a severely strained relationship will be suddenly transformed in the face of grave illness because one of the people involved decides to reach out and let bygones be bygones. However, illness sometimes brings people together in spite of themselves.
These types of situations are opportunities to put spiritual principles into action, to try to practice unconditional love, for example. In that spirit, we reach out lovingly with no strings attached, without the expectation of a certain response or result.
How do we break through a long-standing barrier for the first time? The best way to express our feelings is simply, slowly, and with great clarity: “I know how sorry you are about my illness and that you care very deeply. Just knowing that brings me a great deal of comfort.”
Following that, we can demonstrate our sincerity through encouraging gestures and actions. If we’re still having trouble rebuilding the relationship, we can enlist a parent, brother, or sister to help make our feelings clear.
THOUGHT FOR TODAY
Love lives on.
March 12
“Hope, that with honey blends the cup of pain.”
SIR WILLIAM JONES
Because my pain often attacks suddenly, it just as suddenly retreats, and then without warning roars back again; combating it requires as much guesswork as strategy. Even when my guesses are on target, the weapons I select from my pain-control arsenal—medication, meditation, or distraction—rarely eliminate the pain entirely but only temper it. To compound the challenge, what works well one day may not work at all the next.
Yet there’s one approach I can always count on. When pain is raging and resistant, I’m better able to cope when I’m at my best emotionally. Having said that, I must quickly add that emotional strength doesn’t come to me out of the blue. It requires cultivation, a willingness to focus on positive expectations rather than negative projections, and a shift in attitude and outlook from desperation to faith.
I’m healthiest emotionally, and thereby better able to transcend pain, when I have strong positive feelings toward others. The times I have feelings of love and appreciation for my friends and family members are the times I experience the deepest sense of well-being.
THOUGHT FOR TODAY
Can I focus less on the physical and more on the emotional and spiritual?
March 13
“Comparison, more than reality, makes man happy or wretched.”
THOMAS FULLER
You talk to a woman who had the same kind of cancer that you have. She was diagnosed and treated quickly and three months later her cancer was in remission; no surgery, no radiation. Your hopes soar and so do your expectations. Then you hear about someone else who was diagnosed in January and died in March. Your hopes vanish, your expectations turn wholly negative, and you fear that death is inevitable and imminent.
Obviously, comparisons of this sort are not in our best interest. The single most important factor in dealing with cancer or any other life-threatening illness is that nothing is typical.
Certainly, there is no typical patient; we all have different experiences. In the case of cancer, for example, there are not only many different forms, but also different levels. Symptoms also are different for each of us; so too are the preferred treatments and our responses to those treatments.
To be sure, we can learn a lot by listening to the experiences of others. However, it’s essential that we do so objectively and with a degree of detachment; otherwise, we are likely to turn our open minds into closed ones.
THOUGHT FOR TODAY
I can’t assume that my illness will behave and respond exactly like someone else’s illness.
March 14
“Honor a physician with the honor due unto him for the uses which ye may have of him: for the Lord hath created him.”
APOCRYPHA, ECCLESIASTICUS 38:1–3
My friend phoned me to vent her anger; when she was finished she said she felt better. Then she apologized, thanked me, and hung up. The focus of her fury was her oncologist, who had been insensitive and detached as he rushed her through a weekly checkup that morning. “I felt like one of fifty faceless patients passing through on a conveyor belt,” she fumed.
We’ve all had similar experiences and feelings during visits to doctors. At one time or another, every one of us has been rushed, patronized, or treated disrespectfully. Following such episodes, it is tempting to conclude that physicians care less about medicine than they do about money and that the most important charts in their lives can be found in the financial sections of newspapers.
The truth is that few doctors choose their specialty purely for financial gain. Once we are over our annoyance at the slight we have experienced, can we really believe that any doctor can counsel hundreds upon hundreds of patients, many critically ill and some terminal, and remain unaffected by other people’s pain?
THOUGHT FOR TODAY
Do I unfairly disparage all doctors as “callous and greedy”?
March 15
“When the frustration of my helplessness seemed greatest, I discovered God’s grace was more than sufficient.”
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Illness usually takes us by surprise, slipping into our lives like a thief in the night. Before we have a chance to regain our senses it can strip us of our carefree spirit, our dignity, our self-confidence, and as much as anything else, our once-strong sense of belonging.
Thieves always take and never give, so it’s hard to imagine gaining anything from illness. Yet, over time, we have indeed gained at least one highly valuable asset, humility, which had always seemed well out of our reach.
In the past, many of us arrogantly believed that we would be healthy forever; self-centeredness convinced us that we were somehow immune to the realities of life. When illness brought us to our knees and showed us just how vulnerable we were, that’s when we gained our first measure of humility. Only then was it possible for us to graciously ask for and gratefully accept help.
Illness also taught us to recognize and accept our powerlessness over people, places, and things. We became better able to see ourselves in perspective with others and the world as a whole. We gained a true sense of what is important and what is not.
THOUGHT FOR TODAY
