I remember sitting in my office after working out, just a few months after my Dad passed away from lung cancer. The last year had been rough. I had been home from Iraq less than a year when Christi and I had returned from a vacation to Europe to find a foreboding voicemail waiting on my cell phone. Dad’s cancer had relapsed following the previous year’s surgery. A visit to the doctor a few weeks later informed us that he would likely have only months to live. As it turned out, he had about six. He stayed with us periodically over the summer and early fall of 2007 to receive treatment from the Univ. of Kentucky oncology team.
It was a bittersweet time. We knew our time was precious. I took Dad to as many appointments as I could even though I was still working. Just like they are now, my employer, the Kentucky National Guard, was exceptionally supportive when I needed to be away. I wanted to spend as much time with Dad as I could. When I couldn’t take him, Christi did. She selflessly quit her job that Spring to help with Dad. Others pitched in to help also. As ominous as those days were, they were also some of the best that I ever spent with him, getting to know the man who was my childhood hero but never really an open book.
As I sat there cooling down from my run, I still had in my headphones and was thinking about Dad. Life for me was back to normal somewhat, although I missed him greatly and had (and still do have) the occasional urge to pick up the phone and call him. Then the Caedmon’s Call song, “There is a Reason1,” came up next on my playlist.
“Late at night I wonder why, sometimes I wonder why.
Sometimes I’m so tired I don’t even try.
Seems everything around me fails but I hold on to the promise,
That there is a reason. There is a reason…
“He makes all things good. He makes all things good.
A time to live, a time to die, a time to wonder and to wonder why.
‘Cause there is a reason. There is a reason. There is a reason.”
I vividly remember sitting there in my sweaty running clothes feeling encouraged. I had those questions: why did my Dad have to die so relatively young at 61? He had so much to offer, so much to live for. Admittedly, he smoked most of his life. That, along with exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, likely caused the disease. But such facts lose their teeth among those who mourn. I just wanted my Dad.
Over six years later I’ve pondered similar questions about by own fate. I am at peace with the whys and why nots of my circumstances, at least so far. As I said previously about my current hospital stay, I am considering it an opportunity. I’ve experienced no profound revelation, but I have met Tony, a patient from Tennessee, and several staff members, including the nurse practitioner who admitted to praying for me while she conducted my lumbar puncture (LP) yesterday. It’s no surprise then that yesterday’s LP was the least painful of all seventeen LPs I’ve had. I barely felt a thing. I had been a little down in the afternoon when I learned I might be here though Tuesday, but her literal shot to my spine was a figurative shot in the arm and rapidly improved my fickle mood. What mercy shown by my Father.
My transplant doctor has also been more closely able to monitor my GVHD (the skin rash resulting from my new stem cells rejecting my body). In fact, she is going to start me on a different treatment called photophoresis, where my blood is extracted, exposed to ultraviolet light to kill the T-cells that cause the GVDH, and then re-infused into my body. This is time consuming but more effective than steroids only, which haven’t quite done the job yet. It also has fewer side effects than taking steroids. My pneumonia is getting much better, thankfully, but I still need antibiotics for now.
I don’t know if these are the reasons that I am in here. There may be no epiphany or spiritual revelation coming. I may never know, just as I may never see God’s complete reasoning for allowing me to have leukemia in the first place or not healing my Dad, but the reality is that I don’t have to know the reason, just believe there is one.
“The Lord directs our steps, so why try to understand everything along the way?” (Proverbs 20:24 NLT)
1. Caedmon’s Call. (2007) There is a Reason. On Overdressed [CD]. House of Mirrors Music.