GODSTUFF: One Family’s Story Of Amazing Grace (a.k.a. How God Girl Got Her Groove Back)

GODSTUFF:

ONE FAMILY’S AMAZING STORY OF GRACE

(a.k.a. HOW GOD GIRL GOT HER GRACE GROOVE BACK)

On Thursday, I learned how to make turkey gravy for the first time.

I also learned how to find grace — as well as its accompanying posse of joy, hope and love — again.

I had an excellent teacher: Kim Kalicky, a remarkably plucky woman with the voice and spirit of a pixie, and the heart of a lion.

Kim is the sprightly matriarch (if someone in her late 30s is actually old enough to be considered such a thing) of the Kalicky family — Allyson, 14 (whom they call “Sonny”); Taylor, 10; Jacob, 8, and the proud papa bear, Tom, a paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department whose appearance and demeanor fall somewhere between Richard Dreyfus and Shrek on the cuddly spectrum.

I met the Kalicky clan earlier this week after Tom, who had read my column last week about my mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer and a host of other unpleasantness that has beset my family in recent days, sent me an e-mail saying he and his family were praying for me and mine.

In the last week, I’ve received hundreds of e-mails from big-hearted folks offering their best wishes, prayers and advice. My family and I are so grateful, so touched by the kindness of strangers.

All of the notes moved me and I thank you, again, for them. But there was just something special about Tom’s note that made me track him down. I wanted to meet this man and his family. I just had to. You’ll see why. . . .

Tom sent me the short note simply because he wanted to comfort and encourage me. I don’t doubt this for a second. His motive was 100 percent altruistic. He didn’t want anything from me. He wanted to give me something: hope.

Tom told me not to give up on my faith or on God. “I just have to remember [God] loves me, cares for me and wants what is best for me, even if I don’t see it now or have a clear picture of the big picture,” Tom wrote.

And he should know because he’s a modern-day Job.

His wife is battling cancer and hasn’t been able to work since February. The Fire Department just reinstated him on the job this month after he injured his back carrying a stretcher nearly two years ago. Their 16-year-old son was causing so much trouble at home that they had to send him to live with family Downstate and most recently he’s been expelled from school, they said.

The day Kim got out of the hospital earlier this fall, her 88-year-old grandfather called to say he’d lost his home and had nowhere to live, so they moved him into the basement apartment of their modest home on the Northwest Side. Despite trying to work out a payment plan with their bank (I won’t name it but it rhymes with “grace”), the Kalickys are facing bankruptcy and while Tom was working a 24-hour shift earlier this week, two men showed up at 8 p.m. to repossess Kim’s car — four days before Thanksgiving.

I thought I had troubles.

Kim, who is a nurse at Loyola University Medical Center, has Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She has been battling the disease since 2004. After surgery and rounds of chemotherapy, doctors thought they’d gotten rid of her cancer. But it came back less than a year later in January 2006.

After a couple of rounds of high-dose chemotherapy over the summer, Kim had a stem-cell transplant (using her own cells) in August, and so far, she is cancer-free. Doctors tell her she has a 50-50 chance of the cancer returning.

“We’ve got hope,” she tells me, her eyes twinkling through her long, thick eyelashes, the ones that have just grown back after the chemotherapy killed them off a few months back. “And we’ve got joy! We’ve always got joy!”

Rather than her signature long blond hair, Kim is sporting a fuzzy blondish do. “I think she looks like G.I. Jane,” Tom says, clearly pleased.

The Kalickys, who are born-again Christians, laugh a lot. These are not sad sacks.

“I feel closer to her than I ever have . . . closer to God,” said Tom, who married Kim in 1995 after they met in the emergency room of Chicago’s Columbus Hospital. He was a paramedic delivering a patient. She was the nurse on the receiving end.

“I’m not cocky or arrogant, I just have hope,” Tom says, by way of explaining their inexplicable joy. In the Bible, “Paul wrote to pray by being thankful for what you have then ask for what you want, and you will receive a peace that goes beyond understanding. I believe I finally grasp that now. I can only hope the same for you.”

Laughing as they retold the story of Kim’s car repossession, the couple said they believe God has a plan and is in charge, even — and perhaps most especially — when hardships come their way. After Kim’s car was repo’d, they took the money they would have used on a car payment this month and bought Christmas presents for the kids. An unexpected blessing.

Tom had to work a 24-hour shift on Thanksgiving, so Kim and I made dinner for her family Thursday. We had a blast. She taught me how to make turkey gravy and scalloped corn, and we talked about our curious affection for cranberry sauce out of the can. Nobody else in her family likes it, but it HAS to be on the table. And it must be from a can — preferably with the can lines still intact and disgorged from its container with that satisfying “ssshhhwwuuunnnk” noise.

Standing in the Kalickys’ kitchen, we all cheered when Kim finally managed to free the frightening maroon goop from its tin prison. It was a moment of true joy. One of many.

After 10-year-old Taylor said grace, we each went around the table and said what we were thankful for. Taylor said her mother. Sonny said that her mother was cancer-free. Jacob said he was thankful for “duncher” (that’s what the kids called our dinner/lunch/supper meal) and for God.

Kim said she was thankful for her family, for the people in their lives who have been so loving and kind — the family has been especially buoyed by their fellow members at South Park Church in Park Ridge, who have brought meals, helped with transportation, money, and loads of spiritual support.

Kim also said she was thankful for me.

I didn’t even know where to put that. I am so grateful for her and her family, for their generosity of spirit, for their contagious joy and hope.

I said I was most grateful for my new friends, and thankful for grace. For being able to find it again, here, with them.

“That’s what pastor was talking about last week — grace,” Sonny piped up. “He said that we’ll never deserve it, ever. It’s a gift that we’ll never, ever, ever deserve.”

Her mother interrupted, saying: “Yes, but we get it anyways.”

“Pass the butter!” Jacob demanded.

“Don’t forget your cranberry,” Kim singsonged across the table.

And in unison, her smiling children responded, “NO!”

Earlier this week, in a more somber moment, Kim said that she has to believe that “all the pain and suffering I’ve endured for the last five years,” was for a reason.

“There has to be someone who still has a lesson to learn through this,” she said.

I raised my hand.

“I volunteer. Let it be me,” I said. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

Hope abides. Joy is overflowing. And grace is free.