Crescent Shadows On-Line Newsletter of the Hudson Valley Pagan Network, Inc.

As the doctor crossed the busy ER to our cubicle, my stomach clenched as I could read in his eyes what he was going to say. “There is a tumor in your son’s right testicle, and while we can’t know for sure, it is most likely that it is cancer.” My husband’s knees buckled and he climbed onto the gurney next to our two year old son. I seemed to step outside myself and turned to watch my own reaction. I saw myself thinking, “I am being punished. This is my punishment for all the bad things I’ve done in my life. This is my fault.” Then I looked at Griffin smiling at the doctors and nurses, amusing them with his newfound vocabulary, lisping out stethoscope and gurney. I saw Russ, his face drained of color, eyes closed, and visibly shaking. I heard my own drama of guilt and punishment. In that moment I realized we had abandoned our son. We were so caught up in our fears of losing him that he was lost to us right then and there. We were reacting to a death that had not yet occurred; one which might never occur. I stepped back into my body with a firm admonishment to myself: “This isn’t about you; this is not happening to you, this is happening to Griffin.” As the doctor told us that our small son would be operated on in two days, I realized that if I chose fear Griffin would be left to experience all of this on his own.

In an article last fall in the Times Union, Celine Ottoway described an experience in which she grappled with thoughts of her own demise as she faced a possible health crisis of her own. Her own son was the age that Griffin was when he got his diagnosis of cancer. She made the statement that she realized in that experience that death was no longer something that happens to us, it was something we do to someone else. She was contemplating leaving her son motherless had her health crisis been as dire as it could have been. As a woman whose own father died when I was only fifteen, I would agree that death is something “done” to the surviving. But Griffin was not dead and I was reacting as if his death were already fact! I realized I could not waste my time considering that my child would die if there was any way I was going to help him fight the cancer and win. I could not fantasize about my own grief, nor even about what hardships might lay ahead for my child should his prognosis be poor. I could only think of what he might need right now, in this instant.

I believe that we all have the opportunity in each passing moment to choose success instead of (or in spite of) failure. I was shown in that terrifying moment that if I chose the drama of my fear, I would fail my son miserably. I would pour all of my energies into coping with that fear which, paradoxically, usually means keeping it sharp and alive within us. We can’t help but play the worst case scenarios that leave us bereft and inconsolable. And while I wasted my energies battling phantasms of what might never be, my son would still have to go through the surgery, the tests, and, possibly, the chemotherapy and all its attendant horrors. Somehow in that awful moment as Russ collapsed into fear I saw that choosing fear would put out an energy that could only draw to us what we feared most. Be careful of what you imagine might happen, because it just might occur. But what could I choose instead of my fear? What was the beacon of hope I could steer toward? What would take place of the word cancer in my mind?

While going through the endless hours at the emergency room, many questions were asked and answered. Two of them were when did you notice the change in his testicle, and when do you last recall it as normal? The answer to the first was easy, the answer to the second part less so. But as I reached back into my mind for the answer, it came to me in a visual image, clear as day. My son loved to do the “nakey dance.” The nakey dance consisted of hopping rapidly from foot to foot then taking off and racing through the house shouting, “Nakey dance! Nakey dance!” Cool air against his skin, little penis flopping in the breeze. Just a night or two before the morning I made my grim discovery, Griffin did the nakey dance. And for some reason that I can only wonder at now, I looked at his testicles as he ran by and noted that they looked normal. On the one hand, a mother is always appraising the condition of her child and so this is not particularly surprising, but on the other there is the feeling that I was committing that snapshot of his genitalia to memory. So that when I was asked when they last looked normal, that visual image came to me in a flash and I could say, “Thursday night.” Of course, hindsight colors memory, and there is a danger in reading too much into any particular moment, but the fact remains: I chose that night to commit my child’s physiology to memory. And that became the beacon in the dark night of childhood cancer: I had found the tumor early, as early as I possibly could have.

 The tumor was removed on Valentine’s Day of 2001. We heard in a day or two that the tumor had indeed been malignant. It was only left to determine if the cancer had spread, if so, how much, and what to do next. Over the next six weeks Griffin underwent many tests. His doctor consulted with experts across the country and the verdict came back: Stage 1 cancer, no evidence of spreading, no further treatment recommended, he would be monitored closely.

When I tell Griffin’s story today, people express their horror and their sympathy. How did you handle it? they want to know. I would have been crazy with fear, they say. How awful that you had to go through that. I agree that is was an awful thing to live through, but I still feel strongly that it was Griffin who went through it; it was Griffin who looked Death in the face and came away with the blessings encounters with that particular god can provide. First of all, there was the blessing of the medical community that cured my son. Each doctor, nurse, and technician fell under the spell of Griffin’s charm. So many told us how special they thought Griffin was and how they personally prayed for his recovery. Then there was the blessing of prayer itself. While I am a Pagan, that should not be confused with having no faith at all. I have a great faith that was made all the greater by this experience. Christians especially have difficulty in understanding the commonalities that Paganism shares with Judeo-Christianity. We do pray. We may call it meditation or spellwork, but it is a similar process, nonetheless. When I learned my son was ill I asked anyone and everyone I knew, of any faith at all, to pray for him. And, as miracles are wont to do, this request started locally and ended globally. With the request sent from person to person, the prayer circle grew. I know this because at first I got e-mail from my friends of whom I’d made my request. In a matter of days, I was receiving e-mail from people I had never met and probably will never meet. E-mails came in from all over the country and eventually from as far away as England! I was both humbled and filled with joy at this experience. Of course, the greatest blessing of all was his prognosis: The doctors believed he would experience a 100 per cent cure.

I was fortunate. My son would not be the child in the waiting room just beginning to re-grow his hair. He would not be the child in the wheelchair, impossibly thin, with a scar that started at one ear, traced a path up over the top of his head and ended at the other ear. He would not be the child in the picture on the flyer for Rosie’s Foundation who had died at age three. My son would survive, and he would survive with a minimum of hardship. I would not lose my son and I had been granted another gift: I had learned that we need not be victim to our fears. That to give in to fear is to invite that which we fear to come and dwell with us. That to give in to fear is to commit an ultimately selfish act as it requires us to remain locked in our egos, still believing that we are somehow the center of the universe. To face fear head on, to stare it down and say, You only have the power that I give you, and I choose to starve you out, is to recognize that anything less is an excuse not to live. It could very well be that I could have made this choice and still lost my son. Would I still feel the same as I do right now telling our story? I believe that I would. No matter what the outcome, I would have been there with Griffin, experiencing all that he was meant to experience alongside him, without the scrim of Fear obscuring my view of him.

I am fortunate. I was able to learn this incredible lesson of faith with a minimum of loss. It is true that had we lost him, his death would have happened to us. But while he was living, I was damned if I was going to start mourning him while he was right here in front of me, a living, breathing, flesh-and blood child.

Another unexpected gift of this lesson was that because I chose to set aside my fears I was able to pick up and move on when it was all over. Russ, who had more difficulty in coping with his fears, had more difficulty in letting go of the experience once it was over. And, understandably, he experienced me as being somehow callous through the whole thing. It all came to a head one night when he accused me of that callousness and how he didn’t appreciate my behaving as if it was all over. When I pointed out to him that it was, essentially, over, he shouted at me, “It won’t be over until someone tells me nothing will happen to him ever again!” In that moment he received his own gift. Before I could say anything, an odd look passed over his face and he said, more calmly, “I guess then it will never be over, because there are no guarantees like that in life.” And with that he finally let go of his fear and his anger and joined us once more in the land of the living. Not choosing fear is not an easy accomplishment. I believe that if something else comes up that evokes the fear of loss; I will have to make the choice all over again. But I hope that I will always remember just how much is possible if we can be brave enough to leave our fears behind. --Jennifer Simon

Return to HVPN Home Page

This page visited  times.

Last Updated: February 14, 2002
Copyright 2001-2002 - Hudson Valley Pagan Network