HOPE IS NOT A METHOD, BELIEF A DESTINATION, BUT LOVE THE PALLIATIVE TO ALL

HOPE IS NOT A METHOD, BELIEF A DESTINATION, BUT LOVE THE PALLIATIVE TO ALL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 18, 2011

Eight months ago my daughter Jeannie was removed from life by a hit and run driver.  Yesterday, we found out my daughter Jennifer was hit by the diagnosis she has grade 3, breast cancer.  Only 36, with her career soaring even in these difficult times, and in a solid supportive relationship, the cold words on the report were as impersonal as a weather report.  Glaring on the page as if written in red were the words “carcinoma” and “grade 3,” the most aggressive form of this cancer, but buried in multi-syllable jargon.

You wonder why the agents of the body that work so hard in our defense quietly doing their thing from moment to moment suddenly become perverse, and work against our nature.  The disease and the impersonal words seem an act of collusion.  Anger mixed with repressed tears tells you this is a moment to be strong no longer a need to hide your weakness.  It is not all about you.  It is about your daughter whom you love more than life itself.

Our Jennifer is stoic, and has faced many challenges in her young life with resolve and will.  It is as if she has been in training to combat one adversary after another, and as Kafka says in The Trial, “she has done nothing wrong.”  But it is not a matter of ethics.

Neither is it a time to get lost in remorse and the palaver “this is not fair,” nor in hope that it may reverse the situation, when hope is not a method.  Jennifer will continue her MRI’s, pet scans, biopsies and doing what a regiment of MD’s in this diagnostic clinic are trained to advise her to do, but alas, belief in them is not a destination.  She is on a journey familiar to a multitude at various stages of the same situation, and she is not alone.

The sentinels in her body that will realign themselves like the soldiers they were meant to be, abandoning their mutiny, will not be limited to the possible necessity of surgery, not the possible regiment of chemotherapy, not the constant visits to the clinic to update the status of her interior lymphatic battlefield, nor even her will and resignation to get better and put all this behind her.  Love is the antidote, ultimate medicine that emanates from all sides bombarding her cardio vascular and autonomic nervous system, her physical world with spiritual components as indefinable as the soul. 

It feels as if God has given us a second chance with this hit and run driver, this perpetrator as much a mystery as in the one that fell Jeannie.  Love is the cure, the medicine that will corral these renegade forces because it is the inexhaustible fuel of the will to live.

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