Of Tunnels and Lights

Maybe even now you are deep in a "tunnel" of your own. May the light be brilliant again. I wrote this piece as an article for a student paper at grad school, after my first six months or so of chemotherapy...so back around May 2004.

Of Tunnels and Lights
by Maureen Morley

I wish you could walk in my shoes for a day, on one of these days when I feel like the luckiest girl on Earth. On one of those days when I’m all a-bubble with joy, excitement and gratitude; when there’s nothing I’d change because the day is just right.

I’d avoid handing my shoes over on the chemo days, those days following chemotherapy when I feel like I’ve entered a dim tunnel. I have chemotherapy about once a month and the side effects are concentrated into the week or ten days following the treatment. So I know there’s an end to the tunnel, there’s some distant light, but while I’m in it my world shrinks. My view is restricted; I stay home and sleep it off. I become more dim myself too, losing much energy and any ability to think beyond the simple. My husband Steve once let me win a game of Scrabble on one of these occasions (I was that daft…he’s that competitive). No, I don’t want you to take my shoes on those chemo tunnel days.

Oddly enough, the day I have the chemotherapy wouldn’t be a bad day. You wouldn’t need the shoes, however, since you’d be sitting for the day in a little room at the Cancer Agency. If you are squeamish about needles, take my place after the IV has started. But those days have always been good ones. There have been six of them so far, and I’ve been in a good mood for every one. I’m not tooting my own horn here; I’m not the one responsible for the mood. I’m not doing mental gymnastics to see my situation in a positive light. Believe me. It just happens. I simply call it God lifting me up. And most of those days a special friend has sat next to me (I won’t embarrass you by naming names; you know who you are). We read aloud, we chat with each other, with the other cancer patients and their families, or the nurses. Toward the end of the day, Steve comes and hangs out with me. When we go home I’m tired but smiling, thinking, “Now that was a good day.”

But if you are a little wary of hospitals, then wait a week or so and then take the shoes. But I’ll warn you, wear your sunglasses. Because, man, the light is blinding! It might be a Wednesday when I go to class and hear the prof and other students talk about things that strike a strong chord with me – wasn’t it just the day before when I’d been pondering that very thing, and here it comes up today in this context! Then, you’ll go to lunch with a friend or two and it’ll be clear by the way they take time for you, talk to you, listen and look at you that they actually really care about you.

Perhaps it will be a day when an acquaintance, who you respect and admire but don’t know very well, calls to ask if she can cook for you and your husband. And when you get the food, there are 3 whole pots of it and it is delicious. You feel so blessed that it seems unfair to keep it all to yourself, so the next day you call up some friends and invite them to share it with you. Or perhaps you’ll get one of the days when you find out that a couple of your professors want to arrange a holiday for you – a holiday you weren’t sure you’d be able to have. It could be a day when a person from the school office that you do not know makes a point to stop, look at you searchingly and ask how you are doing.

There are many such days to go around. Toward mid-afternoon you’ll be walking home from the bus, knowing you are walking with a “terminal” diagnosis and at the same time the joy you feel is insuppressible. You remember that months before, you sensed God telling you that he would care for you. And you see the care happening, and the joy happening. And you are amazed.

So take my shoes; I want that amazement for you. Go ahead, call me a Pollyanna cancer patient. I don’t care. I know I’m not the one who brings the joy. As Maxine Hancock spoke of in chapel today, we can’t do a thing to generate this light ourselves. When I’m in that chemo tunnel, it is and I am pretty darn bleak. But then the light breaks in. And then, wow, I just have to thank God.

But I want to thank you too, all you friends and acquaintances and compassionate strangers, because a lot of the light that warms me shines from Him through you.