Re: Tell Us Your Story

jazzyjett — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:15:27 -0000

Brandon,

I have no clue what you've been through, how you've felt or how you feel, or what you've done or not done to help your loved one as well as yourself press on in spite of such unseemly and distressing circumstances particular to cancer. Perhaps if I were writing this to share wisdom and sage I might suggest the possibly curious readership to give my first run on sentence more than a cursory glance or Associated Press (AP) method of hooking a specific audience.

Hardly. I will not write with a long bow and tell anyone of my pain and my family's angst and grief over the past 12 months. While it is a story that I am quite certain would evoke emotion and provide pause for some varied implications of life's purpose, its fragility, and a collective human being implicit awareness of knowing nothing about what the future holds. It is common sense and thus, implicitly understood by all, as clearly we cannot be emotionally affected/effected by experiences, information, and perceptual responses to what time does with people without asking our collective or collaborating approval. It is to come and as the worn out adage protests, "What we don't know will not hurt us."

My story is seemingly the world's story that most of Americana's life style and rather hurried fast lane living affords us, perhaps, to conveniently remain silent or stifled in discussing the root of the fruit of immunological diseases like Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, Sarcoma, breast tumors, brain and bone neoplasm, etc...

It is taking me time to get to the point and I suspect more than a few readers (if they have hung around to this point) may question if I even have one. My answer: I do and it is solely related to the variable of time and our hurried, worried, stressed, depressed, defeated ways - all of which we rarely glean as a major "Dis-Ease".

During one of my graduate study courses, the physician teaching this class went into great depth about what the worried, fretful, obsessively controlling, overly efficient “productive member of society” mentality compulsions and slapdash “values” of predictability related to such morose time conscious rumination actually and factually did to our immune system. Like what "Cancer" cells do as they divide, when malignant, and even when not, keep dividing to conquer what one's future holds. An enemy within!

"Everyone worries! It's just human nature so don't tell me to stop worrying. It's become part of my life and I'm in a false sense of control when I worry about my mortgage, my unsowed lawn, my co-worker's sarcasm, and my obligation to make a few moments to be with my family. C'mon, it's part of life and 'as soon as' I get that raise, the new job, the new wife, new car, the vacation, the right to slow down long enough to think for myself about what I've been doing to not just me but those who I say I love, everything will be okay and the worry won't be there."

I suspect the hypothetical and embellished above remark might hit home with one if not multitudes. My wife will awaken this morning for the first time in her life without her mother, Shirley Vaughn. Easter morning’s sunrise service was something they did since my wife was in her late teens. They continued to do it together a few years after we married. Shirley was a prompt and responsible woman with a heart of gold. After the small-cell lung cancer was verifiably her diagnosis and she informed of it, her world and our worries both stopped and started respectively. Her very being did and she later remarked after some chemo under her frail waistline’s belt that she enjoyed not thinking of time. Yes, literally not giving time the time of day. Why?

Right at 45 days later, my brother received the diagnosis of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma with cancer discovered inside his bone marrow. This is stage four cancers because of the severity, which has, less than favorable implications. He had been living with the untreated cancer in his blood for what the doctors stated had to have been over a year. Steve just did not know but he noticed he was not speeding up. Steve is still going forward, but not as fast and nearly as strong. He will be here in the morning for Easter with his eight-year-old daughter, six year old son, and beautiful life mate he married in 1996. Steve is a driven person or was. His office at a big firm called Taft in Cleveland, Ohio overlooks the lakes that ebb and flow. The view is still the same, but he now states he finally notices the hue of the sunrise. Why? How you perceive life is how you will live it my friend.

My mother has planned to go up to Cleveland in a few days for my brother’s extensive surgery to remove his thyroid and other surrounding tissues. His prognosis really does look okay right now.

Why? He is living, NOW! Moment by moment, giggle-by-giggle, good night prayer by good night prayer. He is partnered with that part of his life now and perceives the partnership track a thing of the dreaded past.

Happy Easter.

"He makes me lie down beside still waters…” Why? You know why. You really do.

Love,
Brian G. Jett

PS. Work from approval, never again for it.

I compose jazz guitar scores because that is what I love to do. Others seem to enjoy the melodies and I believe I understand. They are written and recorded from the heart, never a dreadful task contrived from the head. I will not worry today. Life is short; death is sure, sin the curse, Christ the cure.

April 12, 2009, 5:41 AM

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Re: Tell Us Your Story