What You Cannot Have (A List). This insightful piece, by the same poet who wrote “The List” (posted here several days ago, was in my email inbox this morning. I quickly posted a comment on Bluebird’s blog. This writer is REALLY good. After last night, I needed this more than my morning coffee. As I said on the blog, “A bluebird just flew by my window(s program).” Whoever you are, Bluebird, thanks for flying by, and…thanks for this delicious cookie.
“You have ca… You have can.. cancer. But we think it’s treatable.”
I read The List early this morning, the day after hearing a doctor tell a wonderful older couple the news. The full bone scan tells a different story. It can be treated with radiation, but at what price for an old man already writhing in unbearable pain? My friend has been on “the list” once before 20 years ago. Now he’s back on it, this time for good. He’s a strong man, but not that strong, not immortal, not invulnerable. The treatment will not stop it this time. Morphine and lots of love will see him through until he’s off the list for good.
My step-daughter, Katherine, was placed on “the list” at age 30. She was exited the list at 34. Her ashes are on the mantel now. Her courage, her buoyancy, her steadfast refusal to let being on “the list” define her, her compassion for the doctors and nurses who “treated” her with surgery, chemo, more surgery, radiation, lasers, and morphine, and for us, the members of the family to whom she brought so much delight, have left us with so much more than what’s left on the mantel.
I’ll post a piece written during the third year of Katherine being on “the list” later today. Look for “It’s raining; it’s pouring.”
For now, share your stories with a comment here, or go to Courteney Bluebird’s blog and comment there. All of her work is remarkable and worth the visit.
Purple-yellow iris (Kay Stewart photography). Poem by you know who.
Purple-Yellow Iris
Sometimes I feel all blue
Sad Sorry Down
Like the Blues
A Rhapsody in Blue
Sometimes
When the Blues
Begin to play in me,
It happens –
Blue bursts into purple
Leaping into joy
And a burst of sun-burst yellow
Comes crashing through the blues
I feel all clean
All wet All up
Like a hymn
An ode to purple-yellow joy
This morning Steve Shoemaker sent me his poem (see below this painting, “Christ after the Flagellation“) by Murillo. The “comments” below are a running conversation. Chime in.
Christ after the Flagellation
The human had been tied to the whipping
post, a pillar that had been used many
times before by the Romans (and ages
earlier by the Greeks–but for a much
different purpose). Now, his pale skin looks
translucent (should it not have been darker,
with more blood?) His mother recalled his bris.
They had both cried then, too.
A strong young man, broad back, thick arms, now on
hands and knees, but head raised with eyes open:
seeing a cross that’s even worse ahead…
Still, unflinching, resigned–no, determined
to go on, face more pain, indignities,
shame, even death (there is no sign of God.)
Steve was a classmate at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. We’ve been friends for 47 years. A published poet, Steve was the Senior Minister of the McKinley Presbyterian Church and Director of the McKinley Foundation (campus ministry) at the University of Illinois for many years. He hosts “Keepin’ the Faith” on WILL, Illinois Public Radio, and lives in a geothermally-heated house on the prairie outside Urbana, IL where his neighbors often spot his kites riding the winds of the prairie skies.
Views from the Edge 