Wait

Well, I’m back on the Sauce again, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. This is day three of the fourth round of chemo infusions, and the strange thing is that it’s all beginning to feel so… normal. This morning I walked in to the same sterile lobby smell that I hate and took the same elevator (I finally figured out that the buttons are on different sides of the door in the separate elevators) to the same intentionally well-lit waiting area where I checked in with Doris. I had the same light conversation with the phlebotomist before heading down the hall to the chemo infusion room, where the receptionist no longer needs to ask my name before applying my wristband. At that point I’m fully uniformed with coban on my right arm and the wristband applied, so I’m allowed admission back to the recliners where I dread the familiar prick of the needle as they access my port. Then there’s nothing left to do but whatever I feel like for the next few hours while the little IV pump merrily goes about its task next to me.

And it’s not just the routine on chemo days that’s becoming oddly normal. Now cancer and all the baggage it carries with it- knowing to use the pill splitter instead of the pill crusher, and throwing up on all fours like an animal between the rows of Christmas trees while your family tries to pretend like nothing weird is happening - all of it is just the norm.

And I can honestly say that I never expected this, because at the beginning it was all entirely foreign. Cancer was the interruption. It was the exception to the rule of my life, a break from the ordinary or the silence in the eye of a storm. But now here we are. It’s familiar, it’s routine, and I don’t know how to feel because, truthfully, I don’t feel much at all about it any more. Is that sad, or is it the grace of God that such suffering no longer seems extraordinary?

Either way, it’s funny that this transition to familiarity should coincide with advent, the season of patiently suffering while we wait for Christ’s arrival at Christmas, because it feels like that’s exactly where I am now: patiently suffering. Cancer’s familiarity has led to a patient waiting just like the Good Book says: “we ourselves… groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for… the redemption of our bodies.”

And despite all efforts to the contrary, during this waiting I can’t help but wonder, “how long?” How long must I wait for this redemption? Maybe a couple of months, maybe a couple of years, maybe this thing will never go away. Maybe cancer will kill me one day. Who knows? I sure don’t.

But the one thing I do know and that I have to keep coming back to, that I have to try to believe during those hours of the night which are entirely inappropriate for human consciousness, is that, as Julian of Norwich said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” This cancer reality may feel like the only possible reality right now, but that’s a lie. That can’t be the truth, because the only thing in life that never changes is change itself. So one day this reality will be no more. Though we’ve only ever known the waiting, one day it will end and we’ll know a better reality, one where peace and rest flourish and the decay around us is no more. We’ll know joy in its entirety, filled up and overflowing, like drinking from a cold, clear river for the first time when you thought the only possible form water could take was the trickle of its headwaters far upstream. One day, maybe soon and maybe much too long from now, all of this shit will be no more and something much, much better will arrive to replace it.

For now, though, we wait.