Imagine this…
I turned forty on Christmas Eve and as much as I’d like to regale my friends with tales of a blowout celebration, Jesus’ birth pretty much trumps my own each year — no matter what milestone I’ve hit. I know of only one other person (besides Nostradamus) who shares my birthday and we call each other first thing each December 24th just in case our other friends forget. She’s three years younger and won’t share crossing into the fabulous forties with me, but we did share a pregnancy (almost to the due date) and I feel I owe it to her and my younger friends to forge ahead into my forties with clarity, focus, ease and grace.
This has nothing to do with shoes, or makeovers, or finding new ways of defying gravity. What’s saggy is saggy. Deal with it and laugh. As my late grandmother always said, “Holly, you can’t turn a turd into a rose.” Thanks, Mrs. Egge. She loved Wild Turkey and died one week before her 92nd birthday. There’s longevity in both sides of my family so I’ve vowed to age with grace…and a little help from some mineral cosmetics, yes, but mostly my attitude. It’s all I have left that won’t sag, jiggle, darken with liver spots, break, rupture, split or explode. Maybe a little Wild Turkey will help keep my health, too. Who knows?
I found myself in the days and months leading up to Christmas Eve 2011 reflecting on the last ten years, and subsequently thinking a lot about every year that’s brought me to here. I didn’t bemoan this birthday. In fact, I was as excited about turning 40 as I was about turning 30. And I don’t really think about my age. I never did. Maybe I should. I still feel like I did in college. Sure, a few things have changed. I’ve got lines. A lot. Stretch marks from my baby, some battle scars, sun spots. My heart’s broken open since and a few of my bones have been rearranged, some aren’t even mine but a cadaver’s thanks to modern science that put me back together the summer of 1994. This is all on the surface, but on the inside, I feel like things are getting refined and I like that prospect about turning forty. I’m still working out several rough spots — aren’t we all, and am hopeful I’ve got time to work out the kinks and wear my age years from now as if it’s a diamond necklace.
I didn’t need a big party to acknowledge this milestone because every day of the last year, I’ve thought about other women my age who haven’t lived this long. I am only forty and some of my friends have already died, mostly women, and all from breast cancer. Some have been recently diagnosed. Others buried. Never easy news during the holidays. That’s why I wanted to write about my friend Renee Harcourt — a mother who survived. It’s also why I haven’t written about Laura Marquez (another mother) until now, because the timing wasn’t right. She was on the battlefield too often and any narration felt exploitative, even if it was well-intentioned.
Everything changed December 24, when I checked Facebook to see the smiling faces of friends near and far, grateful for their “big 4-0″ birthday wishes. I was about to close my email when something caught my eye, a letter from my friend and former colleague, Dan Christian, whose wife, Laura Marquez received some news about her breast cancer, which completely re-framed my fortieth birthday. I wasn’t just sharing it with Jesus. I was also sharing it with my friend Laura.
Anyone who knows Laura Marquez knows that sharing her company in anything is just about the best gift a friend can get. She’s a born giver. She’s hosted Oscar Parties at her house during her treatments. She connects good people, and where Laura goes many gather. My daughter has been fortunate to inherit her daughter’s wardrobe and even in the midst of Laura’s grueling treatments, she managed to clean out her garage and invite me on numerous occasions “to come up and shop.” She once told me that her friends often joked about her high level of organization during cancer, “You’re making us feel lazy.”
The only thing I could give Laura during her treatments was pizza and pasta, the only foods she could stomach at times, my presence, and a sense of humor. There were things I tried hard not to bring, my fear and my tears, which I fought every time I was about to see her. Still, what I could give her never seemed enough to me because I wanted to give her back her health. Along with a daily practice of gratitude, I asked for that every day of 2011.
Doing the dance of life: Laura Marquez and Daniel Christian at my wedding in 2008.
Laura continued to give to me and others throughout her battle with cancer. This time, inspiration. During her stage four diagnosis in 2010, Laura dove into the pool and reported swimming twenty laps and playing two hours of tennis the day she started treatments. At that time, she was taking oral chemotherapy and kept her hair. She didn’t luck out on that one during stage stage 4 metastatic breast cancer (2011), meaning it was deemed ‘incurable’ and had spread beyond the original cancer site in the breast. Still, she found a way to stay positive and delight in the growth of her young daughter Tessa. Talk about living on the edge with grace.
Laura has seen a lot in her life. She’s achieved a lot too — an Emmy Award for her ABC World News coverage of the Lake Arrowhead fires. But what Laura Marquez has accomplished as a wife and mother of a toddler while undergoing brutal clinical trials (five days on, nine days off) for one full year in addition to the most recent chemotherapy is not just a testament to her attitude, strength and courage, but proof of the invisible forces that heal, call them God, spirit, faith, whatever. Something was at work, and something was answering my only wish every day this year: for my continued health and for the health of my friends battling breast cancer. Receiving Laura’s great news was the best part of my birthday.
I invite you to read her husband’s letter, reprinted with his permission, and see for yourself.
“The Unimaginable Becomes Real at Christmas Time”
I like Christmas. It is one of my most favorite times of the year. I like all the sentimentality and familiarity that is associated with the season. But all too often we are taken over by singing chipmunks, dancing snowmen and frenzied shopping, and this leaves us asking or crying for a more meaningful and lasting Christmas experience. Like Charlie Brown we all desire Christmas to have greater transformational meaning in our life. We long for more than expanded waistlines and January credit card bills.
Christmas as a spiritual experience is about opening our lives to the unimaginable becoming real. Ponder this for a moment? A baby being born to a 14 year old virgin doesn’t add up, knowing everything we understand about human biology. The Christmas story is by no means a biology lecture. Quiet the contrary. Having faith in a deeper meaning of Christmas asks that we have an audacious belief that a God can bring new life or a new way of being when all the logic and evidence says otherwise.
My wife and I live this reality daily. Seven out of the eight years of our marriage Laura has been battling breast cancer. Advancements in chemotherapies, radiation and target therapy keeps her alive and thriving. We live everyday of our life on the edge of modern medicine hoping and praying for the unimaginable to become real. Audaciously believing that the unimaginable can become real is a daily ritual for all who walk the road of cancer. With each devastating diagnosis that knocks us down and sends our minds spinning and our hearts sinking, we are lifted back up with unbelievable news that the tumors are gone. Time and time again we are lifted back to our feet because doctors have no scientific explanation as to why she responds so well to treatments.
We stopped asking “why me” a long time ago. Because the answer from the best minds in cancer research remains the same, “ we don’t know.” When we ask, “why does she get great results that other women do not get?” The answer is the same, “we don’t know, at least not yet”.
Laura’s recent scan before Thanksgiving revealed that in just 8 weeks her disease has “almost completely gone away”. As the woman who heads UCSF’s clinical trials said, “ I’ve never seen this kind of response in any of my patients.” It makes her cry, us too. The unimaginable has become our reality.
So I know a little about what it is like to receive some unimaginable news, news that doesn’t make sense, news that defies explanation from modern science.
Our life is spent living on the edge of medical mystery in the 21st century. I have no problem reading scripture that turns human understanding upside down. In fact, I am restored by it. God can bring new life in ways that takes all that we know to be true and turns it topsy-turvy. This isn’t just Good News! It is Great News! Christmas is the audacious belief in a God that creates a path, when all logic and evidence indicates there is no path.
Have a blessed Christmas My Friends,
Rev. Dan
The Reverend Daniel Christian
St. Luke Presbyterian Church
So it’s true. Miracles do happen, and not just at Christmas. I join thousands of people around this country who are grateful for Laura’s recovery as it challenges us to confront some of life’s greatest mysteries. Perhaps that is what turning forty is about for me: finally embodying the clarity, focus, ease and grace I have witnessed in Laura Marquez.
Clarity: Okay. I will never have all the answers; life is supposed to be a mystery.
Focus: I’m ready to experience major joy. Serious, unbelievable mind-altering joy that I witness in my daughter every day. I already know how to suffer. Been there. Done that. As Gracelyn says to all things she doesn’t particularly like — like garbage trucks, flies and leaf blowers, “Bye-bye” dis-ease. Hello ecstatic living and prosperity.
Ease: I’m ready to stop freaking out about the infinite things I have no control over.
Grace: If I can show up and love every day, the good times as much as the bad, I have a chance of dying a very happy, old but vital woman. And if I can have faith like Laura in something bigger than me, the universe, perhaps unnamed and unknown, I too, will come to understand the absolute truth in the miracle of my life and cherish every moment.
