Deo

On Christmas Eve of 2006, I boarded a plane in Connecticut and flew home to Chicago.  My parents and siblings picked me up from the airport, and we drove to church for the Christmas Eve service.

I had always hoped I’d be like Mary – a young woman who loved God, whose life took an extraordinary turn.  My life had taken an extraordinary turn, but in the wrong direction. Instead of beating the odds to become pregnant with the Messiah, I’d beaten million-to-one odds and gotten breast cancer in my 20’s.  And God was nowhere to be found.

After the pageant, the ushers dimmed the lights and passed out small white candles.  As I held the flickering light in my hand, we began to sing Christmas carols a cappella.

Angels we have heard on high

Sweetly singing o’er the plains

And the mountains in reply

Echoing their joyous strain

Gloria, in excelsis Deo!

In excelsis Deo.  I knew from my Sunday School days that the phrase was Latin for “God in the Highest.” It reminded me of another Latin phrase, in extremis. This was a phrase I had learned in my medical training that described a patient who was struggling to breathe as they died. In extremis is translated as, “in the farthest reaches” or “at the point of death.”

As I listened to people around me singing carols, I thought, “God, don’t want you to be in the highest; I need you to be with me now in the lowest.”

That’s where I felt that Christmas: In the lowest depths.  In the farthest reaches.  At the point of death.

*

My mastectomy was in May, and since then I’d been in a deep depression.  Instead of feeling better, I continued to feel worse – and December was the worst month yet.

My birthday was the second week of December, and my friends threw me a dinner party to celebrate. When they brought out the cake, I closed my eyes, leaned over the candles and made a wish. Actually, it was more like a prayer.  “Please, God, please don’t let this year be any worse than last year was. I can’t take any more.”

For months now I felt like someone very close to me had died, and no matter how honestly and deeply I grieved, the sadness wouldn’t lift.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake the darkness.  At the suggestion of my oncologist, I had joined an online breast cancer support group in the hopes of finding a community to encourage me while I recovered from the physical and emotional scars. I chatted with women who had walked this road, and I begged them to tell me what to do to get past this pain.

One woman told me that she had been depressed after her mastectomy, too.  Her Kabbalah instructor told her to write an obituary to her breasts, and let them go.  After we’d chatted for a while, she wrote, “Honey, go write that obit and have a good cry.”

But in that moment, I wasn’t sad; I was mad. Write an obituary?  If I did that, the loss would be irrevocable. Say good-bye?  I had spent the past few months telling God how unacceptable this loss was, how He needed to appeal His decision and give me back my chest and my health and my life.  If I said good-bye, I would cement my loss, and God might think I was okay.

I was definitely not okay. I spent hours a day sitting on the couch in my studio apartment, staring at the sky while tears ran down my face.

And so as I thought about my birthday wish, I told God He didn’t have to make my life better right away; I could probably survive as long as it didn’t get any worse.  I blew out the candle, but before I could open my eyes, people around the table started screaming and I smelled smoke. As I looked up to see what was happening, my boyfriend yelled, “Your hair’s on fire!”

He dumped water on his hand, then grabbed a fistful of my hair and squelched the flames.

As my nostrils filled with the stench of burnt hair and my friends scurried to clean up the mess, I wondered, “If your hair catches on fire while you’re making a wish, does that mean it isn’t coming true?”

*

The only person I could talk to about the depression was my friend Lauren, who lived 90 minutes south in New York City.

Lauren was the adjunct professor of the first writing class I took in Journalism school.  She was a lifelong New Yorker, a self-proclaimed bitch who worked as an investigative reporter for a Long Island newspaper.

When I first met her, I thought of her as my antithesis.  She was brash and I was soft-spoken.  She had curly black hair, and I had blonde straight hair. She prided herself on powerful, succinct writing and I tried to turn each piece I wrote into a literary masterpiece.

At the beginning of the semester, we had been assigned to write an article about the criminal justice system.  I was more interested in the guards’ uniforms, the marble floors, and the inscriptions above the doorways than I was in the court proceedings, so that’s what I wrote about.  Lauren graded the assignment, and at the top she scrawled in red ink, “Sarah -This piece meanders like the Nile.”

When I called my journalism professor to tell him I’d been diagnosed with cancer and would be out for the last two weeks of the semester, he told me, “You should talk to Lauren.”

I had never talked to Lauren about anything except writing assignments, and I had no reason to talk to her now – she seemed the person least likely to sympathize with my plight.  “Why Lauren?” I asked.

“Lauren has cancer,” my professor said.

A few days later, Lauren called me and asked me to meet her in her office before class.  She told me the year before she’d been diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 37.  “Cancer is one big mindfuck,” she said succinctly.  “When I got my diagnosis, all I wanted to know was, who did I piss off in heaven?”

She told me she’d been in remission for the past few months, and she was getting married the following spring, glad to be done with treatments so she could focus on reporting and the wedding.

“You’ll be fine,” she assured me.  “I know a few women our age who kicked breast cancer’s ass.”

She looked at her watch, and told me it was time for class, and we left her office and walked down the hall.  I wanted to hug and cry and emote for a while, but she was matter-of-fact.  The only emotion I could detect in her was anger – she was as angry at God as she imagined He was at her.

I spent the first week after my diagnosis trying to explain to my family and friends and coworkers how I felt and what I needed them to do, and what I needed them not to say. I got tired of explaining, and soon I was talking to Lauren instead.  She understood like no one else what it was like to have cancer and stare down the barrel of treatment and wonder if you had what it took to get through it.

“Whatever it takes,” Lauren told me over and over.  “Just do whatever it takes to survive.”

She came to visit me in the hospital after my surgery, and called me every week that summer, just to make sure I was okay.

And then, three months before Christmas, her cancer came back.  It had metastasized to her ribs and her liver and her brain.  She had surgery, and then endless rounds of chemo and radiation.

Every week I took the train into New York City for journalism classes.  And then I took the subway to Lauren’s neighborhood on the Upper West Side, bought two slices of vegetarian pizza and two Coke’s, and took the elevator to the 10^th floor of her apartment building where she and her little terrier Bart were waiting for me.

While we ate our pizza, we talked relationships and writing and cancer treatments and chemo side effects.  One week, my professor asked if he could join us.  He sat there in silence while Lauren and I chattered away. Afterwards he told me, “I didn’t know what to say. It’s like you two were speaking your own language.”

“We speak cancer,” I said simply.

*

As Christmas grew closer that year, Lauren and I started talking even more.  Her cancer wasn’t responding to treatments this time, and she was terrified of dying.  My cancer was gone, but the scars on my chest ached continually, and kept me awake most nights.  I was sleep deprived and depressed, and I spent most nights staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what had happened to my love of Christmas.

I used to be Christmas’ biggest fan.  When I was in grad school, I was the roommate who went to the Christmas tree farm and cut down the tree, tied it to the top of my car, dragged it through the front door and made my roommates help me decorate it.  I made everyone get into the spirit of Christmas, whether they wanted to or not.  I had heard that suicide hotlines got more calls at Christmas time, but I never understood why.  I thought that anyone who was alone or sad just needed to take in the Christmas carols and Macy’s window displays and their spirits would be lifted.

This was the first year in my life I didn’t want Christmas to come.  The joy that Christmas was supposed to bring was a stark contrast to the despair I was feeling now.  I thought that if the message of Christmas was true – if Jesus really had come to earth to give us joy and peace – then I wouldn’t feel this low right now.

And I was feeling desperately low.

Every night for the past week I’d dragged out the box of Christmas decorations and tried to force myself to get into the holiday spirit.  I’d sit there for an hour or two listening to Christmas music, trying to muster the energy to decorate.  And then I’d give up, turn out the lights, and cry myself to sleep.

The sadness made me feel guilty, and the guilt made me feel even sadder.  Every day I spiraled lower.

A few days before Christmas, I walked out of my apartment building and a man with a press pass and a camera stepped in front of me.  He introduced himself as a reporter for the local newspaper.

“Any thoughts on what transpired here today?” he asked.

I told him I wasn’t aware that anything had happened.

He pointed to the parking lot next to the apartment building, where several police cars and an ambulance had gathered, their lights flashing.

“I didn’t hear anything,” I told him.  “What happened?”

“A graduate student jumped off the top of your building and committed suicide,” he said.

As I walked to work, I considered the student who had jumped from the roof.  It was such a simple, fast way to die, and my first thought was, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

*

I knew enough to know that when jumping from a building sounded like a good idea, it was time to get help. But I didn’t know where or how to get it.

One night I was flipping through channels when I found the Billy Graham Christmas Special on T.V. I listened to testimonials of people who had been at the end of their rope and then found Jesus.  I had grown up in the church, but Jesus seemed so far as to be non-existent at the moment.  I was definitely at the end of my rope, and either I needed to find Jesus or He needed to find me. So I called the prayer hotline at the bottom of the screen.

A man answered and asked what I wanted prayer for.

“I had cancer and the cancer’s gone but the sadness won’t go away,” I said, my voice breaking.

“Are you a Christian?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Let me get this straight,” he said coarsely.  “You had cancer and now you’re cancer free, and you’re sad? What do you have to be sad about?  Either you beat it and you’re cancer free, or you don’t beat it and you go to heaven forever.”

He asked again what it was I needed prayer for.

“Never mind,” I said, and as I hung up the phone I thought, “I’m really screwed.  Even Billy Graham’s people can’t help me now.”

*

Later that night, Lauren called with more bad news. Her cancer had progressed, and her doctors told her she’d exhausted all of her treatment options.

“You’re the pastor’s kid, you tell me why this is happening.  Isn’t God supposed to show us love and compassion and shit like that?”

“Well, I used to think so but now I don’t know,” I answered honestly.  “I mean, I wouldn’t wish cancer on someone I hated, let alone someone I loved.”

She told me she was going to pull the covers over her head and binge on Cheetos.  “Merry fucking Christmas,” she said as she hung up.

The next night, I went to a holiday party where two of my friends announced they were moving out of state, and another friend announced she was pregnant.  I overheard her telling one of our friends that she knew she was pregnant because “all of a sudden my boobs got really big.”

I tried to be sociable and engaging and fun, but I couldn’t do it. “We have to go,” I told my boyfriend.  We said a hurried good-bye and walked down the street to his apartment.  He put water on for tea while I went to hang up my coat.  A few minutes later he found me sitting in the closet, crying.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“My friends are leaving me,” I sobbed.

He pulled me close to him and rested his chin on the top of my head.  “It’s okay,” he said.  “I’ll be here.”

“And my friend knew she was pregnant because her boobs got big.”

“What?” he asked with a laugh.

“I can’t ever get pregnant, and my boobs are gone – they’ll never be big,” I cried.

“I love you anyway,” he said.

I kept crying.  Finally I was able to get the words out, “And Lauren’s dying,” I wailed.

He gave up and conceded, “And Lauren’s dying.”

*

My birthday wish did not come true. Instead of my 28^th year being easier, it was much, much harder.

My cancer returned, and Lauren died the night before I started chemo.   I missed her funeral because I was vomiting on the bathroom floor and my hair was falling out in clumps.

During my chemo sessions, I listened to carols on my iPod and tried to figure out the mystery of Christmas.  I thought about how the bright lights and happy music mocked my depression and Lauren’s terminal illness.  How could Christmas and our pain coexist?  Didn’t one negate the other?

Finally it occurred to me that maybe our pain didn’t disprove the message of Christmas; maybe it validated the need for it. If the world wasn’t so dark, if we weren’t given to despair, if we weren’t terrified of death, why would we need a Savior?

And somehow, in the midst of all the loss, I was found.  God did not lift me up to the highest; He descended to me in the lowest.

As Advent approaches this year, I’ve been thinking that maybe the real meaning of Christmas is not in excelsis Deo.  Our hope is not that we find God in our joy but that He finds us in our pain.

Gloria, for in extremis, Deo.