I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.
Ether 12:27
We Knew Him
We knew Him long ago Before we crossed the veil Of forgetfulness Our Father’s firstborn Son The Great I Am Glorious Creator Immortal Jehovah Yet when He came to earth Clothed as mortal man His own knew him not Despised Him Rejected Him Crucified Him Would I have known Him For what He was? Would I have known Him In Bethlehem In Nazareth In Jerusalem Or on the cross As He died for me?
After we buried Mom in a cemetery where the mortal remains of many family members lie; after Lynne, April, and Alan had driven away from the empty house, heading for California, I returned to New York and resumed my job at the newspapers’ production desk. Over the next year, I began to write features for our special publications.
In the spring of 2006, the editor of special publications left to have a baby, and I presented myself as the best candidate for the job. My bosses agreed and I was promoted. It was a big responsibility but I threw myself into it with energy and enthusiasm.
The summer issue of the Long Island Wine Press was already under way when the most famous wine critic in the world published the latest ratings for Long Island wines, and the news was excellent. Many regional wines received high marks. The excitement in the wine community was palpable. Joining in the excitement, I scrapped the plans for the issue and turned it into an all-out celebration of the winning wines and winemakers.
Time was short. With David as my photographer, I visited and interviewed every single winning winemaking team in a matter of days. My energy was at fever pitch as I zoomed from appointment to appointment. One day my managing editor commented as I sped by her, “You seem to be in your element.” In hindsight, that comment proved ironic in the extreme.
While I worked frantically to finish the summer Wine Press, I was still in school, just nine credits shy of completing my degree in the history of religion. It was time to decide which seminary I would attend and how I’d pay for it. I was hoping to get a grant to cover much of my tuition. In fact, I was counting on it. I was sure the fact that I was an older woman returning to school to become a minister would be unusual enough to warrant special consideration.
After the summer issue went to the printer, my pastor and I took the Long Island Rail Road to Manhattan to visit Union Theological Seminary, her alma mater. I talked with the dean of admissions and picked up the applications for admission and a grant. My pastor showed me around the campus and we sat in on a class and a moving worship service. I was excited to be so close to the last step before realizing my goal of becoming an ordained minister. Following the visit with my pastor, I completed and mailed my applications for admission and a grant, fully expecting positive results on both counts.
Around that time, I became obsessed with thrift shopping. We had great thrift shops on the North Fork, and I’d loved shopping for clothes ever since I’d lost forty pounds on a strict gluten-free diet. I had been diagnosed with celiac disease, and the special diet needed to heal my gut had taken my extra pounds off fast. I needed a whole new wardrobe, and thrift shopping became a thrilling treasure hunt.
The trouble was, as that summer wore on, I found myself unable to drive past a thrift shop. The siren call of size-small designer clothes compelled me to stop and shop. My closet and dresser filled up with clothes, but I kept bringing more home and stuffing them in.
A few weeks after I sent in my seminary applications, I got the good news and the bad. I’d been accepted contingent on completing my undergraduate degree, but no grant would be forthcoming. It turned out that older women who wanted to become ministers were a dime a dozen. In order to attend seminary, I’d have to take out more student loans on top of the debt I’d already incurred. As I considered that, plus the fact that I’d never earn more than a modest salary as a minister and that I could be sent somewhere David and I might not like, something collapsed inside me.
Of course, I’d known all along that I wouldn’t make much money as a minister and that we might have to move away from a place we loved, but I hadn’t allowed myself to dwell on those inconvenient facts. I’d assumed I’d get a grant and hoped there would be a vacancy on Long Island when I graduated from seminary. It had seemed so far in the future, and I’d assumed everything would work out for the best.
Now reality set in like a bucket of cold water over my head. With dread in my heart and a sick chill in my stomach, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I couldn’t incur thousands more in debt that would take decades to pay off. I couldn’t drag David away from our little piece of paradise to who-knew-where.
Over the span of a few days, my precious call to the ministry dissipated like smoke in a high wind, leaving me to wonder if it had been real. What if it had been a delusion all along? What if the voice I’d heard in my head and the feeling in my heart were symptoms of madness? Mental illness runs in my family. My brother Alan was schizophrenic, several family members suffered from clinical depression or anxiety disorder, and Mom had been certain a grandfather who’d been given to sudden violent rages was bipolar. What if I was sick, like them?
I recalled the night I had awakened in the wee hours and written down a hundred ideas for sermons in a few minutes. I had attributed that episode to divine inspiration, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was mania? And what about my compulsive thrift shopping? Was that another symptom, not merely an eccentricity?
My old nemesis, depression, reached up and dragged me down again. Somehow I kept working, but during sleepless nights on the couch, I longed to disappear into oblivion, as if I’d never been born. I never would have killed myself. I knew how devastating it was to lose a beloved family member and I couldn’t do that to David or my family, but I yearned to be gone from this world of confusion and pain.
I have no record of how long I endured in that state. I told no one that my “divine” call to the ministry had evaporated into thin air. I’d been so sure of that call, and so obsessed with pursuing it for the past three years that couldn’t admit it might never have been real.
I was sinking into a mental and emotional quagmire, barely able to hold myself together at home or at work. It was torture to get out of bed in the morning and worse torture to go to the office and pretend I was fine. Of course, David saw that I was suffering, but he didn’t know how to help me, and I couldn’t talk about it.
Knowing I couldn’t go on that way, I got on the phone and finally found a psychiatrist who could see me right away. He diagnosed Bipolar II, a milder form of Bipolar illness, and started me on two medications. With that diagnosis, I convinced myself that I’d been suffering from some level of illness for many years. I didn’t know if that was true, but it provided a handy excuse for my foolish choices and aimlessness of the past, so I grasped at it.
Within a few days of starting the medications, I was on a more even keel. My highs and lows leveled out and I was able to function more or less normally again. After a while, I could even laugh at my “low-rent” hypomania: compulsive thrift shopping. But the way I’d felt was no laughing matter, and I was so grateful for the medications that kept those feelings at bay. After a few months of faithfully taking my meds, I wrote this poem:
Bipolar II
Two little pills, One to keep my rocket mind Within earth’s atmosphere, One to stem the silent slide Into gray despair, Have bound me to myself again. The chaos years, Whole decades hocked To phantom aspirations, No pill can reclaim. Now is the day of my birth, Now I take this vow: Not a day will I let fly But that I mark its fleeting beauty And praise its tender worth.
I kept going to church for a while, but without that powerful call, my heart wasn’t in it. Then a few congregants who were unhappy with our kindhearted pastor’s liberal interpretation of doctrine ganged up and forced her out. Church services weren’t the same without her. I stayed long enough to help find a new pastor, but after that, I stopped attending and quit my studies.
Over the next few months, I became more and more convinced that my return to faith had been driven by mental illness triggered by the events of 9/11, and that my call to the ministry had been a delusion. I’m sure Satan delighted in convincing me that all religions were born of wishful thinking fueled by delusion. Before long I was firmly back in that “great and spacious building.”
After returning to the Church, I confirmed the fact of Satan’s treachery in prayer to my Heavenly Father. The still, small voice of the Holy Spirit told me that yes, it was Satan who convinced me that my call to serve God’s people was a delusion caused by mental illness. Heavenly Father’s plan all along was to reclaim me for his faithful daughter, and the adversary pulled out all the stops, using my weakness to try to derail that divine design for my life. The king of lies delights in every victory. I fell victim to the adversary’s deceit, but not forever.
Since my return, I’ve wondered if my call to serve in another church dissolved because I’d learned everything Heavenly Father wanted me to learn from the preparation process, and it wasn’t part of His plan for me to actually become a Presbyterian minister. Whether or not that’s true, my Father knew exactly what I’d do, and He prepared my path for my good. During the next several years I would learn many important lessons in patience, love, empathy, and service, lessons He wanted me to learn on my way back to Him.
A few months earlier, while I was still singing in the church choir, a fellow soprano had noticed what appeared to be a group of light-and-dark freckles on my left shoulder. It looked nothing like the images of cancer online, so I thought it was harmless and ignored it. Later, in September 2007, I went to a dermatologist for a different reason and she noticed that small cluster of freckles on my shoulder. Suspicious, she took a biopsy and sent it off for examination.
Those innocent-looking “freckles” turned out to be melanoma. I have fair skin and blue eyes and I grew up in coastal Southern California. There was no such thing as sunscreen back then, so every trip to the beach meant a sunburn, many of them blistering. Although I’d stopped sunbathing many years before, all that early exposure had taken its toll.
The diagnosis of a potentially deadly cancer sent me into another tailspin. A first cousin only six months older than me had died of melanoma several months earlier. Many years before that, my Texas grandfather, a fair-skinned, blue-eyed farmer, had also died of melanoma. So, even though my dermatologist assured me in a “good news/bad news” phone call that my melanoma was at a very early stage, I was terrified, and not only for myself. If I died before David, who would take care of him? He was nearly twelve years older than I was and had serious heart disease. I’d always counted on being there until his last breath. What would happen to him if I went first?
Panicked, I spent the next several months researching everything I could find online about melanoma, even after the excision confirmed that my own melanoma was at a very early stage and there was no evidence of metastasis, so I didn’t need radiation or chemotherapy.
My mind and my life became consumed by the possibility that I’d die before my time, before my beloved husband, and he’d be all alone as he declined toward death. Having rejected the comfort of faith in an all-knowing, all-loving God, I had nothing to lean on and no one to turn to.
I sought confirmation of my melanoma diagnosis from the famous cancer center in New York City, Memorial Sloan-Kettering. When their laboratory reached the same conclusion, stage T1a with no evidence of metastasis, I felt reassured and began to calm down. I did my six-month follow-ups with a melanoma researcher there and my life returned to its new normal: secular, medicated, and relatively smooth. I had banished God, and I thought I was doing just fine without divine help. I knew nothing of the light of Christ that still burned in my unbelieving heart. I never imagined His light was the source of my belief in eternal life and the ground of any goodness I possessed.
In the run-up to July Fourth weekend in 2010, while we were preparing for a houseful of company, I forgot to renew my prescriptions for Depakote and Wellbutrin. By the time I noticed I was out of my medications, the pharmacy was closed for the holiday. I faced the busy three-day weekend with trepidation, but nothing bad happened. I felt fine. When the weekend was over, I decided to keep going without the medications, watching my moods closely and enlisting David’s help. Days went by, and then weeks and months, and I stayed on an even keel.
I wasn’t aware at the time that this could happen, that if you took your medications faithfully for a long time, there might come a day when you could do without them. I certainly don’t recommend doing what I did; in fact, I strongly caution against it. It can be dangerous to stop medications all at once without a doctor’s supervision. I was fortunate not to experience any harmful effects. I was also well-practiced at monitoring myself and fully prepared to resume the medications if necessary.
Later that year, there was a change in management at the newspaper office, and I began to chafe under increasing micro-management of my work. I was nearing retirement age anyway and I started to consider leaving my job. David and I discussed this and arranged our finances to make my retirement possible. I started cutting back on my work schedule. A few months later, I resigned. With my new free time, I wrote and self-published a romantic suspense novel and started two fantasy series. I loved having all that time to write the stories in my head.
Three years after I retired, on August 25, 2014, I looked out the kitchen window and saw David struggling to climb the few steps from the yard to the deck. Alarmed, I opened the door and announced that we were going to the emergency room. He protested at first, but I got him into the car and drove to the nearest hospital.
When I entered his hospital room a little while later, the doctor told me David’s heart had stopped in the examination room. By that time I’d lost track of how many times he’d almost died. He was suffering from a severe arrhythmia and urgently needed a pacemaker. An ambulance transported him to a larger hospital over an hour away and a pacemaker was implanted on August 27.
Thus began a round of visits to an arrhythmia clinic in addition to David’s regular visits to his cardiologist, and thus began a new worry to add to my others. Not only was David in danger of a heart attack or stroke from occluded arteries but now his heart might go wild or simply stop beating.
David came home the next day and all seemed well until early October, when he got a call from the arrhythmia clinic to come in for a checkup. That checkup turned into another hospital stay to replace his malfunctioning pacemaker with a new one.
Along with his pacemaker, David was put on a very powerful and potentially dangerous drug to control his heart’s rhythm. That combination seemed to work. With remote monitoring and frequent clinic visits, emergencies were kept at bay for a while, but David was slowly sinking into depression over his deteriorating quality of life. He’d always been very active in between medical emergencies, but now he began to lose weight and strength.
In January 2018, with a blizzard imminent, we drove to the distant hospital for a procedure to correct a severe arrhythmia his pacemaker and medication couldn’t handle. I slept in a recliner beside his bed for four nights while they tried to stabilize his heart and finally performed the procedure to shock his heart back into its proper rhythm. He was released on January 7, but we were back just over a month later, during another snowstorm. This time it was to open up the same artery where his first stent had been placed, the one they called the widow-maker. Medical technology had advanced to the point where they could place a smaller stent inside the first one.
After that difficult winter, David’s health declined ever faster. He became anemic because his kidneys were failing. We both learned something new: the kidneys play a crucial role in producing red blood cells. When they fail, anemia sets in. He was referred to a blood clinic for regular iron infusions, but they couldn’t start them yet because his red cell count was dangerously low. We were sent to the local hospital for a transfusion of packed red cells. Then we started a new routine of weekly trips to the blood center for either an iron infusion or, if his iron level was sufficient, a shot of Procrit to boost his kidney function.
Over the following months, David grew alarmingly frail and more and more depressed. And then COVID-19 reared its hideous head.
David turned eighty-four on March 11, 2020. Somehow he mustered the strength to enjoy a lovely lunch at our favorite restaurant. We talked and even laughed over the delicious meal, but our enjoyment was tinged with the unspoken fear that this would be his last birthday lunch.
People who were born with David’s heart defect before the age of modern surgical techniques seldom survived to old age. Whenever he saw new doctors, they were always amazed to learn that he had been born with Tetralogy of Fallot. The latest to be amazed was his doctor at a pain clinic. David had also been born with severe scoliosis. His body had compensated well for his crooked spine, even creating a kind of flying buttress of new bone to hold it in place, but the wear and tear on his hip joint had begun to cause serious problems. More powerful medications were prescribed to alleviate his debilitating pain. I couldn’t help thinking that all the powerful drugs that were keeping David alive were also, paradoxically, contributing to his decline, but what choice did he have?
The COVID lockdown started in New York on March 15, 2020, four days after David’s birthday and our last restaurant meal together. After that, my life was devoted to keeping him safe from COVID. I wore a mask every time I left the house, and often surgical gloves as well. I set up a table on the front porch where I sprayed every package with disinfectant before I took it inside.
I found ways to work around shortages of toilet paper and disinfectants and suffered panic attacks in the grocery store. Terrified that I’d contract the virus and take it home to David, I went out as little as possible. Except for doctor visits and the time he spent in the yard struggling to do a little gardening, David was a virtual prisoner under house arrest.
I had no doubt my vigilance was necessary, convinced that if David got COVID-19, he would die alone in a hospital. Long before the pandemic, I had made a silent vow that I wouldn’t let my dear husband die in a hospital stuck full of tubes, and that I wouldn’t let him suffer. I was prepared to do whatever was necessary to keep him from suffering. Now, all I could do was watch him suffer.
I don’t know when David first fell. He didn’t always tell me when it happened. He tried to spare me because we both knew what it meant: His illness and his frailty had progressed to the point where he couldn’t last much longer.
I drove him to the blood clinic every Friday for his iron infusion or shot. We tried to make a joke of it, saying, “Oh, goody, it’s Friday! We get to drive to Riverhead again!” But the news was increasingly bad. David’s kidneys were on the verge of shutting down. Dialysis had been mentioned, but that wasn’t indicated yet.
During the COVID lockdown, when David needed only the Procrit shot, visits to the blood clinic were drive-in, with a masked nurse coming out to the car to take his blood and then bring the shot. When he needed to go inside for an iron infusion, they wouldn’t let me go with him. I had always sat with him for that hour; now I had to wait in the car. He couldn’t walk without a cane by that time, and increasingly he needed a wheelchair to make it down the long hall at the clinic.
During this time of David’s rapid decline, I had only myself to rely on. Having rejected the concept of a personal God, and thanks to the isolation imposed by COVID, I faced the impending loss of my beloved husband alone. The nearest family was our niece, whom I’ll call “Susan,” in Philadelphia. We were close emotionally, but she couldn’t come to see us while the deadly virus raged. I’d never been one to talk on the phone much, and that didn’t change. True to my stubbornly independent nature, I suffered my anticipatory grief in lonely silence.
Memoirs of a Prodigal Daughter 