LIFE WITH A CAPITAL 'L' Chapter FOUR, sec. THREE
LEANING – Lean a Lot
What a year or two this family recently involved me in. First, our friend Cal Gregg was dying of cancer.
“I know you walked through this with Linda,” he said to me one day over coffee. “Will you do it with me?”
I felt a great kinship to a long-ago Nehemiah who when confronted with a hard question from King Artaxerxes became “dreadfully afraid” so he “prayed to the God of heaven.” Dreadfully afraid, we began that very day. Then, his incredibly talented and bright sixteen-year-old son Chris began meeting with me regularly so he could talk and figure. Over the phone, over pizza and soft drinks, or hot tea and popcorn, he challenged my brain and spirit.
“If you must hurt, hurt well,’ he heard me say once and decided he wanted to do that. We worked together on how to hurt.
Nearly daily by phone or visit, I caught up with his mom, my friend and neighbor Nancy. Nancy’s parents were on an extended visit from Ohio. Her father, too, was undergoing chemotherapy treatments. That the Gregg family hurt is an understatement. But never does only one thing go on at a time. There was more than hurt at their house. Great joy was brewing around their eldest son, Roger, a familiar figure to me since he and our son Gordy were high school buddies. Now, fairly well recovered from an unchosen divorce, he was dating everyone’s favorite person, Gloria, a twenty-nine-year-old beauty with a great love for the Dodgers baseball team and an exuberant involvement with high-school kids in her church.
How nice for me that Gloria and I frequently met together before Roger entered the picture. Our fortnightly occasions quickly became “smile all night” sessions where she evaluated and celebrated falling irretrievably in love. But, not the half was known—to anyone. Forgive the pun—it was a leanyear for the Gregg family.
In late summer Roger and Gloria became pregnant. They leaned. I supported. For well-founded reasons but not perfect ones, we agreed that since they were nearly thirty years old and not seventeen, since pregnancy was a fact and there was no plan to change that, since they needed to confirm their commitment to one another and not only to a pregnancy, since they anticipated some flak once the news was out, they needed some time. They wanted to settle their own issues before dealing with responses of family and community.
I urged them to be courageous enough to chart their own course, to marry and tell when the time was right for them, not “because of” and not for people who count on their fingers the months before a child is born. Darned if they didn’t take me seriously. I was beginning to fidget as they delayed, as seasons shifted.
Near November’s end, Roger visited his father, Cal, and observed the absence of familiar humor and hope. Cal was depressed, weary with pain, suffering effects of chemotherapy, willing to die. Roger knew he held a powerful distraction.
“Dad, you have to keep living. Gloria and I are getting married soon, and you are going to be a grandfather. If the baby is a boy, we plan to name him after you.”
A grandchild! His first. Cal had new incentive to live, to fight cancer. And fight he did. This country-western music lover started humming the “Gloria” at the oddest times and wore his son’s secret as a perpetual grin.
No one had a wit quite as quick as Cal’s. One near-Christmas day I dropped by their business to see Nancy. Cal was there and “knew I knew.” He signaled me aside and after a brief greeting said with gentle irreverence, “You know, I remember another special woman who got pregnant before she was married, and it worked out really well that time. I think it will this time, too.”
Well, it did. They waited to be married longer than any of us would recommend. I mean waited.But in December they married in deep, committed love. The brouhaha it caused, a powerful one and not without some justification, blew over for the most part by April when their beautiful son was born and named for his paternal grandfather. Cal lived till June, long enough to go bananas over his his grandchild, to pour love and blessing on his new, radiant daughter-in-law, and to be comforted in dying by cradling a child bearing his name.
One thing the independent, self-sufficient, private Greggs had to learn in that very hard period of small scandal and large disease was to swallow pride and lean—a lot. Cal was best at it. I was proud of his allowing friends to learn with him about dying, to assist him in it. Roger and Gloria caught baskets full of criticism from very righteous people; I, too, for my manner of supporting them. But they leaned a lot and astounded me by their composure. Some people were saddened or angered by the loss of Gloria as an ideal model of a Christian single woman. That Roger was her first sexual partner, that she did not abort a baby, receive less attention than the fact that when she chose to be sexually involved, she did not immediately resign from working with high school kids. If my counsel or her concern were perfect, she surely would have; it would have saved much grief. But, she and Roger did a good job of leaning in a gale of criticism. They had a complicated start, what with grieving Cal, disappointing some family members, shocking people generally, and settling into marriage and parenthood.
Chris worked to understand criticism lodged against his older brother. He struggled with reactions of his peers toward him as he privately absorbed the pain of his father’s illness. He worked hard to shoulder the effects of loss. Chris just was not always himself. Buddies wanted him to focus on baseball, and good grades, and girls, as he usually did, but now reality was basically bad news. One sweet friend, Kathy, walked especially close. Some worked hard to understand Chris, and Chris worked hard to understand others. All in all, he has grieved well what we all wish never occurred. But his mom, Nancy?
My dear friend Nancy is likely to give away the bulb out of her only lamp, lend directions and a siphon hose to a car thief, and publish her cherished, secret recipe. Nancy habitually gives. She prefers not to lean. Ever.
In the beginning of Cal’s crisis, she behaved like an independent primate. In fact, she increasingly tended others but refused to accept tending to the point that people wondered if she understood the situation. In truth, she was so aware, so terrified, so unaccustomed to needing support that she retreated. Nancy was a well-constructed braided rug unraveling. Eventually, she was forced to repair or ruin. She opted for repair.
In learning to lean a lot she allowed three important things. First, she allowed her friend, Sue, to organize a broad group of people to assist her; driving her father and her husband to doctors appointments, running errands, ironing, preparing a few meals, visiting, assisting Cal when he was finally forced home for good, generally covering chores impossible for Nancy who now assumed full responsibility of a small family business. F.O.G. was formed—Friends of Greggs.
Nancy allowed Hospice to enter the picture. Hospice counseled, taught the family how to set up and prepare for Cal’s dying at home, supplied nursing visits at the necessary time. Then, on a more intimate level, Cal and Nancy allowed the development of the “Grapple Group.”
We really meant to find a better name, we seven couples that met together. We meant to grapple with some hard experiences under a better name, but we never found one. So, for well over a year, we met every other week, studying Scripture, praying, supporting, sharing communion, meals, and deliberate community. We sponsored a laugh night for Cal, learned to talk about unspeakable subjects, learned to commit ourselves to one another, learned that while the Greggs were our primary concern, every one of us needed help. We learned to keep laughing, hoping, caring while we cried together. We learned to assume tasks that the Gregg could no longer personally tend, to prepare well for an unacceptable eventuality. The Gregg lean grew great, and the Grapple Group was strong enough to let them lean a lot.
The requirementfor leaning is a change of posture—attitudinal posture. No more pride about standing up straight. No more hyper-independence, no more isolation within a group meant to be healthy by reciprocation. Emotional health requires a tilt, like walking in a strong wind. The wisdomof leaning lies in learning how much support you need in order to stay on your feet. Leaning and its affects on others can vary as greatly as the slaps of an ocean against the shore. Effective barriers range from reef grasses or short concrete walls to massive stacks of boulders or deeply driven pilings, depending upon the level of force that strikes. Leaning a lot, wisely, means acknowledging great need, yes. It also means not asking reef grass to do the holding work of boulders, not calling for boulders when a small wall will do. A lot of leaning requires a lot of vulnerability and usually more than one person to catch the force of crashing reality. Cal was instantly ready. Nancy learned to lean . . . a lot.
COMING UP: When a Lean Isn’t
A cry for help that rejects reciprocation describes not leaning but using
