Faith through Cancer: Distance

Pink is all around this month, on our clothes, our food, enormous billboards, if you can name it you better believe that the company has put a brightly labeled pink ribbon on the product. There is no escaping the big ‘C’ word this month and sometimes, for those of us in the middle of a cancer crisis, it can feel like a boa constrictor slowly squeezing the breath out of you.

Needless to say I don’t think that a day has passed in the last year that I have not thought about cancer. Cancer, Cancer, Cancer… it spins constantly in my head like a Ferris wheel that stops occasionally to let another memory on or off. There is no end in sight and to even think about the end is unbearable. The only thing that protects me is the distance. Literal and figurative distance between my mom, her cancer and me.

This morning, I woke up, was laying in bed, catching up on over night Facebook happenings and came across the status of a professional acquaintance. I have had less than 5 face to face interactions with this person but our first is impossible to forget.

Years ago, when I was new on the Columbus, OH interpreting scene, I was asked to interpret a funeral of a young mom who’s husband had just died of cancer. I was “chosen” to interpret because she wanted someone she didn’t know. I remember clearly going to the church, standing on stage next to an American flag as her people walked past her husbands casket. I remember the cute little Ann Taylor suit I wore. I remember the faces of the Deaf people that were in the audience. I remember her sweet bald little baby.

I do not remember anything else. I do not remember which songs were played, I do not remember the message or prayers. I do not remember anything of significance. I was a stranger in the midst of their grief. There was a distance between myself and the event. A distance between myself and cancer.

This morning, this same acquaintance, posted on their FB about needing prayers for her ex mother in law.  This women, who had buried her son is now dying from the same disease and that beautiful baby (now a young girl) is about to loose her grandmother. There was a flood of memories about that funeral and I started thinking about how a person can live their whole life aware of cancer. A life lived without distance.

As I thought about the impact of cancer on their lives and how unaware I was of the true impact of cancer until last year. I was grateful for the distance. The distance that existed for so many years. Even though I wish that I could be there for my mom, I admit that there is something safe about being so far away. The distance is a way to protect my children and my heart from the grief that is sure to come.

I want to go back to the days when there was no cancer in my world. To be blissfully unaware of this horrible disease. I want to get off the Ferris wheel, walk away and just enjoy the carnival.