Radical Acts of Love. Janie Brown

First, you remember all the things you love about Daddy, and then you find something at home or make something to put in the box to remind you of that special memory. We could start talking about the memories today, and then when you go home, perhaps you and Claire can finish the memory box together, with your dad?’

      Emily nodded with enthusiasm.

      ‘What is one thing you love about Daddy?’ I asked.

      Without any hesitation she answered, ‘I love Daddy’s kisses.’ She smiled up at him.

      ‘Of course you do,’ I said. ‘How do you think we could put Daddy’s kisses in the memory box, so that you can pull one out when you want to remember?’

      ‘I know,’ she said, excitedly. ‘I could put Mommy’s lipstick on Daddy and then he could kiss pieces of paper and then we could put them in the box.’ She giggled.

      Daniel and I looked at one another with raised eyebrows. Creativity had wrapped the pain of imminent loss in delight. His kisses would survive long after he was gone.

      ‘Daddy, what do you think? Will you do it?’ Emily asked.

      ‘Of course,’ Daniel said.

      We talked then about other ideas for objects to go in the memory box. Children sometimes choose favourite photographs from vacations or celebrations, or saved letters or cards written from one to the other. Some parents write letters to their children or make audiotapes or videos of them reading favourite stories. Children might pick items of clothing, or jewellery, or objects from nature like shells or rocks collected from a special beach. They might paint and decorate the memory box together.

      ‘Will you bring your memory box to show me next time you come?’ I asked Emily. She nodded.

      Children need to make preparations, too.

      Lin asked her daughters if they wanted to see their dad after he died and they both said they did. Daniel had been admitted to hospital suddenly one day when his pain had escalated and he died forty-eight hours later, from what the doctor thought was likely a blood clot. Lin thought the girls might want to do something special for their dad, and she left it up to them to decide what they wanted that to be.

      Emily asked Lin if she and her sister Claire could take all the petals off the flowers in the vases along the window ledge, and she had agreed. The girls then slowly and carefully pulled the petals off each flower and piled them up on the tray table next to the bed. There were tulips and lilies, anemones and roses, petals of all sizes and colours, and some that still held fragrance. The girls carefully overlapped the petals, one at a time, and shaped them into the words ‘WE LOVE YOU DADDY’ on top of the white blanket covering Daniel’s lifeless body. All the while they did this, they chatted to him, telling him the stories they would never forget.

      3

      RACHEL: Pod of Orcas

      Rachel asked me to check the small lump on her inner right thigh, just above her knee.

      ‘It feels like a cyst,’ I said, my fingers palpating the interloper just under the surface of Rachel’s skin. I didn’t think for a moment it could be cancer. Malignancies are usually fixed and hard to the touch.

      Rachel had been a bedside nurse, like me, for many years before she became a nurse educator and I became a clinical nurse specialist. Every summer for ten years we registered for the same Therapeutic Touch workshop, on Orcas Island, to enhance our skills and catch up on each other’s lives. Rachel and I always looked forward to it.

      My phone rang a couple of weeks later.

      ‘Brace yourself,’ Rachel said. The pause felt interminable. I could hear her rapid breaths. ‘The lump you felt on my leg is a sarcoma. My oncologist told me he might have to amputate my leg.’ Her voice cracked.

      ‘Oh, shit. I’m so sorry, Rachel,’ I said. I knew not all sarcomas required such radical surgery, but I also knew that if surgical amputation was given as an option with such an aggressive cancer, they were going for a cure. This diagnosis would mean several hours of surgery followed by multiple rounds of chemotherapy and months of rehabilitation. Just three weeks after celebrating her sixtieth birthday, Rachel would have to find more fortitude than anyone should have to. She had already gone through breast cancer ten years earlier, but this was a new primary cancer, a different beast altogether.

      ‘Sarcoma is not good, is it?’ she asked.

      I inhaled deeply but didn’t want to pause for too long before I answered. ‘It depends on the pathology, doesn’t it? Let’s not get too far ahead until we have more information,’ I said, trying to suppress the fear swirling in the pit of my stomach. The cancer was one nightmare, the amputation another.

      Rachel didn’t need me to say, ‘Hey, you’re a fighter. You’ve been through cancer before and beaten it. You can do it again.’

      People become disoriented and vulnerable when the fear of death snatches ordinary life out from under them, the moment destiny reveals itself. It’s not the time for bravado from friends.

      Grappling for words that were slow in coming, I tried to push my love down the phone line, hoping she’d feel it.

      ‘I wish I was with you right now. You’ll get through this, one step at a time.’

      I heard the whimper of her crying and felt the urge to move the conversation along. Had Rachel been in the chair across from me I’d have held her hand, my love more easily conveyed through physical touch.

      ‘What happens next?’ I asked.

      ‘I’m coming to town next week to see the surgeon, Dr Lestin. Have you heard of him?’ she asked.

      ‘The word on the street says that he’s the best, though he doesn’t get such high marks for bedside manner,’ I said.

      ‘If I had to choose one quality over another, I’d rather he be good with his hands than be a good listener, wouldn’t you?’ she replied. ‘I can get my emotional support from other people.’

      ‘I suppose,’ I said, wishing he could be one of those doctors who was an expert on both counts. The doctors I know who are brilliant surgeons and excellent communicators understand it is the emotional relationship, as well as the expertise, that builds resilience in people to tackle what would feel impossible without both. We rise up to meet an experience when we know someone cares about us.

      ‘Could you come to the appointment? Another set of ears would help. Michael and I will be pretty stressed out,’ she said.

      ‘Of course.’ I knew she’d be there for me if I were in the same spot.

      A few days later, on a rainy November day, Rachel and her husband caught an early ferry to Vancouver. They were sitting side by side on beige plastic waiting-room chairs at the hospital when I tracked them down. The room was packed, though nobody conversed; an eerie quiet that exuded uncertainty. Michael held an unopened newspaper on his lap and rested one arm loosely across Rachel’s shoulders. His forehead wrinkled as he gazed at the wall of patient-education brochures across the room. Rachel looked surprisingly cheerful. She wore a long indigo cardigan over black jeans and her deep blue eyes intensified the white of her thick, straight, shoulder-length hair.

      ‘Hey there, Janie. Sorry to get you out of bed so early,’ Rachel said brightly, as she stood up to greet me.

      ‘Couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be,’ I said with a grin. I hugged her, then Michael, and sat down on the only vacant chair.

      Forty minutes after the scheduled appointment time, a nurse called loudly from the nurses’ station, ‘Rachel McLeod. In there.’ She pointed to a door and walked away.

      The doctor’s office looked like a physiotherapist’s room, with coloured gym balls of different sizes pushed into one corner and a collection of weights stacked neatly along a rack in another. Wheelchairs, walkers, crutches and canes were set along one wall,