Cancer

Many beat it daily. Others valiantly succumb. Some wish for death.
Black Hazel wished for death.

My Aunt’s biopsy was positive for cancer today. The last bout our family had with cancer was with Black Hazel, my grandmother. She was diagnosed in the last stages of the disease. For years doctors told us, it was acute rheumatoid arthritis. After $10,000 shots, acupuncture and any other remedy plausible, we all found ourselves transitioning from the hospital to hospice.

Knowing wasn’t power, it was futility.

Black Hazel was more an ideal than she was my grandmother. Her daughters never embodied her fortitude, elegance and wit. She was beautiful, bourgeois. She did more work than her housekeeper and was rewarded after decades of servitude — with a shopping allowance.

My grandfather was the frugal businessman and politician but my grandmother was an inventor. If his profit was her venture capital, our family would be vacationing from the proceeds of infomercial success.

Her death, for me, was the burial of an era. Yet, I digress.

Now, my Aunt, her eldest born will be tried. The severity of which, I am uncertain. It will change our fragile family dynamic. I am worried. Hopefully, we “caught it,” and surgery, treatment and a renewed lease on life will follow. Hopefully.

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A woman, puts checks in my hand. The memos read, “Pray for my healing.” My faith flutters. I have to use the topical concordance to pray the Word. I struggle to accept the comfort in knowing that we will be healed “on this side of heaven, or the other.” I’ll need to write those “healing” scriptures on index cards, stuff them in my travel bible and be the family minister — hoping, praying that God will heal; trusting in his timeline, learning and articulating life’s lessons along the way.