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What could I do? What could I say? I’m fresh out of magic words that can make everything all right.
I did the only thing I could do. I listened. Every once in a while, I threw in some small piece of advice about navigating the cancer-care maze: the importance of sitting down with the whole family and talking frankly about the situation, the need to make sure the right-hand doctor knows what the left-hand doctor is doing, the value – nay, the necessity – of getting a second opinion (preferably from a specialist at an NCI-accredited Comprehensive Cancer Center).
By the end of the call, she seemed to feel much calmer. I didn’t do very much, really, other than listen. But that was enough. It was the needful thing.
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Reynolds Price, poet and novelist, was a well-known figure in the literary world before he got cancer, and started writing about it. A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing tells the story of his treatment, mostly by surgery and radiation, for life-threatening spinal cancer. Never a man of overt religious faith, but always one of deep religious sensibility, he discovered a web of support he never knew was there: people who found their way to him at his darkest moments, people who prayed for him when he barely believed in prayer. Here’s something he wrote:
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‘He shall give his angels charge over thee;
to keep thee in all thy ways.’
Soon she was dead but her word on me is still in force.
At moments of exhaustion those unsought assurances could ring a little crazily. I well understood that the vast majority of human prayers get No for an answer, if any answer at all. I knew that my threatened life was surely not an exception to that dark rule.... But as things sped downward in my mind and body that summer and fall, and a blank wall was all the end I could see, those promises from friends of unquestioned sanity carried more weight with my battered mind than most other messages. Bad as I often felt, they seemed oddly credible. And I’m still not convinced I chose to trust them only because I needed to. Even now as I recall each one and the moment of its arrival, I can hear its battlefield-bulletin prose as welcome and trusty; and I take great care not to make empty promises to troubled friends unless, as I very rarely do, I have a firm sense of their ongoing luck.” (Reynolds Price, A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing – Plume, 1982, pp. 64-65.)
It was a pretty gutsy thing for that woman to do, phoning her friend and pronouncing medical absolution over him, when she wasn’t even a doctor. I don’t think I would be so bold. Yet, somehow, her preposterous prophecy seemed to make all the difference for Reynolds. Along with other good friends, she slid under him when he was falling, and caught him.
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Thank God we are not alone.