Enduring to the End

It's funny that we usually think of enduring to the end as holding true to our beliefs and standards. Yet, I'm finding that enduring to the end can mean much more in a close and personal fashion, such as dealing with a spouse with ongoing health issues.

I remember when I was fourteen, and my mother was dreadfully ill. We were living in a city that was 90 minutes from where my father worked, so for one year my father commuted home only on the weekends, leaving my mother to handle most of the challenges of three children. Unbeknownst to my father, my mother had a brain tumor, and she hid from him how bad her symptoms were. It was in a day and age when medical technology was very limited. For two years she suffered from increasing pain, but the X-rays showed nothing. At one point, her doctor sent her to a psychiatrist, who in turn talked with her for a few minutes and sent her back to her regular doc with instructions to tell him to find out what was really wrong with her.

She was trying to endure to the end--to hang on for my brother's graduation from high school, when the rest of us would be together again. We had lived in our home for four years before my father was transferred to the Philippines for two years. It was there that she first manifest symptoms. When my father's tour overseas was completed, he was stationed on a base only 90 minutes away. As my brother was going into his senior year of high school, my parents opted not to have him attend a completely new school but returned to the old neighborhood and school system of two years before.

However, her condition continued to deteriorate until she was no longer able to hide it from my dad. That was a terrible time. She had always done the mom things like laundry, but now she was bedridden, in dreadful pain, and I found myself having to do things I had no experience with. The hardest thing was watching someone I loved and admired suffer, while I was completely helpless to do anything to bring her surcease. Fourteen is too young to find out the hard truth that there is very much in life we have absolutely no control over, and there are many things--too many things--we cannot make better.

My parents made arrangements for her to see a specialist at a Naval hospital in the Bay Area. Once they made the decision to hospitalize her, my poor father was in an untenable position. His wife was in Oakland and his children in Sacramento. So he got keys to new quarters just made available on base, drove to our old house and told us to pack up because we were moving. My brother helped us with the move the next morning and stayed in the empty house for the couple of weeks until he was done with school.

It was a scary and lonely time. My father had his job and visited my mother while they ran tests. My little sister was enrolled in school since she was only in first grade. I was close enough to the end of the school year that they just counted it as good. My existence was solitary, because school is the easiest way to make friends. The hospital creeped me out, and I didn't go with my father to visit my mother as often I should have--a decision that I was soon to regret.

They found the tumor and operated on Friday, June 6th. My maternal grandmother came for the surgery. I remember waking the next morning at 6 a.m. to the sound of the phone and my grandmother's crying. When my father passed my room, I called to him, and he told me the hospital had called to say my mother had taken a turn for the worse. He said it meant she was either dead or dying, and he and my grandmother were driving to the hospital.

I got up and tried to watch some Saturday morning cartoons while I waited. It seemed like an eternity. I remember laying on the couch as I heard the door open, and I leaped up and stood waiting to hear. My father, tears streaming from his eyes, said only that we'd lost her, and we clung to each other and sobbed. I will always remember that moment, with the sound of my poor grandmother crying that her baby was gone. I feel bad now, thinking that we didn't reach out to her at that moment, consumed with our own grief. She must have felt so alone.

I find myself in a similar position now. My poor Ed is suffering so much, and once again I am helpless to assist. He's trying so hard to endure to the end, but each of his days are filled with so much pain, I don't know how he does it. I think I would curl up in the fetal position and check out, yet he perseveres in spite of it. I get frustrated when his pain overcomes him, and he lashes out completely out of proportion with the irritation. But I wonder how I would act if I had to carry the burden he does every single day, every hour. He is such an inspiration in his adversity.

But I'm only human, and the challenge of one member of a family is never that person's alone. It becomes the challenge of everyone. While it can help us to be stronger, it also drains us of energy and, sometimes, hope. When someone hurts so badly all the time, there's never a time when my own pain or depression has any meaning. I am forgotten, alone. So I find that enduring to the end for my sweetie means enduring to the end for me as well.

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much. ~Mother Teresa