I just spent way, way too much time wrapping presents — which is partly an illustration of the material abundance in the Actuary household, and partly that this year we ended up with a lot of smaller presents instead of just a couple big-ticket items. Also, my husband went to bed early because he signed up to be the 4 AM link in a prayer-chain (yeah, he initially thought he would kill two birds with one stone: he was scheduled for the 3 – 7 AM PADS shift — the rotating-churches homeless shelter — but then he was replaced with a father-son team, but still has the 4 AM alarm set, and he’ll wrap additional presents afterwards).
The prayer chain is for a friend of the family, and fellow-assistant-scoutmaster, who was diagnosed last week with stage 4 kidney cancer. He’s started radiation treatments (no chemo for this type of cancer), and is in a clinical trial for a new treatment and is hopeful (at least outwardly) that this will help him defeat the otherwise-bad odds. This is the sort of circumstance in which we all would throw ourselves into providing meals and so on, but nothing’s really happened yet, except the diagnosis. My husband and I also talked about whether they’ll need financial help, with out-of-pocket medical costs and income loss (depending on what his sick pay benefits are), down the road. But in the meantime, another friend put together the prayer chain, through the magic of SignUpGenius.
This follows on the sudden death of the father of one of my son’s classmates last spring; the family was well-known in the church. And he was my age, more or less! (I’m 45.)
Also: when my youngest son was a baby, we tried the “Moms Plus” group at church for a couple weeks. One of the other moms, with a baby my son’s age, was dealing with the fact that her daughter was having seizures; at the time, she was visiting specialists looking for a diagnosis.
Now, my son was late in developing. When he was a just past a year old, and wasn’t walking, wasn’t crawling, wasn’t even close to crawling, we got a referral from the doctor and had the Early Intervention team come to evaluate him. That was a very difficult day: we were told, “your son is developmentally at the level of a 6 month old.” Very hard to hear, as you can imagine, and he spent the next year in physical therapy and occupational therapy, and until just before age 3 in speech therapy.
The good news is that either the therapy had its intended effect, or he truly was just a late bloomer developmentally, and now, at age 7, he’s doing just fine.
But I periodically saw mother and daughter at the therapy office, and now I periodically see them at church, and I don’t know the degree of the girl’s disability, but it is clear that things didn’t work out just as well for her, since, well, either she’s unable to walk, or doesn’t walk well, because I see her mom or dad carrying her.
So I find myself with mixed emotions. In the first place, I’m grateful that things worked out for us. (My other sons have other issues, but that’s another story.) But even the very concept of “gratitude” implies, “God blessed us with, in the end, a typically-developing child” — and at the same time, didn’t bless the G—- family, not to mention the C— family that lost a father/husband and the N—- family that’s now dealing with cancer. And yet — I admit: I’m glad it’s not me widowed at an early age.
In any case, of course, it’s a reminder that, even though the days of losing multiple children to an early death (made clear when I was doing my genealogical research a couple years ago) are gone, the notion that we can expect our lives to be free from these tragedies is a bit blind to the realities of life.
Anyway, it’s late, and I’m having trouble formulating things precisely. So I’ll just end with the usual cop-out question: what do you think?
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