The Lavender Envelope

Following the cancer confirmation a few weeks later, the eye wall made impact. I was visiting Dad for Labor Day weekend, and he filled me in as we sat on the balcony of his condo, watching the sun set over the marsh. It was colon cancer—stage four. It was so aggressive it had grown from nothing to metastasizing throughout his body in a year. He told me all about the chemo, diet changes, and natural supplements he would begin, both of us thankful that this type of chemo would only produce neuropathy and nausea so his soft blond hair would remain intact. For the rest of the weekend Eagle Scout Eric talked positively, declaring the Lord had this in His hands, all the while preparing Lindsey and I for the storm ahead, with envelopes containing official documents, access to the safe deposit box at the bank, even making sure we knew how to sail our little sailboat back and forth across the lake at the cabin. The hurricane was back.

For the next month I woke up every morning, showed up to work when I needed to, called to check in on Dad, and attended church on Sundays. I was on autopilot, and I didn’t even know it, not until a friend of mine challenged me to live in the midst of what was going on, not just check out and wait for it to be over.

The only problem was that in order to live I had to deal with emotions—emotions I didn’t want to experience. The truth is I was furious at this hurricane that had overtaken me. I had grown up loving and serving Jesus since I was five years old. I had clung to Him when my mom was sick. Many nights I wasn’t able to fall asleep over the roar of the wind and waves of this internal storm, until I found a promise loud enough to drown them out for one more day. I repeated over and over to myself the words of King David and the declarations of Isaiah. I almost fainted but I didn’t, because I believe I will see the goodness of the Lord in my life. When I enter into the deep waters He will be right there guiding me through. When I cross rushing rivers, their currents will not be able to sweep me off my feet and carry me away.

However, this time the rumble of the storm was so loud the repetition of those verses was nothing more than the moving of lips. There was no sense or reason in my father’s cancer diagnosis just four years after losing my mother. None of my friends from high school or college had weathered the death of a parent, and here I was poised to lose my dad and become an orphan at twenty-three. Why didn’t they feel the effects of the wind and rain? How come they didn’t dread the rising floodwaters?

It wasn’t fair.

Life wasn’t supposed to be this way. I didn’t sign up for this. When I wrote in my journal as a high school student that I would follow God the rest of my life, come fire or high water, I didn’t mean this.

I raged and cried and penned eight pages of handwritten lament, but I had no beautiful revelation. No scriptural prayer or exhortation suddenly came to mind and ministered to my heart. When I called a dear friend who had lost her father to cancer a year prior, she didn’t answer the phone.

I was alone.

Even the miraculous provision I had seen from the Lord during my mother’s sickness waned as reports on my father rose and fell. As a teenager, I had completed college-level papers, sports practices, laundry, and cooking on five or six hours of sleep, but now I was exhausted all the time, even though I wasn’t taking care of my father—or even living with him for that matter.

I dragged myself out of bed in the mornings no matter how many hours I had slept. This was not new to me. I had dealt with it before, in spurts of a few months at a time, this unrelenting fatigue that fogged up my brain and left me emotionally unable to make decisions. This time it wasn’t fading, though. My body was betraying me. Every emotion I refused to deal with, every bit of trauma I was carrying, my subconscious brain released as fatigue to “protect” me in my vulnerable time. I was stuck in “fight or flight” mode, except that I was actually in “freeze” (nature’s third response) where fatigue, anxiety, and depression took turns having their way.

The backside of the storm had caught me unaware. I barely had time to run inside and scramble on top of the tallest piece of furniture that would hold me. In moments it was there: the dirty swirling water seeping into my house in the absence of the sandbags that had blocked most of it before. The open shutters clattered against the siding as I shivered on top of the table, my eyes trained helplessly on the rising water, one moment hoping against hope it wouldn’t reach me and the next moment determined that if it did, I would find a way to climb higher.