Unexpected Grace

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The day we met, David preferred to remain a two-inch blacked-out Zoom box on my screen. He hadn’t wanted to be there at all, but his wife Sophie, who clearly cared about him, signed him up for our six-week story circle where cancer patients would share their stories and perhaps write with the intention of healing and moving forward.

Perhaps I imagined it, but when I asked David to introduce himself to our class, his black box seemed to shake with rage. “I am a forty-year-old mess,” he explained to twenty other participants with their cameras on. “I don’t want you to see me. I have brain cancer, and it has destroyed my life. First surgery. Now chemo.” Suddenly the box seemed to stand still. Go silent. Then David tried to speak, choked on his words, and mumbled, “I don’t know how much more I can take.” Then we heard a sob.

“It’s okay,” I said gently. “We often need tears—”

“But—why is this happening to me?” he blurted. “I am a teacher. I try to do good things. Why me?” While we couldn’t see him, we heard his soft sobs and felt his deep-seated turmoil.

After David we met dark-haired Sylvia from the Bay Area who sounded sad as she explained she had two boys and was facing an unexpected recurrence of breast cancer.  John was a tight-faced exec who had trouble looking at us as he explained he had not factored advanced colon cancer into his life, but he said he was holding up. We made our way around the boxes to the last student who popped her mic and spoke with the airiness of Tinkerbell.

“Hi.  I’m Cathy.  I, too, was surprised by metastatic breast cancer, and I know my odds are not good, but I accept that.” She looked across the gallery of our faces and shared a heartwarming smile with us. “I’m here to learn all I can in the time I have.” The light shined on her bald head and her words seemed to lift us up as they floated across our Zoom room.  “I want to live, I mean really live, while I can.” And her young voice resonated like a soft song, perhaps of a nightingale. She spoke gently like a poet, a youthful Mary Oliver. Her eyes sparkled and the light from a lamp in her room highlighted the shininess of her bald head. In that moment I wanted to reach out through the screen and hug this beautiful person. This Cathy.

Then something surprising happened. David popped his video and mic on, and he appeared in his little box on our screen. “Cathy, how old you?” he asked. Then he self-consciously tugged down his red ski cap to hide his baldness and raised his bushy black eyebrows.  “Is it okay to ask?”

Laughing gently Cathy clicked her mic back on. “Twenty-three, twenty-four in March.”

“Wow!” David looked awestruck. “I want to thank you. You are about half my age!  When I look at your beautiful bald head with the light shining on it, you are so calm and to think you, too, are facing . . .  .” He couldn’t finish the sentence, but he started again. “Thank you. I know I can learn from you.” In coming weeks, David did learn from Cathy. From all of us. And he never turned his camera off again.

While there is more to the story, the season is rushing at me, and I want to pause to remember just this moment. For sometimes when life feels impossible or maybe you realize you feel caught up in the stresses of the season, there are moments that slip into our lives and change us. Moments that truly matter. Moments that give us perspective on what is truly important.

Sometimes the inexplicable slices through the darkness. Someone’s words, the sound of their voice, a smile, or the light shining on their bald head can capture us unexpectedly and leave us floating, awash in joy.

Cathy, amid a battle for her young life, was showing us how to paint the world in stunning shades. She had joy for the moments she had. She had a curiosity that propelled her to keep learning. Her words were colored in hope—and she wrapped that around us.

Perhaps a moment like this is a glimmer. Perhaps it is grace. But whatever energy slips through the darkness and taps us on the shoulder, leaving us moved and possibly changed, it is worth remembering. It is a great gift. Maybe the most important gift we can give or receive.

So as we go about the hustle and bustle of this season, my wish for you is simple. May your holidays be rich in moments of joy, hope, and unexpected grace.

A Moment of Gratitude

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Last night was one of those evenings with a gentle breeze and the temps in the low eighties. The sun had disappeared in the west, but you could still see traces of the red rocks outlining the Eastern horizon and it all felt a bit magical and mysterious.

     Steve and I started to turn on the news but decided all of those images of an upcoming election and a war where children were dying would ruin the evening. Perhaps that is why we decided to eat on the patio at a nearby restaurant. Even though they had discontinued the meatloaf.  We ordered one glass of red wine to share. We do that more and more all the time, but somehow, I drink most of it. Then we ordered cheeseburgers stacked four inches high because, we joked, it was the closest thing to meatloaf.

     As we waited a young, blond mop-haired boy sitting at the table in front of us caught our attention. He couldn’t stop moving with arms flying in all directions like a windmill. In all fairness, no two-year-old can sit quietly at a restaurant unless you have an iPad or cell phone that can stream Coco Mellon or Paw Patrol. To the mother’s credit there were no electronic devices being deployed as babysitters. Instead, the boy was jiggling around, entertaining his doting and graying grandparents who sat across from him. From my sidewise view, the mother was doing her best to interest the boy in eating what might have been chicken nuggets. She would spear a bit of a chicken with her fork and try to lower it into her son’s mouth. All the while he sat peering up into her eyes and like a baby bird awaiting feeding, he would chirp, “Peez. Peez. Peez.”

     This routine worked for a time, perhaps until the mother got caught in a conversation with the grandma. Then suddenly the boy stood up on his seat and introduced the diners to another word in his limited vocabulary. “Poopy! Poopy!” he called out loudly. From across the patio, a wave of smiles could be seen as eyes darted to the child in distress.

     Like a fireman hearing the alarm, the mother bolted from her seat and as she did her bright blue billowy shirt caught the breeze and seemed to float with her. As gracefully as possible, she pulled her young son off his chair and tugged him inside the restaurant. At the same time the grandma at their table caught my eye and winked at me with that universal signal that often passes from one grandmother to another.

     The room was strangely quiet as we finished our burgers and chatted about our upcoming hike. But soon enough our little prince bounded back through the patio door, one hand secured by his mother’s hand. As he waved at his granddad, he shouted across the room, “Poopy okay!” And he laughed the joyous, infecious laugh of a child. This time many of the diners laughed with him. We were caught up in the beauty of the evening and the charm of an innocent child. Cocooned in the love of others.

     While an election looms large, and there are many children suffering across the country and the world, and it is often hard to bear, at that one moment everything in my world felt right—and a wave of gratitude swept through me.

I wish you many moments of gratitude.

Hope

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Once Upon a Time by Hannah Jayne

     Once upon a time I was a 14-year-old girl in a training bra and a spiral perm, screaming my guts out at a one-inch-tall singer in rhinestones and a backward baseball cap. He was a New Kid on the Block, and I was one of 63,000 girls teeming with hormones and Aussie Scrunch Spray, and absolutely certain that he could hear me, would sweep me from my nosebleed seat and fall madly and deeply in love with me. It didn’t matter that I was 14 and cried whenever I spent the weekend away from my family, and he was essentially a grown man.

      It didn’t matter that I was a cheerleader who never missed practice, and he was a performer at the absolute height of his career, who couldn’t leave his hotel room without a hoard of bodyguards who navigated their way through squealing teens with long, prodding fingers and Sharpie markers. I had absolute faith and hope and the fearlessness that comes from naivety and unbridled teenage passion.

     Once upon a time I was a forty-eight-year-old woman with one and a-half breasts and what remained of my ponytail, screaming my guts out at a singer in rhinestones and a backwards baseball cap. He was taller now, six inches at least because I wasn’t 14 anymore and could afford better seats, but he was still a New Kid and the crowd was still full of girls—women now, but still screaming fervently and when he said, “Are you ready to go again?” I screamed along with them because in that moment, I could be hopeful and naïve and fervent too, and I was ready to go again, to have a go at being silly and hopeful and borderline 14.

     “Are you ready to go again?” I’m still 48. The concert is over, though I can still hear the screams, and I blasted the music in my car the whole way here and maybe pretended that I was going on tour with the New Kids, even though I desperately love my husband and cry if I have to leave my baby for two days. My heart was thundering in my throat like I was the one about to go onstage, like I was about to be ogled by thousands of screaming fans instead of one kindly mammogram tech with a sad smile on her face.

     “Are you ready to go again?” Once upon a time I screamed a resounding yes and now I wanted to scream “no, no, I’m not ready to go again. I’ll never be ready to go again” but here it was, possibly, cancer in my lap a second time and the teenage angst and passion, and certainty and naivety was gone, and I so desperately wanted to reach for it again. I so needed to be that hopeful teenager yet again, so I sent a message into the universe, into the ether, to my favorite New Kid in his rhinestones and backward hat, desperate to touch a little bit of that hopeful magic. I waited for the mammogram tech to reconfigure this and scrunch a little of that, swallowing down the lump in my throat until the machine pinged and my phone did, too—praying hands in my in-box, from my favorite New Kid on the Block.  I am hopeful still.

About the Author:   Hannah Jayne decided to be an author in the second grade. She couldn’t spell and had terrible ideas, but she kept at it. Many (many) years—and nearly twenty books, and one breast cancer diagnosis—later, she gets to live her dream and mainly does it in her pajamas. She lives with her rock-star husband, their 8-year-old daughter, and 1 very persnickety cat in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is always on the lookout for a juicy mystery, an exciting story, or a great adventure.  Learn more at https://www.hannah-jayne.com/