I asked Emily on our drive home from Broken Bow a few days ago. I was curled up in the passenger seat with my head swirling while Emily stoically made the four-hour drive back home. My body was so angry with me. Everything hurt, and it had for days, and for all I knew it would for many more days. I was afraid. I was despairing, and I was beginning to suspect that there’s no going back, not after you’ve been broken like we had for the last few days.
I was broken in that moment, when I asked that question. The last week had been so rough. At that moment, I was nauseatingly dizzy and hot (my hypermetabolic tumor does this to me often) and had been for hours. For the past week I’d been so lethargic I’d hardly left the couch and the stagnant scenery was wrecking my mental world. I’d been through two rounds of puking, where I quickly learned that anyone who plans to throw up as often as me should not have a bushy handlebar mustache. I’d begun scooping hairs out of my cereal milk as they fell out, and that was when I had the appetite to eat anything. But mostly I just felt like I had the flu for the last week. I went to the E.R., too, for bone pain caused by one of the drugs. I didn’t know pain could ascend to an octave that high. I’ll spare you the details except to say that if this pain were a concert, it would be AC DC on stage. It rocked so. damn. hard.
So this week I’ve been broken by both pain and despair, and the experience has changed me, though I’m not sure how yet. To be completely, indefensibly undone; to be too far out to sea to row yourself back to shore, knowing that you are beyond your own ability or strength to restore things or yourself - that’s territory from which you don’t return unchanged. And there’s no guarantee of a silver lining here, because life, while it may not be intentionally cruel, is indifferent to your plight.
So now I am broken, like so many other things in this world. I am a pencil too stubby to write with or an old car sitting out under the cruel sun patiently waiting for oxidation, time, and gravity to tear it apart. And while this week has wrought physical decay on my body, it left a much more distinct mark on my soul. Lying on the couch watching the dog walkers stroll by at their appointed times each day, unable to help my family move through life, I felt discarded because of my brokenness, an island of purposelessness amidst the swirl of a family’s life. Purpose - that’s another thing cancer has taken.
I find myself fighting this brokenness, because I know that keeping a strong mental game is so important to fighting cancer, and being broken feels like a dangerous step away from that. Not only that, it makes me look weak, like I can’t handle this, and I’m pretty committed to the foolish pursuit of image management, even now. I try to wrap up all of my thoughts with a neat bow on top just like my writing, but the truth is sometimes I’m just shattered inside, despite all desire to the contrary.
But still, the little twinge of fear this causes that has been my constant passenger lately hasn't led to complete despair, because I've read from some pretty authoritative sources that I always have been broken, that it’s just part of my nature. Not even my perceived usefulness to my family or at my job ever really made me anything but broken. I am and always have been a lone sock whose counterpart got lost in the dryer, a lost fork behind the fridge. The only thing that really happened this week is the scales fell from my eyes and I’m seeing the reality of that brokenness more clearly than ever. Don't get me wrong- it hurts to see myself in such sharp relief. We’re so frail, so vulnerable, but our value doesn’t stem from our utility to this world. Just look at Jesus or any of the sages of old - they spent all their time around broken, poor people, and even seemed to prefer them as vessels to get things done. Those people had value to them. No, I think that our only value comes from our resemblance to our Creator, and he was and is, utterly broken - “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” I still feel broken and there may not be a bow to place on top of this, but at least I’m in good company.
At least, down here, it’s okay to be broken.
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