6 skills I retain after 11 treatments of Chemo:
1. Putting on or taking off a turtleneck without losing the toothpick in my mouth.
2. Driving a car with my knees under the steering wheel. (On private farm property. Chemo pain meds keep me off public roads.)
3. Sleeping in any position: prone, supine, curled, sitting.
4. Writing light verse, and sometimes poetry.
5. Helping folks laugh.
6. Praying.
No kneeling after knee replacement,
But can still sit and bow my head–
So not yet
Prayers unanswered for another:
Disease, decline, and death–
But not yet
Aged, depressed, diminished,
But want to see tomorrow’s sunrise–
Still not yet
But when cancer has taken body and mind,
Life is lifeless, no pleasures are left:
Please pray for my peace, not my life.
I ain’t bein’ brave…
I ain’t FIGHTIN’ CANCER…
I’m just sleepin’ at night,
an’ waking up with the sunrise
so far…
I’m livin’ each day,
sayin’ thanks
for food brought by friends,
for stories, for memories,
for jokes fresh or tired…
I ain’t livin’ by faith,
or swearin’ at God.
I’m breathin’ by day
and conked out more hours
by night…
This is still life.
Steve sent this @12:26 a.m. today. Though fatigued, he had a “good day” with visits from his high school friend Gary, an 18 year-old he’s mentored since the fourth grade (clarification: since the young man, not since Steve, was in the fourth grade 😮), and a yoga instructor friend who helped him “straighten up in my wheelchair”:
The deer is lost – out of place – in the civilized world of pavement and traffic beyond the woods. It runs past us at break-neck speed, capturing the attention of customers in the coffee shop.
Such primal fear invokes a hush. Everyone is standing at attention now, hoping against hope that the beautiful frightened animal will make it across the bridge over the divided highway to the woods on the other side.
As it reaches the overpass, a car approaches from the opposite direction, startling the deer. With high wire fences on each side of the overpass, it races toward the car and then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it jumps 10 to 15 feet into the air, over the fence, plunging headlong to the berm of the highway 30 feet below. It gathers itself for a moment, wobbling up the hill to its right, and collapses on the entrance ramp like a lump of warm putty.
Fear is a deadly thing. The deer had lost its bearings in the man-made world where natural landmarks get displaced by bridges, and unnatural cliffs take the place of natural terrain.
The picture is etched in my mind. It wake me up early this morning thinking about mortality. The mortal vulnerability of a thing so beautiful and precious as a deer — the beauty and preciousness of all mortal life.
Death is the limit that binds together the viewers in the coffee shop with all other creatures. Fear is the acolyte of death – the unconscious or unconscious knowledge of our fragility, our ultimate dependence, our vulnerability to forces we cannot control, the reminder of our own ticking clocks, our time-bound nature within nature itself.
I’m sad for the deer. Sad for a civilized world that displaced it, confused it, frightened it to death. Sad over the sight of something so beautiful leaping so gracefully into the air, leaping into open space into the nothingness of death. Sad that something so lovely experiences such terror. Sad that it not know better; sad it did not take a breath and think before letting fear control its course.
Something in all of us at the coffee shop stood still for a moment at the Caribou — made us put down our coffee and touch this deeper place of vulnerability, watching this pantomime of our own inner lives, the too real to face reality of our struggles with anxiety, with fear, with death, with sudden and final extinction.
When the dear leaped from the overpass, Katie, my adult stepdaughter, put her face in her hands. Others of us could not take our eyes away, too stunned not to watch, staring in stunned silence in hope, at first, that the poor thing would get up and walk away from it all, that it hadn’t happened the way we’d seen it, plunged into the reality that the deer couldn’t just get up and walk away to safety.
Wendell Berry reminds us that we Americans are the descendants of the road builders — the placeless people who cut the forests, leveled the trees, and bulldozed their way to their ideas of what the world should be. says Wendell Berry in “The Native Hill.” Our European ancestors fled their familiar places to escape them. To build something better. Something freer perhaps, less restricted not only by law and custom but, more fundamentally, by the limits of creaturely life: time and space. They landed on the soil of the path walkers, the indigenous people whose foot paths wound their way harmlessly following the contours of the hills, rivers, streams and valleys.
Today is Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday, the day after the deer leaped into the air to its death, and the day Jesus walked the road-builders road in humility on a donkey. The liturgy reminds the worshipers that the grandest leaps — personal or collective —lead to tragic ends, but an essential goodness greater than ourselves surrounds every leap and every plunge.
Profs have found that it helps cancer’s pain
To take puffs of that old Mary Jane,
And our State says it’s great,
Docs write scrips for our trips,
But what cancer symptoms can I feign?
After My Death
(not a poem)
Remove
wedding ring (gold),
Watch (Timex–$35)
Glasses (blended, or reading)
IPhone 6+ (right pants pocket,
or still clutched in hand)
Buck penknife (left pants pocket)
(Wallet, keys, calendar on closet
shelf by front door)
Not to fear touching dead body:
does not look human, all people
turn gray (red, yellow, black,
and white–all the same color
when blood no longer
circulates–equal at the end.)
And all go from warm to cold.
To open phone: xxxx
-Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, March 11, 2016
Gordon’s note: Unfortunately I couldn’t post this in its original format which included indentations. Imagine everything under the bolded print indented and looking like a ski slope \ . We’re all on that downward slope. Some know it more than others. Some deny it. Some face it. Â Thank you, Steve, for the continuing honesty in the face of death. Honesty has not killed Humor or your continuing witness to an end of racism (“equal at the end”).
Steve talks about his battle with stage 4 pancreatic cancer last  Tuesday at his home south of Urbana, IL.
‘Lucky to have had the life I had’
Sun, 03/06/2016 – 7:00am | Melissa Merli,The News-Gazette
Steve Shoemaker talks about his battle with stage 4 pancreatic cancer on Tuesday at his home south of Urbana.
URBANA — Steve and Nadja Shoemaker’s contemporary-style home lies on a ridge south of Urbana, overlooking the prairie.
Through its tall windows, they enjoy magnificent sunrises and can see 30 miles into the distance. Even on an overcast day, they can pick out the wind turbines over in the next county, etched in light gray against the darker sky.
“If you’re going to die, this is a great place to be,” Steve says, sitting in a comfortable sofa on the south end of Prairie Haven, the architect-designed house he and his wife, a retired University of Illinois microbiologist, had built 10 years ago.
“I love the house,” Steve adds. “We have great neighbors and friends. I’ve been very fortunate. I feel like Lou Gehrig — lucky to have had the life I had.”
Lucky.
Fortunate.
The retired Presbyterian minister and University YMCA director, former Champaign County Board member, ex-radio host, poet and outspoken advocate for the less fortunate uses those words often.
He avoids “blessed” — he doesn’t believe in the “prosperity gospel” — as he reflects on his life of 73 years and the fact it might come to an end sooner than he would like.
Shoemaker was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer three months ago.
His doctors told him with chemotherapy he had six months to live.
He tells people he’s now into Month 3. He tries not to dwell on his cancer but will answer questions — though his daughter set up a CaringBridge website so his many friends and family can go there for updates.
He says his main symptom had been stomach pain, due to a growth that cut off oxygen to his intestines. Pancreatic cancer is usually deadly because the pain doesn’t come until it’s too late.
“In my case, it had already spread to the lungs and liver. The chemotherapy has reduced some of it so that’s a good sign,” he says.
Most days now, he’s without pain. But he feels the side effects of chemotherapy. Low energy. Fatigue.
He sometimes needs a walker or wheelchair. And he finds that his emotions swing.
“I’ll probably cry before you leave,” he says.
But he doesn’t, not until he points to two tangible markers of what he’s most proud of in his life besides his two children, Daniel and Marla, and his friends, among them self-described agnostics and atheists.
One trophy is heavy and glass and set on a windowsill. It’s the Intercultural Dialogue Award, given to Shoemaker in 2006 by the Intercultural Friendship Foundation for his efforts to bring together Muslims, Christians and Jews in a post-9/11 world, when he was director of the University YMCA.
The other, also made of glass, came from the Martin Luther King Jr. Advocacy Committee for Shoemaker’s 20 years of service.
“I’m pleased that part of the local black community felt that I did something worthwhile,” he says, choking up.
Many communities here, both off and on campus, feel the same way about Shoemaker. For years, he’s been one of the most visible, outspoken ministers in Champaign-Urbana, advocating for the poor, homeless, minorities, gays and most recently immigrants.
In 1998, he was designated a “Point of Light” for his work with the homeless while pastor at McKinley Presbyterian Church, where he helped set up a basement shelter for homeless men.
Besides his outspokenness, Shoemaker is visible for other reasons: At 6-foot-8, he usually towers above everyone else in a room.
And for most of the past 50 or so years, he’s worn a full beard. It’s gone now as a result of his medical treatment.
Earlier in his life, he didn’t get a pastor’s job in the Durham, N.C., area because he wouldn’t shave his beard.
“It was 1969, a time of hippies, protesters, malcontents,” he says. “One of the messages (of the beard) would be to accept other people,” Shoemaker told the pastor who was interviewing him.
“Sorry, that’s not a battle I want to fight,” the minister responded.
At the time, Shoemaker was working on a doctorate in religion at Duke University. He ended up preaching at two North Carolina churches for four years and spent eight as a Presbyterian minister on the North Carolina State University campus.
Then he and his wife, Nadja — they had dated while attending Urbana High School — returned to their hometown so Steve could take the pastor position at McKinley in 1981.
He doesn’t regret having become a minister, saying a Presbyterian campus ministry suited his liberal leanings.
He doesn’t regret returning to his hometown to live and work.
“I still have some friends here and still see some of them,” he says. “I played basketball with Gary Storm in high school. He moved back after he retired, and I see him fairly regularly.”
The only regrets he would mention: He wishes he would have been more organized and had made better grades in college.
Shoemaker, who played center on Urbana High’s basketball team, went to Wheaton College, a private Christian liberal arts school, though he had offers to play the sport at the NCAA Division I level. He played for two years at Wheaton.
“I wasn’t very interested in playing basketball,” he says. “I didn’t want to devote my whole life to basketball. It’s just a game. I never could care who won. I didn’t have the right attitude.”
He was more interested in literary pursuits. He had begun writing poetry in high school. At Wheaton, he worked for the school newspaper and literary magazine.
At the time, he didn’t want to be a minister. He wanted to be a writer.
He applied to writing programs but was rejected. His grades weren’t good enough.
So he applied to seminary, feeling he would like to be a social worker in a church agency. But he realized he wouldn’t like the bureaucracy.
At the time, he and Nadja were attending a Presbyterian church in Chicago, where 60 percent of the congregation was black.
“We loved the pastor and what he was doing in the neighborhood, trying to improve it,” Steve says. “I decided then I wanted to be that kind of pastor.”
Both Shoemaker’s father and grandfather had been fundamentalist Baptist preachers. At age 13, Steve began questioning that faith.
Eventually, he and his father mutually decided they wouldn’t discuss religion and would instead focus on the grandchildren.
Recently, though, Shoemaker’s three brothers came to visit Steve. They hired a Baptist pianist to accompany them as they sang the Baptist gospel hymns of their youth.
Steve has always loved to sing. He sang in many choirs, including The Chorale, a mixed-voice community choir.
He’s too sick now, he says, to sing with choral groups but he continues to write poetry, which he enjoys as an intellectual challenge more than emotional outlet.
Since his diagnosis, he’s writing mostly limericks. He titled a recent one “Ol’ Fuzzy Head.”
The nurse said I had “Chemo Brain,”
From writing, I just should refrain;
But I have the notion
That writing’s the potion
To retrain the brain to be sane.
He calls another one “When Cancer Patients Cry.”
It may mean nothing when you see
The tears, or when you hear the voice
Begin to catch and whisper. The
Strong drugs for pain remove the poise
And self-control. Emotions rule
Or
The patient, for some reason, may
regret the loss of family
And friends … Feel sorrow, not to stay
In this the known world, possibly
The only world. Hope fades, Faith flees.
Actually, his faith — Shoemaker’s 14-year WILL-AM radio show was called “Keepin’ the Faith” — fluctuates, just like anyone’s, he says.
“I hope for an afterlife, but I don’t think it matters much what I believe,” he says. “I think what matters is if there is a God that he’s loving, compassionate and merciful, and what that God thinks of me. I think God is beyond us, and we can’t comprehend it.
“How I live. I think that’s what matters.”
He also likes the Catholic belief that God has a “preferential option” for the poor.
“God’s eye is on the sparrow, not the eagle, on the people who are hurting,” he says. “That’s the God that makes sense to me.”
He admits to feeling doubt, fear and worry at times.
“Sometimes I’m scared thinking about how my spouse will do after I pass away and my kids and my two grandkids.”
But he says he’s not afraid to die.
“I’ve had a good life, and I’m grateful for it. I hope there’s an afterlife, especially for people who have not been as lucky as I have. I hope they will be compensated.”
When asleep I dream I am awake–
Time goes by, I learn that’s a mistake.
I hope when I die
I dream I am alive
I will take that good cake at the wake!
[Brother Dave: please bake your famous carrot cake in memory of that time I ate half of it…]
…and I Eat Lifesaver ™ Candy
The Doc said pancreatic Cancer,
No more a geriatric Dancer,
But may the gods bless her,
My Yoga instructor
Gives only a lifesaving Answer!
[Several of my friends practice
Yoga as well as Lutheran.
Presbyterian, or Episcopalian!]
Views from the Edge 