The Waiting Room

continued

As I gaze surreptitiously about the room, I am praying for each of the patients waiting with us, that they too will live to become as familiar with this third-floor room as we are.

"What can you tell me about that person?" my detective father used to test my skills of observation. "Look at hands first, then posture, then clothes." As I pray I try to picture homes, families, occupations. My mental images are guesswork, of course, but one thing I can spot for sure: those arriving for the first time. They clutch an instruction sheet from the admitting office downstairs, often pinned to a sheaf of records from other institutions. Their eyes widen at the sight of the surgical scars on their fellow patients, then look swiftly away. Watching these newcomers, my mind goes back to our own first time here, when we knew nothing about cancer, still less about prayer, only a chill, mind-numbing fear...

It was in January 1957, almost three years before that first Sunday at St. Mark's, that I'd noticed a small mole on John's left ear. When I pointed out that it was growing, he shrugged. Trying to get John to a doctor was like trying to get the children to eat liver - wasted breath. At last, going for an insurance checkup, he promised to get it looked at.

"What did the doctor say?" I asked that evening.

"It's nothing. He said he'd remove it for cosmetic reasons if it bothered me."

Cosmetic. If there's a word that can make a stubborn man dig his heels in harder, I don't know it. Week after week I watched the angry-looking growth darken. Week after week my "pestering" got nowhere. With kids ages six, three, and one, he pointed out, we had enough medical bills without running to a doctor out of vanity. Psychiatry bills, too, kindness kept him from adding: I was seeing Dr. Kazan at this point three times a week.

Finally in September, because I kept bugging him, John had the thing off in a brief office visit at our local medical center. "Satisfied?" he said when he came home with a Band-Aid pasted to his ear.

It was a good day all around. Dr. Kazan had just that morning agreed that I could stop taking the medication I'd been on for nearly two years.

Two days later I answered the telephone. It was the doctor who'd removed the mole. He'd like to see my husband. Yes, right now. And, uh - perhaps I could come with him? Well, bring the baby along.

At his office a mile from our home, the doctor shoved a lab report across his desk. As a matter of routine, he explained, he'd sent the tissue for a biopsy. It was malignant melanoma, a particularly fast-spreading cancer of the lymph system. If it couldn't be checked, John might have as little as three months. He'd made an appointment for John that afternoon with a specialist at Memorial Hospital.

Practical steps. Phone the baby-sitter. Collect the tissue sample from the lab. Pick up Donn at nursery school. Leave a note at Mt. Kisco Elementary: "Mrs. Coolidge will come for Scott today."

By 3:00 John and I were threading our way for the first time through Memorial's maze of hallways - so like the unmarked road looming ahead in our lives. Don't look down it! Take a step at a time. Find the right department, fill out the forms.

John was seen by the chief of Head and Neck, Dr. Daniel Catlin. Three days later, Dr. Catlin removed a slice of John's left ear and the lymph tissue on the left side of his neck.

John remained in the hospital for a week. Both our fathers were gone by then, and I didn't yet know my heavenly Father. So I reached out to my grandfather, up from Florida for his annual end-of-the-baseball-season visit. The day after the surgery I poured out to him my fears, the uncertain prognosis.

"I'm seeing a doctor next week too," Papa said. "I have an acid stomach. My doctor in Miami gave me a prescription, but I don't believe it's helping."

On and on, the recital of Papa's ills, Papa's medications. My beloved grandfather - at age eighty his world had narrowed to the horizons of his own needs. It was a growing-up passage for me, just then when so much growing up was asked. To see Papa not as I needed him to be, but as the central figure in his own story, with a childhood, a young adulthood, failures and successes. In time it meant a deeper, more adult love for him, but that night it was another of life's props knocked away.

Looking back, I see the tremendous good that flowed for both John and me from this terrible time. See, for example, how our props, one by one, must be left behind on the Way that is Jesus. To put our faith in anyone or anything else is to let go of his hand.

"What seemed when they entered it, to be the vale of misery," C. S. Lewis writes about the souls in heaven, "turns out, when they look back, to have been a well. And where present experience saw only salt deserts, memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water."

But that "present experience," that salt desert time, when one has no suspicion that there is a heaven! The simplest daily act was clouded in fear. Tucking the children in at night - would they grow up without a father? Stepping into the supermarket, not so long before a place of terror - what if the panic attacks returned? None of this could I share with John, of course. My job was to be upbeat and encouraging and run the water in the sink to mask the sound of crying.

Even out of this, good would come: a lifelong empathy with the partner in a crisis - the competent, smiling, supportive one with the hollow place inside. That very month I happened to be writing about a munitions worker who'd lost his hands in an explosion. I remembered how during the interview I'd thanked his wife for the coffee, turned to her for details of his rehabilitation, and not once asked what the upheaval in their lives had meant to her.