May 25
Chinese proverb (written in the margin): As a gong cannot be polished without friction, so is a man not shaped without trials.
There is so much to say and only a lifetime to say it. More on my pessimism —I’m confused now. I don’t know whether I’m looking at things too negatively or looking at the facts the way they are.
Don’s cancer is apparently worse than we realized. It’s stage three of three, where the tumor has metastasized to other parts of the body; in Don’s case there is a tumor in the lymph glands of his neck, and he has a two-year old unhealed wound in his groin area. He’s having his first dose of chemotherapy tonight and will have another next month.
Mom is candid about this: she is frankly speaking of the possibilities: Anne without a father, for instance. Anne doesn’t seem to know.
I broke the news to Josh this evening —he was calling here from Champaign —and I basically told him everything I’ve said on this page so far. And when I was done, I felt guilty. Maybe I told it wrong. Maybe my pessimism clouded the hope he might have had if someone else had told him. I’m afraid people will start seeing me as a gloomy monster. I want to give up my role as the realist, immune from denial. I want to be the one to say “Praise the Lord” in the shadow of darkness. But I can’t, because of my awareness and because of my guilt.
Mom just chastised me for spending the night in a hotel with Parul. Guilt: was I callous, in “light” of it all? Am I unworthy to be “there” for anyone now? Have I proven myself, yet once more, to be more harmful than helpful? (“Annie wasn’t aware,” I rationalized, “was she?”)
Maybe I’m just too filthy, too carnal, to be a part of this family, so fixed, rightly, on finding their Christian support.
Maybe I’m being an advocate of the devil.
Maybe I ought to sink quietly out of the “light,” out of sight.
Maybe I’ll just succumb to my rampant self-pity. And why shouldn’t I pity myself? Myself can’t say “Praise God,” myself has walked away, myself has lost hope. Myself has been given a million chances to say “Praise God,” and sometimes it gets said, but I can’t seem to help myself from being insincere.
God forgive me. Even here I have no faith. In the end there may be nothing more to say.
Get out of yourself! Don’s dying, Mom’s crying, Joshua’s stunned, Anne is confused and you sit here thinking of yourself? Get out! Look at you: you just thought of getting on your knees and praying —something you haven’t done properly in eight months —but what for? Not to pray for anyone but yourself! Yeah, you need prayer all right (“Yes, I do.”); yeah, you’re hopeless (“Yes, I’m afraid I am.”). So fuck the artiness, the pride, you goddamn writer! Fuck the fact that Letterman starts in ten minutes. Your priorities completely suck! But to hell with them. If you’re gonna put yourself ahead of everything and everyone else, then stop pretending. Do it. Go ahead, pray for yourself, see if I care, you fucking loser. Get down on your goddamn knees and pray!
May 26
I’m not going to try to reply to yesterday’s tantrum. Rereading it, I sound sillier than I actually felt. I’m not going to comment on the prayer that followed, either. I did it, God was listening —if I say anymore I’m sure I’ll slip into insincerity. I’m not good enough of a writer to capture the intensity, as it happens, of a maelstrom, so how can I now grab the waves afterwards, one day out of perspective?
God help me. I don’t even want to pray tonight. I don’t want to go to church tomorrow. God help me beat the devil down...
Josh and Dan called tonight. A much better call, but still distant, tense.
Mom has apparently forgiven, forgotten, but still —am I projecting? —tense, distant. Annie, God bless her, is herself. May it always be so.
Don, though groggy and doped and a little despondent, is not “moody,” as Parul phrased in a question. He’s sucking in, bearing it, surviving.
Parul is good to have beside me...
I’m going to be okay, I think. I’m not now, but in the future —maybe this is faith, after all. Maybe with some of that I will go to church, and I will pray.
One other thing. I had been letting my fish die, putting off cleaning its tank, not even feeding it for two days, but today I changed the water. I did not do a pH match, but somehow, even in the half effort, there is an analogy here for hope. Originally I had the rationale of giving up and starting over, after everything had died anyway, but now I’ve decided to work on life. (I’m insincere now, but later...).
May 27
In the mean time...
It is good to have Josh and Dan home. I feared weariness tonight, but I never laughed so hard in my life at one point, and overall we were jovial. God we needed that. We need each other.
God bless Parul, Annie, Dan, Josh, Mom, Don. God bless Don and Josh especially, and keep them. Make your face shine, God, give your peace to us all. Thank you God that I am able for the first time in two weeks to put other people first in my prayers. But Lord I pray to be lifted from the meantime, lifted by the Holy Spirit, brought to a better place, lifted by Jesus, by grace.
⇋
It doesn’t matter what anybody says,
I will hate them for it,
doesn’t matter what anybody does,
I am on the edge, in the mean time
waiting... waiting...
“for the Holy Spirit to descend,” the pastor said,
but I will consider this wrong too:
I am consistent here on the edge
in the mean time where I never meant to be.
“Everything is futile,” said Q., but I’ll fight
even this statement, just to be guilty
for not being able to do anything
in the mean time. What does it matter?
I’m waiting... waiting...
“for Jesus’ forgiveness!” but what if I’m not sorry?
in the mean time between your Eden and your hell,
my birth, my death —and what’s to be absolved?
I am on the edge of a razor fence,
waiting... waiting...
to see what you will say. For God’s sake, speak!
before I hate you, no matter
in the mean time, no matter at all.
⇋
May 28
The customer never feeds back unless there’s something wrong. When all is well, no one talks about it. So it is with my writing (my feedback) and likewise with prayer. God is a Maytag repairman: I take him for granted and don’t always have much to say to him, but he’s always on the job, waiting, in case there’s something wrong.
God I’m here because it’s not going perfect, not as I try to make it anyway. God I’m here because I can’t fix things myself: something always doesn’t fit when I try to put it together. I suppose I should stop pretending to know what’s going on when I have no blueprints.
But tonight God, I’m not here with a list of complaints. It has been a good day; not a perfect day, God, but maybe that’s good in itself. I almost didn’t write tonight, almost wouldn’t pray tonight —almost too happy to talk about it. But I’m here tonight, God, and I wanted to show my appreciation, my awareness that you’re always on the job.
I’m not ready to thank you for cancer. But I’m here to thank you for strengthening Don enough to get out of bed and walk to the Koehn’s. I’m here to give thanks that Joshua, who goes into the hospital tomorrow, is full of life today.
Dan just found out the extent of Don’s cancer today; I told him, as I had told Josh. I think I was of help to him, but it’s funny how things go. Thank you God for Dan, who has so often being a help to me.
Annie. God she’s thirteen and potentially a cause for all sorts of teenage trouble. Thank you God that she’s not there now and that she knows of your goodness.
Mom. God I’m here tonight without any gripes about my mother. Thank you God, and may I not take her for granted.
Parul. Thank you God for bringing such a good person into my life. Bless her and bring her into your family.
Thank you God for salvation, for Jesus, for your love. Thank you God for the Holy Spirit and for its effect on my narrative, my prayer.
Thank you God for teaching me to appreciate.
May 29
Maybe if I looked back at what I’ve written over the last several weeks (and months and years, if I had written as often) it wouldn’t be as bad as it seems. Without looking back it feels like a roller coaster, and I’m afraid that one day the exhilaration will be permanently overcome by the sickness in my stomach. Maybe if you read what I’ve written you’ll understand —but maybe not. “Kind of a wimpy roller coaster,” you’ll say, or “your tracks are not so unique. We’ve been there, too.” And maybe so, but maybe your ride is not as rickety as mine. Or maybe we’ll all derail.
GOD IT’S A BUNCH OF CRAP.
Let me copy down what I wrote on scratch paper at work this evening. I’ll swear up and down I wasn’t serious. In fact, it would be traumatic if anyone had ever seen this composition, and this piece alone may make me want to lock this journal up from now on.
I wrote —or maybe it was someone else:
“This won’t be fair to some people —my brothers, my mother especially. But life’s been unfair, God’s been unfair. He’s led me through trials I couldn’t handle, and if my brothers, my mother or anybody else can’t handle my suicide, then it’s just more proof that we have an unfair God. I hope that everyone can handle this and go on with life. If God has any justice at all, you deserve things to turn around (and Parul talks about worth —ha!). But if anyone can’t handle this, I don’t blame you.
“I suppose God will punish me for this blasphemy, on top of the suicide’s punishment. That will figure. If there is a God he can throw me into the deepest hell and I will feel no remorse.”
Reasons for this? The usual, I guess. Work sucks, school’s a pressure, and of course there is all that is happening to the people around me. Sunday I told Parul (not a cause of my woes) that I was considering going to one of those Cancer Family Group Sessions. I should go, but I probably won’t. I don’t think I can get off this roller coaster right now.
May 30
Readers: I’ve been writing so much for me only that any other approach —any address to you directly, for instance —seems odd now. But I’ve got to get out of myself for a while, for always if I can help it, and I need to talk to you today. This journal hasn’t been working well as a whine, and maybe that suicide note on the last page really meant something else, like an end to that whole chapter of self-centeredness. No, it did not (“poof”) disappear last night at the end of the entry, but during the course of this day after, here and there parts of my old self have been slipping away, and not by my writing or my doing but by other people —even, perhaps, by you.
Ron Ward led a bible study today. But first he listened to how things were going, and he talked in his minimal way. Then the study began, starting with a hymn he chose, Amazing Grace, because it went with our topic, the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep parables. And though at the beginning I was determined not to pray aloud, by the end I was eager and sincere: “Thank you,” I prayed, “for the fatherly hug and the shepherdly care, for accepting us and bringing back to the flock.”
Elizabeth (the Indian shepherdess) asked me to park her car.
Joshua Lamken is in the hospital again: chemo #3. His spirits are light, and though his veins are a bit worn out from all the tracking stuff, he takes it with a sense of humor. I though visiting him would be anti-climactic, considering Don’s shape, but it wasn’t. It was good.
Don is doing better. Still low energied, still a little eerie, but underneath the physical weariness the spiritual flame is burning. Midday I saw him curled up in bed, under the covers in a dark room. At day’s end, Mom reported that he had had a red-letter good day, praying for hours, talking to God, sensing response. Dan said he’d had supper with the family and had met with church deacons; and I saw him smile when I said good night —we even talked about today’s Bulls game.
Dan went back today, but we had lunch together and a beer in the evening before he caught his bus. I let him know that I was here if he ever needed some talk, and that I appreciated him being there.
Parul and I only briefly passed today. I was rushing between lunch and work and she was leaving the house, having stopped by to see me. Nothing more than that, but it served as a reminder that she cared, too. If only I could do a better job of reciprocating.
Annie caught a cold this week and missed two days of school, but it was a blessing in disguise, as she got to spend time with Dan and was here to be around her dad. I hope her cold gets better now, and I even told her so, without sarcasm, without older brotherness. Annie, I might be growing up.
Life is still a roller coaster and I still can’t get off, but it’s nice to be reminded that I’m never riding the tracks all alone. Thank you God.
May 31
One word doesn’t have to match —I think I’ve well enough shown you this —with the one before it. One day at a time, therefore, where yesterday could just as well be years ago. Everything is behind me now, everything is ahead, and if my last step lacked a consistency with the one before it, as long as I have the persistency to keep on stepping I’ll be okay; and if you fly above me and map my steps and determine that I’ve been going in circles or squares, stay there above me so that I don’t have to know what you see. I’ll keep on stepping and feeling good that I’m not yet lying down.
Thank you, all the same, God, for a glimpse of the whole picture, an Ecclesiastical illumination: it is vanity to think my steps or my words add up to beans, and yet it is wise to realize that Gods steps in, that it is God’s Word in the end, and I am saved. Thank you God.
The customer never feeds back unless there’s something wrong. When all is well, no one talks about it. So it is with my writing (my feedback) and likewise with prayer. God is a Maytag repairman: I take him for granted and don’t always have much to say to him, but he’s always on the job, waiting, in case there’s something wrong.
God I’m here because it’s not going perfect, not as I try to make it anyway. God I’m here because I can’t fix things myself: something always doesn’t fit when I try to put it together. I suppose I should stop pretending to know what’s going on when I have no blueprints.
But tonight God, I’m not here with a list of complaints. It has been a good day; not a perfect day, God, but maybe that’s good in itself. I almost didn’t write tonight, almost wouldn’t pray tonight —almost too happy to talk about it. But I’m here tonight, God, and I wanted to show my appreciation, my awareness that you’re always on the job.
I’m not ready to thank you for cancer. But I’m here to thank you for strengthening Don enough to get out of bed and walk to the Koehn’s. I’m here to give thanks that Joshua, who goes into the hospital tomorrow, is full of life today.
Dan just found out the extent of Don’s cancer today; I told him, as I had told Josh. I think I was of help to him, but it’s funny how things go. Thank you God for Dan, who has so often being a help to me.
Annie. God she’s thirteen and potentially a cause for all sorts of teenage trouble. Thank you God that she’s not there now and that she knows of your goodness.
Mom. God I’m here tonight without any gripes about my mother. Thank you God, and may I not take her for granted.
Parul. Thank you God for bringing such a good person into my life. Bless her and bring her into your family.
Thank you God for salvation, for Jesus, for your love. Thank you God for the Holy Spirit and for its effect on my narrative, my prayer.
Thank you God for teaching me to appreciate.
May 29
Maybe if I looked back at what I’ve written over the last several weeks (and months and years, if I had written as often) it wouldn’t be as bad as it seems. Without looking back it feels like a roller coaster, and I’m afraid that one day the exhilaration will be permanently overcome by the sickness in my stomach. Maybe if you read what I’ve written you’ll understand —but maybe not. “Kind of a wimpy roller coaster,” you’ll say, or “your tracks are not so unique. We’ve been there, too.” And maybe so, but maybe your ride is not as rickety as mine. Or maybe we’ll all derail.
GOD IT’S A BUNCH OF CRAP.
Let me copy down what I wrote on scratch paper at work this evening. I’ll swear up and down I wasn’t serious. In fact, it would be traumatic if anyone had ever seen this composition, and this piece alone may make me want to lock this journal up from now on.
I wrote —or maybe it was someone else:
“This won’t be fair to some people —my brothers, my mother especially. But life’s been unfair, God’s been unfair. He’s led me through trials I couldn’t handle, and if my brothers, my mother or anybody else can’t handle my suicide, then it’s just more proof that we have an unfair God. I hope that everyone can handle this and go on with life. If God has any justice at all, you deserve things to turn around (and Parul talks about worth —ha!). But if anyone can’t handle this, I don’t blame you.
“I suppose God will punish me for this blasphemy, on top of the suicide’s punishment. That will figure. If there is a God he can throw me into the deepest hell and I will feel no remorse.”
Reasons for this? The usual, I guess. Work sucks, school’s a pressure, and of course there is all that is happening to the people around me. Sunday I told Parul (not a cause of my woes) that I was considering going to one of those Cancer Family Group Sessions. I should go, but I probably won’t. I don’t think I can get off this roller coaster right now.
May 30
Readers: I’ve been writing so much for me only that any other approach —any address to you directly, for instance —seems odd now. But I’ve got to get out of myself for a while, for always if I can help it, and I need to talk to you today. This journal hasn’t been working well as a whine, and maybe that suicide note on the last page really meant something else, like an end to that whole chapter of self-centeredness. No, it did not (“poof”) disappear last night at the end of the entry, but during the course of this day after, here and there parts of my old self have been slipping away, and not by my writing or my doing but by other people —even, perhaps, by you.
Ron Ward led a bible study today. But first he listened to how things were going, and he talked in his minimal way. Then the study began, starting with a hymn he chose, Amazing Grace, because it went with our topic, the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep parables. And though at the beginning I was determined not to pray aloud, by the end I was eager and sincere: “Thank you,” I prayed, “for the fatherly hug and the shepherdly care, for accepting us and bringing back to the flock.”
Elizabeth (the Indian shepherdess) asked me to park her car.
Joshua Lamken is in the hospital again: chemo #3. His spirits are light, and though his veins are a bit worn out from all the tracking stuff, he takes it with a sense of humor. I though visiting him would be anti-climactic, considering Don’s shape, but it wasn’t. It was good.
Don is doing better. Still low energied, still a little eerie, but underneath the physical weariness the spiritual flame is burning. Midday I saw him curled up in bed, under the covers in a dark room. At day’s end, Mom reported that he had had a red-letter good day, praying for hours, talking to God, sensing response. Dan said he’d had supper with the family and had met with church deacons; and I saw him smile when I said good night —we even talked about today’s Bulls game.
Dan went back today, but we had lunch together and a beer in the evening before he caught his bus. I let him know that I was here if he ever needed some talk, and that I appreciated him being there.
Parul and I only briefly passed today. I was rushing between lunch and work and she was leaving the house, having stopped by to see me. Nothing more than that, but it served as a reminder that she cared, too. If only I could do a better job of reciprocating.
Annie caught a cold this week and missed two days of school, but it was a blessing in disguise, as she got to spend time with Dan and was here to be around her dad. I hope her cold gets better now, and I even told her so, without sarcasm, without older brotherness. Annie, I might be growing up.
Life is still a roller coaster and I still can’t get off, but it’s nice to be reminded that I’m never riding the tracks all alone. Thank you God.
May 31
One word doesn’t have to match —I think I’ve well enough shown you this —with the one before it. One day at a time, therefore, where yesterday could just as well be years ago. Everything is behind me now, everything is ahead, and if my last step lacked a consistency with the one before it, as long as I have the persistency to keep on stepping I’ll be okay; and if you fly above me and map my steps and determine that I’ve been going in circles or squares, stay there above me so that I don’t have to know what you see. I’ll keep on stepping and feeling good that I’m not yet lying down.
Thank you, all the same, God, for a glimpse of the whole picture, an Ecclesiastical illumination: it is vanity to think my steps or my words add up to beans, and yet it is wise to realize that Gods steps in, that it is God’s Word in the end, and I am saved. Thank you God.
