Cold vs Cancer

Friends are Friends Forever part 2 of 3

A year into our time on Oahu, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I was also 16 weeks pregnant with our seventh child.

I was grateful then that I had a year to make friends and weave our family into the Navy community before I had to make a “withdrawal” from those friend-accounts. Looking back I can see now that, I hadn’t yet learned what Henri Nouwen describes to a friend in his book, Life of the Beloved, a book I’ve recently read.

“Over the last few years, I have been increasingly aware that true healing mostly takes place through the sharing of weakness. Mostly we are so afraid of our weaknesses that we hide them at all cost and thus make them unavailable to others but also often to ourselves. And, in this way, we end up living double lives even against our own desires: one life in which we present ourselves to the world, to ourselves, and to God as a person who is in control and another life in which we feel insecure, doubtful, confused, and anxious and totally out of control. The split between these two lives causes us a lot of suffering. I have become increasingly aware of the importance of overcoming the great chasm between these two lives and am becoming more and more aware that facing, with others, the reality of our existence can be the beginning of a truly free life.”

A letter to a friend written by Henri Nouwen

Because of my diagnosis, I was able to move to on-base housing. This made the drive to my cancer treatments easier and put our family within a few short minutes of our good friends, the Bouldens. My friend, Cathie Boulden, was also expecting a baby with her delivery date within weeks of mine.

All friendships need each to navigate one’s own weaknesses as well as the weaknesses of the other. On one phone call during this time, Cathie and I were doing our usual check-in reporting with a little bit of commiserating about our challenges. In the middle of it, Cathie paused, and I sensed her moving away from the conversation.

“What is it? What’s bothering you, Cathie?” I asked.

“Mary, how can I complain about my cold when you have cancer?”

There it was. My troubles seem insignificant in comparison to yours.

“Cathie that cold is your big trouble today. My cancer is mine. Don’t think you can’t share it just because of what I have going on. “

Cathie and I had many opportunities to share our sufferings in our almost 20 years of friendship. Many of these sufferings we inflicted on ourselves or each other! I can’t overstate that! We also shared some heavy losses, at various times in our friendship: losing parents, losing children, losing friends, having cancers. We grew together, often having to relearn the lesson that sufferings aren’t for comparing but for sharing. This not comparing our lives also applied to the good things that happened in each other’s lives.

Forever friendship lesson #2: Sufferings are part of a real friendship. I am grateful for a friend with whom I could face the unfiltered reality of our broken existence and be free with one another.

The griefs we shared and suffered together were firmly anchored by that line from Michael W Smith’s song, Friends are Friends Forever.

And friends are friends forever, if the Lord’s the Lord of them.

Michael W. Smith

Our mutual trust in God allowed us to put trust in the gap when our empathy was lacking for each other.

Cathie personalized her email signature with a bit from Proverbs 3:5 –

Trusting in the Lord with all my heart.