Just Show Up. Part One. A Team Danica-Monica Update

“Nurturing friendships is hard enough when everyone is healthy. But when you show up and do the work of being a friend to someone who is suffering, it will cost you something. In other words, you’re going to have to sacrifice your comfort, your schedule and maybe even aspects of your faith.”–Kara Tippetts

We are three days in, and it’s already been a week of hard. Monday I had my stitches removed. If you are a facebook friend I’m sure you cringed at my “over sharing” photo. (Please remember that at least half my “friends” are people who are walking through similar surgeries and recoveries. We celebrate healing no matter how gnarly, and our wounds are truly the places where light filters to our souls.) During the same visit Danica had her pre-op labs drawn and other tests for screening. Her last needle experience in Cincinnati was brutal with several failed IV attempts for a CT with contrast. She was anxious. As much as we talked about how this blood draw was a quick stick with no straw and a much smaller needle she lost her courage when it came time. Both of us showed our needle PTSD. It was ugly. It took the doctor, two nurses and myself to hold her down to try to get a stick, but she jerked, and we missed. She was sobbing. I was sobbing. I left the room for a minute to tell God He got this all wrong. “I CAN’T WATCH HER SUFFER AGAIN.” I was really thinking how impossible this was going to be. We are headed for brain and spinal surgery, and we can’t get through a needle stick. I came back in and moved from the completely understanding and comforting ally to get tougher on her. We had to get through this. We switched to the other arm, held her at four corners, and I began to pray over her. “Jesus, Calm Danica’s heart. Help us stick this vein.” We got it. On our way out our dear doctor hugged us both. She knows how fragile I am from my recent surgery. She’s walked the long road with me for over six years. She knows how impossible all this seems, especially right now. Her hug validated all those things and then said, “You can do this!”

Afterward my dad took us to Chic-fil-A and then to Danica’s special hair appointment where she had the underneath of her head shaved and a purple stripe added for Chiari. It was sad and fun all at the same time. Every step makes November 30th more real. We are all feeling the weight of it.

I had my every six week maintenance chemo drip yesterday. It was painful to sit in the chair for over eight hours with my neck in such spasm. By mid bag I begin to feel oh so sick and the deep bone ache began from the inside out. Last night I was exhausted but could not sleep because of the steroids, the hurt and how sick my tummy gets. I was up and down, up and down…finally I gave up trying to rest. Around 4 am I slipped out to the cold, dark living room and picked up the book “Just Show Up: The Dance of Walking Through Suffering Together” by dear Kara Tippetts and her friend Jill Lynn Buteyn. My friend Kristin had given it to me in January of this year. At the time I skimmed and shelved it. I brought it out to read at chemo but didn’t have the energy. I finally read it cover to cover this morning with a pen and a highlighter. I got out old school college ruled notebook paper and wrote Kristin a long letter stained with some tears.

Kristin is my friend from Denver who first loved us when she heard God telling her to “Drain it.” (If you’ve never heard this story before you’ve got to read it!) We worked remotely for the same company based in Northern Virginia. I’d only briefly met her twice face to face when I’d traveled to Virginia for work functions and a third time when she came to visit me after one of my surgeries in Maryland before she moved to Colorado. I often say we are the least likely of friends. We are different in many ways. All my life I’d found friends who were almost mirror images of myself. This was someone I could learn from in a whole new way. We became close. She became the person who made me laugh out loud when no one else could. She allowed just enough whining before kicking my butt with the perfect amount of tough love. Even though we live very far from one another she has consistently found ways to “show up” for my family and I. Last October we took a very special girl’s trip to Galveston, TX to celebrate me turing forty. It was the first time we’d spent quality time together in the flesh. We shared hearts. I learned more about her walks with a former fiance’ and her dad who both fought and lost cancer wars. I understood more about how she knew what so many people simply can’t when it comes to loving someone in chronic suffering. When I found out about my emergency surgery she immediately called and said she was coming. She flew to spend a week with me in the hotel after my hospital discharge. It wasn’t easy for her to find care for her children or for her husband to handle all the details while she was gone. He told her “Go be the hands and feet.” (Seriously, this guy lets her obey God and “drain it” and now this. Corey, you are Jesus in skin.)

Kristin hasn’t been feeling well for some time. It’s strange how long and hard we have to look to find what becomes glaring when it’s finally seen. I hugged her in the parking lot of the Dulles Virginia Residence Inn on October 28th as the sun began to rise. She flew home and went to a doctor’s appointment on Monday to explore a lump. Two days later she had a CT that screamed malignant tumor. A week later she had a biopsy that named it. She has cancer. Big cancer. I checked flights to Denver. I wanted to go so badly, if only to ring her doorbell and hug her again. Neck healing be damned. I should have hugged her harder and longer.

This giving and receiving thing still seems so complicated to me. I’m proud. After all this time, I still really want to become independent again. I want to pay all our debt on our own merit. I want to go back to work and save the day. I want to disappear off this screen and be a person who shows up in flesh and blood for others. I want to bring you dinner, or clean your bathroom or fly across the United States to care for you post-op. But I can barely put my own socks on. I can’t drive now and maybe never will again. I’m disabled in all the ways I think the world needs me…in all the ways you, my friends and family, need me. I’m humbled over and over again. I even fight it with my own parents. I fight it with my husband and my children. They see me wincing through a smile. They see me faking it but hear me saying I’m not. I want to find my worth again in their lives too. Everything in this world screams this is by doing. What if you can’t do? What if you can only be?

Like Kara Tippetts I’d like to be known as a “keeper and grower of friendships, a tender nurturer of those around” me even in my suffering. Stripped of all the trappings of what I do for a living, where I live, what I wear or plans for any future I am left with a worn chair in the corner of a living room where I sit and read and write and pray. I pray circles. I mail words. I pray circles. I’d like to believe this is a kind of showing up too…a kind of giving. I’d like to believe BEING in Jesus really is enough. There’s my word again. Dayenu. More than enough.

Kara was dying as she finished writing “Just Show Up.” The way she lived and died impacted the hearts and lives of thousands and thousands of people because she wasn’t afraid of the one thing that remains when everything else falls away. She wasn’t afraid of community. She wasn’t afraid to give and receive. Some of her last written words were these:

“Friends, Community. It is the only way to know and be known. It’s where we see our own humanity and frailty, our gifts and our weaknesses. When we show up for one another, we invade each other in love and become witnesses to the truth that trials and sickness and pain are not the whole story. There’s more. So much more. We can remind one another that our lives are not a mistake. And, most importantly, that we are loved with an everlasting love.”

I’m four weeks out from surgery today. Two weeks away from my baby girl’s huge operation. I am healing slowly. Anything I do jeopardizes what we just tried to accomplish. This surgery can’t be repeated. It HAS to be the last time inside my cervical spine. I HAVE to find a way to ask for and receive specific help. I spent a lot of time in bed on heat after Dan and the girls left for work and school. Chemo recovery day is hard. I still had many phone calls and follow ups to accomplish. And my lists of things to do in the next week and a half before we leave for Baltimore seemed to grow longer not shorter. Around 1 pm I got up to make my family their favorite chicken casserole. It sounds simple, right? I reached down for the large Corning Ware dish. I reached down for the heavy Calphalon pan to boil the water for the stuffing. I bent over to put the chicken in the big pan in the oven. I reached up to get a mixing bowl for the sour cream and soup mixture. I leaned back down to get the chicken out of the oven and then cut it in little pieces. I lifted the large bowl to dump the ingredients and mix them. I lifted the stuffing pan and my wrist slipped out of joint as I scattered the stuffing on top. What if this one meal…this one personal act of love and assertion of independence ruined something? My neck was screaming. Now there were dirty dishes. The dishwasher was full and clean. This is rare. Usually Dan runs it each night and empties it each morning. I have no business reaching in and out of a dishwasher ever. But I did. Doesn’t a sink full of dirty pots and pans and a full dishwasher negate the encouragement I was trying to give by making the meal? So I emptied it.

My girls came home. Danica had homework to make up from Monday. She had a lovely gift bag from a teacher at school. We went through the things. Of course I needed to find a journal to begin a list of gratitude. The mail came. There was a box from my dear friend in Wisconsin with things for Danica. We went through the things. My body was howling, but I kept a cheerful face and spirit for my girl. We added the gifts to the gratitude journal. I took the cardboard to the recycling bin in the garage and sat down to wail.

I need help. We need help. I’ve pushed your offers away, because I wanted to do these weeks cozied here as a family. I did work on a list of specific ways you can help during and after Danica’s surgery, but I kind’ve wanted to keep you out of this part. It’s ugly. I’m ugly. I’m in full on lament. I realized this afternoon I cannot even pack for this kind of trip. I need help.

I got on my knees and with no head bowing ever again I prayed for God to help me ask and receive. I begged Him to help me be honest and detailed about how others can help and trust Him to fill the slots.

The next post will be this ask. Humbly, I will ask you to “just show up.”