I'm not sure. But through most of her first day, I was with her until they took her to the operating room so they could drill a hole in her head to relieve the pressure on her brain.

That first day, I called my children and family and calmly told them the news. My daughters were only marginally concerned at first because of the calm voice I was using. Of course, I was in shock. My mental health training informed my intellect that I was in shock. But since shock doesn't feel like shock to the one experiencing it, I did what most professionals do in such occasions: I told myself that I was doing fine.

Even after the first two or three days, I kept trying to plan the coming week. I was thinking about upcoming sermons I would have to preach. I was trying to return to all the responsibilities that formed my normal, everyday routine. For example, each morning of that first week, I went to the gym to work out. I also read the scripture and did the devotionals each day. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I wrote e-mails to you so I could discharge the emotions that I was not consciously feeling.

Days turned to weeks. Slowly, the devastation I had been experiencing at the periphery of my life worked its way toward the center. While Trish was in ICU, I went to the hospital early in the morning and stayed late. The next day I would do it again. And each night I would return home and write you an e-mail. As I lived this new routine, something in me started realizing, "this isn't Kansas anymore."

When it became evident that Trish would not die, I thought the burden would get lighter. So I asked our church to put a rush order on my laptop. That way, I could do my work at the hospital! I began thinking about how to resume my "normal" life. What a surprise to discover that rehab has, in some ways at least, been more difficult for me than ICU. For one thing, the shock wore off. I began to feel the pain and anxiety natural to such a life-altering situation. Also, in rehab, I was not just a husband sitting on the sidelines grieving. I had to work. I have been busy lifting Trish, coaching her as she eats, helping her to the restroom, assisting her as she takes a shower -- all that kind of stuff. Every morning I take a book to the hospital and most days I return home having not read a single page. Most days, I get to read the newspaper and that is about all the intellectual nourishment I have been experiencing. (If the newspaper can be called intellectual nourishment -- but I digress!)

I am not telling you any of this because I want it any other way. The fact is, if others would take my place in caring for Trish, I would find it difficult to function anyway. I can't imagine doing anything else right now. I force myself to look at bills. I have forgotten important meetings. Life has gotten very narrowly focused. I have lost interest in nearly everything except Trish, in her recovery and in our continued life together.

I know this season will pass. Trish is improving daily. Its just that I am finally realizing that our life cannot be the same as it was. Death knocked on our door last month. This time he did not insist that the door be opened. But now I know that he is in the neighborhood. Of course, he always has been in the neighborhood. Now that I have heard him knocking at our door though. I cannot return to the pretence that he will not return.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is a musical echo of that knock of death. "TA TA TA TA -- TA TA TA TA -- KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK!!! The great genius had begun to hear the knock that everyone must hear. He was preparing to respond and his insides were trembling. He wrote a piece of great art to share his anxiety with the rest of us.

Unlike Beethoven, I am not trembling. I am at peace for my soul is resting in grace. If I die tonight, I will awake to see the face of God. So the knock of death does not scare me. It is the knock of life that has my attention tonight. What will I do with the rest of my life? How will I love my wife and family now? How will I serve God and humanity after this event? I have spent so much time trying to please others. I have worried too much about things I could not fix. All of that has been a waste. I wish now that I had ignored every critic and fled from every cynic. For life is too short to spend our time trying to please those who cannot be pleased. I especially wish that I had ignored the inner voices of self-doubt and self-condemnation that have far too often paralyzed my good intentions. I know tonight that I have spent far too much energy running after prizes that I didn't even want. Tonight, I do not care whether I live in a mansion or a hut, obtain great titles or die unknown. What matters to me now is that I live, truly live before I die. I do not have to answer death's knock yet. Life's knock however, cannot be ignored.

Now that know life that can suddenly be taken from one, either through death or through having to radically reorder ones existence in response to an unexpected catastrophe to those we love, I cannot live life as before. Puberty, they say, is irreversible. So is the life-change that happens to a person as they walk through events such as we have experienced these past six weeks. The life-change can be for the better or for the worse, but it cannot leave one unaltered.

Many caretakers, for example, have no hope that they will ever again be able to really experience life. All day long they lift and feed, clean and inject, serve and care for an afflicted loved one. Some catastrophe, some trauma, some illness has thrust their loved one's basic needs into the center of their life's responsibilities. They often gradually give up believing that it will ever be otherwise. And yet, in many cases, they must still work a job, satisfy some employer, justify their work -- make a living without living a life. Day after day they work for some company and then return home to care for a loved one. They live on the economic edge. They pour their livelihood out on medicines and nurses, equipment and procedures. They slowly become mere satellites, in perpetual orbit around a loved one's illness, until their own days run out.

I have not been as aware of such people as I ought to have been. It is one of the "things left undone" for which I am trying to repent. Now, for a season anyway, I am one of these people. Grace has allowed me to taste what life looks like as a caretaker. I have discovered joys and I have discovered a propensity to turn inward, like an imploding star on its way to becoming a black hole. I have come to the conclusion that those who life lives as caretakers without succumbing to self-pity and helplessness, are saints of the highest order. I am not sure I have the grace to be one of them.

I don't believe that God sends afflictions to us such as we have experienced. Our faith teaches us that we live in a fallen world. Bad things can happen to anyone in a universe in which it "rains upon the just as well as the unjust." However, God knows how to do amazing alchemy when confronted with catastrophe. He delights in creating things of beauty out of our misfortunes, if we will but ask Him.

Because I am only a month and a half into this trauma, I still have the wherewithal to ask, "God, use Trish's trial for your glory and for our spiritual benefit." But in these few weeks, I have experienced enough fatigue, enough numbness, and enough mindless functionality, to realize that there is a point beyond which people lose the wherewithal to think about grace and God. At that point, they can become machines, caregivers who keep working for others without hope of experiencing further life for themselves.

For all such people, may God make me forever mindful now to pray, to care and to serve.

Tomorrow's gospel reading is about the Good Samaritan. The Levites and the Priests in the story had so many things to do for God and for His Church that they did not notice the man in the ditch. He was a man who had been walking the very same road as they until unexpected thieves interrupted his plans and knocked him down. The Good Samaritan stopped. He rearranged his own schedule so he could care for a man who could not help himself. Somehow, he had the ability to turn off his inner voices, voices that were probably telling him that he had appointments to keep and work of his own to do. The Good Samaritan was called good simply because he did not keep running his normal routine after seeing a man in a ditch.

Last month, Trish was on her way to help men get free of cocaine and alcohol. I was on my way to do the work of ministry at our church. Our church was entering its Summer schedule. Our sister churches in Mexico were awaiting my pastoral visit in a few days. My children were preparing for vacation. We were all just doing our normal things without knowing that it was all about to change. A thief came and knocked Trish down on the road. When she fell, the wind was knocked out of all our sails. Except for these e-mails, I too have been knocked down. I seem to have next to no ability to focus upon anything except her. As a result, I often feel useless, incapacitated, unable to continue my "work" and my ministry.

God, in His mercy, has saved me from continuing to be like the Levite and the Priest. As I care for Trish, I am awakening to the realization that there are others I know much less who are in great need of care. Some of them are those who are pouring out their lives serving others.

As Trish recovers and we get a second chance to live and to work, I pray that I can emerge from this trial with a much deeper concern for all those whom life has knocked down and left for dead, I am believing hat perhaps this trial has changed me enough that I will never again, in the name of ministry, keep walking by when someone has been knocked down.

Tomorrow is the Lord's Day. We are planning to take Trish to church. We are planning to worship. I trust that you will be able to do the same, especially if you have been caring for others all week.

Dan