Perseverance

Student services is offering a contest for students to write and reflect on either a situation or scenario in which they or someone they knew persevered. In and attempt to encourage my students to part-take in this, I told them that this is the kind of writing they have been doing all year and that in comparison to their current research paper, this should be a welcomed switch. They said if it is so valuable and blah blab blah, why don't you do it Ms. Nolan? I don't know why I engaged in their little game but I replied without hesitation, "Absolutely!" I finished my homework assignment from my students. Here it is. It's not finished because what piece of writing ever is, but well, it's due and 22 kids will be waiting for it.

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

-Winston Churchill

            While my sisters, my mom and I headed to the beach from our cabin in Michigan, my dad was checking himself into the hospital. It wasn’t uncommon for him to miss the annual trip, either because of work or more so because this scenario wasn’t his cup of tea. However, as of late he hadn’t been feeling well and unfortunately, a stay at a hospital wasn’t unusual for my father either. So much so, that our packed bags easily found their way into our cars, and our minds without reservation set to vacation mode.

Just one day into the trip my mom received a phone call from the doctors at Palos hospital, my father had been moved to the ICU due to abnormal high fevers stemming from a growth that they had determined, with near certainty, was cancer. It would seem that this hospital visit was unlike any other. In his lifetime my father had battled back surgeries, colon surgeries, diabetes, diverticulitis attacks, a kidney transplant and eventually what we would come to learn was non hodgkins lymphoma. My sisters panicked, unsure of how to operate in the moment. It was late, should they wake their kids?  I don’t quite remember how my decision to drive alone in the darkness of cornfields and expressways evolved, nor do I have any memory of the actual journey home; however, I do recall crossing the threshold of his hospital room…the giant wide doors leading to a full staffed room of doctors and nurses overseeing just three patients in critical care. I suited up in a gown and gloves, anxious to see him I peeked my head in his door. He smiled and at the sight of me said weakly, “I think my fever just broke.”

I’ve known people who have had cancer.  I’ve walked for cancer. Raised money for cancer. Gotten teary at cancer commercials. But to hear that term, assigned to someone so close to me, someone I saw most every day, someone responsible for the core of who I am, made my heart freeze and then as if someone took a hammer to it, crushed into a million miserable pieces.

The disease moved quickly, spreading out to all the lymph nodes in his body. My dad was diagnosed in July, created a plan with the doctors in August and started his first chemo treatment in September. During these months he was still walking up and down stairs, still making himself breakfast, still holding full conversations without being winded and still regulating a semi-normal body temperature. The doctor’s faked optimism while we all held our breath. After all was said and done my dad had only made it through one chemo treatment. Yet, the one treatment had wrecked such havoc on his body. By the middle of October he was an emaciated version of himself, a skeleton of a man, whose skin peeled off in big patches, leaving what remained red, irritated and in pain. His tongue filled with sores, and his body too frail to move on its own, relied on the support and guidance of at least two people. Every time he went back to the doctor, the head honchos refused to give him another treatment, his body never recovering from the first. My dad was supposed to have a number of treatments by December in order to have a fighting chance.

So if the end of this story is my father’s passing where is the perseverance? While I wish the story had a different ending because what I wouldn’t give for one more conversation, one more hug, one more opportunity to affirm that our lives mattered to each other…in his last few moments my dad gave me the ultimate definition of the term. 

After telling us he loved us, he looked to the pastor in the room and asked, “Am I going to have the big adventure?” To which, our priest responded, “Yes John, I believe you will.”