Читать книгу The Spiritual Lives of Dying People - Paul A. Scaglione - Страница 8

The Woman Who Had Questions

Sarah attended one of our autumn spiritual retreats for people who are seriously ill. These Gennesaret Retreats are named after the region where Jesus carried out most of his ministry. They are held at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky, the Trappist monastery made famous by Thomas Merton, who lived and worked there for many years. My relationship with Sarah was short and intense. Six months after I met her, she died.

Her participation in the retreat was somewhat unusual. Sarah was not actively involved in the Catholic community, although she had been baptized and raised as a Catholic. She heard about the retreat through a friend who saw an ad about it in a parish bulletin. Sarah’s illness was pancreatic cancer. That form of cancer usually brings death within a year, but amazingly she had survived for more than three years. Sarah met with the retreat nurse coordinator, who did a medical history and evaluation that determined she was healthy enough to participate in the retreat.

I did the spiritual evaluation of her life situation, her relationship with her illness and with God, and the anxieties that might inhibit her from receiving and hearing what we offer on the retreat. I always try to do these spiritual assessments in person, but because of miscommunication, Sarah and I missed an appointment at a local coffee shop. I called her with an apology and offered another time to meet with her to do the spiritual assessment. She declined. She insisted that a phone interview was sufficient, and in it she set the direction of our conversation. From the very beginning, it was evident that this was a woman who was in control.

She was an unmarried woman in her fifties. She was very matter-of-fact about her disease. Her mother had died a year earlier, and she had assumed full care for her mother during her mother’s final years. She claimed initially that she had no problem doing that, though I later learned she struggled being her mother’s primary caregiver. She had three sisters and two brothers, but it was Sarah alone who provided her mother with total care. In the course of nursing her mother, she realized that her own health was deteriorating. For the last two years of her mother’s life, Sarah knew she had pancreatic cancer. She did not let her illness interfere with her caregiving; she stoically carried the burden. Later she would tell me that her mother’s death was a somber path to follow as she lived with her own fatal disease.

When I asked whether she had ever been on a retreat, she reported that she had been on only one, as a very young girl. When I asked her about her faith, she flatly replied, “I have more questions than answers.” As I later learned, that brusque comment spoke volumes about Sarah. She was a skeptic. I sensed that she had been alienated and estranged from God and the church, but I didn’t know why. Gradually, I learned that she was searching—for answers, but also love.

At the retreat, we had several people who were very verbal, but Sarah was quiet, guarded, and introspective. She was clearly reflective but not comfortable sharing herself. When the talkative ones insisted that everyone should introduce him or herself, she announced that she had a terminal illness. Nothing more.

I eventually discovered that Sarah had always managed her own businesses. She described herself as an entrepreneur. She had successfully started and sold a couple of companies that imported and distributed cosmetics—a field she knew. She had no training in business, and she said she kept her business plans in her head. She was a manager—of her businesses and of her life.

Two things had an enormous impact on her during the retreat. The first came when I quoted Pope John XXIII: “The greatest challenge of the spiritual life is not to love but to receive love.” That disturbed her because she felt that this had never been part of her life. The idea of receiving love really hit her.

The second was when she picked up a card in the monastery’s retreat center on which was printed this famous prayer by Thomas Merton:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.1

I had no conversations with Sarah until the last day of the retreat when she asked to meet with me. At that meeting, she told me about Merton’s prayer and especially the quotation from Pope John XXIII. She declared, “I don’t know if God can love me. A lot in my life is unlovable.”

In my typical, somewhat no-holds-barred style, I replied, “It’s not your choice; it’s God’s. It’s God’s will to love you as you are.”

Sarah replied, “I’ve struggled with that all my life.”

Then she began to tell her story. The burden of caring for her mother had left her “stretched out.” She had been a caregiver while at the same time having to care for herself. She was never sure whether she was meeting her mother’s needs, and now was plagued by the fact that the first anniversary of her mother’s death was approaching.

I asked her, “How is your disease for you?”

“When I was diagnosed,” she said, “I decided I was going to fight it with everything I had. I was going to take control of this and go full blast to beat it.”

She reported that she went three times a year to M. D. Anderson, the famous cancer center in Houston. In between visits, she was treated by Louisville doctors. The M. D. Anderson physicians recommended chemotherapy, but the Louisville specialists urged an experimental treatment. This conflict wore her down. “I feel like I’m batting myself back and forth,” she said. The disagreement persisted until her death.

Every time she visited Houston, her three sisters accompanied her. In my experience, that was very unusual. They became her support system. She told me that one sister was a critical care nurse, and she was particularly helpful. For another sister, who was the least emotionally stable, these visits to Texas were very difficult, but she made them as a commitment to her sister.