“We don’t know that, Jack. You have to promise me they will never return to America, to his abuse and rage, to my cousin who betrayed me. This is home to them now.”
“I promise, Joy.”
“Will you go to them?” I took his hand in mine. “They need you, and they love you, Jack. You know that, don’t you?”
“As I love them.” He kissed me and left as a father to my sons.
I settled back into the pillow, into the floating anesthetic. I’d been exhausted for so long, and now I knew why—I was dying.
All my searching and doctors and wondering, and then the labeling of fibrositis and rheumatism and hypothyroidism . . . hadn’t God known all along? Hadn’t he seen the cancer growing, eating away at my insides? Could he not have intervened in human form? Sent a doctor to diagnosis it long before it ate me alive?
How could my body have gone on destroying me while I mustered my courage and resolve to rebuild a new life? My body worked against me as I tried hard, so bloody hard, to start over? Couldn’t one doctor of the dozens I’d seen notice that cancer ravaged my body? That it coursed through my flesh?
I wanted to cry, “Thy will be done.” It would be the best thing if I could, but instead, alone in that hospital room, I wept long, hot tears of despair and begged God for a miracle.
CHAPTER 52
I would create myself
In a little fume of words and leave my words
After my death to kiss you forever and ever
“YET ONE MORE SPRING,” JOY DAVIDMAN
March 1957
Maybe I deserved all of it—the five months of surgeries and pain and vomiting, the weeks of fear and hospital transfers and inexhaustible disease. Maybe this had all been accumulating with each terrible thing I’d said or done in my life to beset me at forty-one years old. But did God work that way?
No.
He was not meant to be bargained with as he doled out punishment.
My leg was set and plastered and my ovaries clipped out; evidence remained in the form of crooked black stitches that ran along my stomach like tiny spiders. My breast lump had been excised—the cursed lump I’d known about all along but that had been dismissed. Radiation to the hip under groaning machines, and I’d swallowed medicines I’d never heard about before. The cursed-awful list of cancer’s sites: in the left femur, the left breast, the right shoulder, and the right leg.
During these months I went from experiencing the mystical peace of God to black doubt and the abysmal dread of annihilation. But in the end, did I really believe all I claimed to believe? Did I believe God could exist at all? Or was he just like my Fairyland—a tactic to navigate life, imagining there was something more, something better, something out there that I’d longed for but that only existed in dreams? Maybe, just dammit maybe, there was nothing but being human and being in pain and in suffering until there was nothing.
In a ledger I could list the reasons I deserved this fate. I could list and I could flagellate myself, but the vile cancer was doing a just fine job of it all by itself.
Dear God, love finally arrived, and you will take me? Are you that selfish? That jealous? Is this my payment for loving Jack with such fierce intensity? For finally finding a life of peace? Or did I conceive you of my own making for consolation?
As Orual cried out to the Grey Mountain in defense of her love for Psyche, so I cried out to the God I’d felt and believed in and surrendered to in my boys’ bedroom all those many years ago.
You will give me great love and then sweep me to the heavens—if they exist at all?
But did I believe God punished? The old wrathful God who smote his enemies and burned their cities? I was no better than Job or Jonah, railing against my lot in life. Just when it seemed everything might work out, that I might have the life I’d dreamed of for very, very long, I would die?
All my life I’d pushed too hard, tried too much, attempted to convince the head what only the heart can decide. But dying now? When I understood the grace of surrender? When love had arrived? What cruel injustice.
It took weeks, but I slowly emerged from that parched desert of doubt stronger in my faith than ever. Through reading and prayer, holding tight to Jack as he absorbed my doubt and pain, talking until we couldn’t find another word, Jack and I found if not peace, then acceptance. Grace, I wrote to Eva, arrived as I prayed. Whatever my fate, I would be able to bear it with Jack at my side and my Creator’s love surrounding me even as the doubt appeared and disappeared like smoke from the past, whispers of the woman who shadowed me and mocked my belief.