Love in Action

By Sister Keith Marcinak, OSF 

Many people have written about cancer and their experiences. These stories are always personal, caring, empathetic, loving, other centered, humbling, tear-filled and, yes, joy filled. They are stories of dying and resurrection. The mystery of each person’s experience that we cannot always see immediately. But it is something we can be attuned to through practice. Our vision depends on our sight.

This came to me from my first meeting with the radiation team for breast cancer.

While sitting in the waiting room by myself, I decided to just sit back and watch the people coming in and out of the unit. I saw love in action. Spouses taking care of each other, lovingly pushing their partner in a wheelchair without complaint, offering a hand in support, being there in need, sometimes funny and clowning and sometimes caring. Always other centered. Both the experience of having cancer and walking beside someone you love who has cancer is frightening. You can see the exhaustion etched into the faces as they try to hide their worry from each other. Each one is experiencing what Benedict XVI called the “liturgy of life.”

This liturgy is everywhere in a radiation waiting room. I quietly observed the couple next to me. Waiting for their child to emerge, the mother is perched at the edge of her seat while the father feigned ease, sitting with his back resting on the chair. Her pain was tangible as they kept a watchful worried eye on the door to the lab, but the father’s way of dealing with his son’s illness was to joke with everyone who sat down. Finally, the door opens and their son walks out of the radiation center, the port for chemo peeking out of his half-buttoned shirt. The mother runs up to him and tries to comfort him.

A woman, alone, sits facing the wall, staring into space, lost in her thoughts. The doors swing open, and a big man makes his way to the front desk to check in. I hear him say, “At least I am sober today.”

The man next to me asks,” Are you here with your husband?” I reply and that I am a Religious Sister – a nun.

He says, “I thought that there were very few of you guys left.”

“There aren’t that many as before and we might be on the endangered species list, but we are not extinct yet,” I reply.

He told me that he has prostate cancer and has just started treatment. He asks me what I have. “Breast cancer,” I tell him. Our conversation was short because I was up next for my treatment.

Treatment consists of 15 sessions of radiation, five times each a week for three weeks. I was number two on the list for radiation, which means getting up very early.

Every day after our first conversation, my friend, who was number three on the schedule, would always come and sit by me. He would talk and I would listen.

I would come in and sit in a big over-stuffed chair relaxing before the treatment. He would come in about three minutes after me and see where I was sitting. He would find a chair and tell me about his hopes, fears about cancer, an upcoming surgery, how he planned to mow his half acre of grass or to fly in his plane.

Occasionally, I would ask questions to keep him talking. This was a regular event for the 15 sessions I was there.

On my last day of treatment, he came in and told me about his vacation plans. I listened, as always, attentively and with pleasure. I told him it was my last day of treatment. Although happy for me, his face fell with sadness. He had found a friend.

At that moment, the nurse called my name out. As I was walking to the door, he yelled at the nurse, “Make sure you take good care of this woman. She is a good woman.” The nurse said she would.

At that moment I turned around and walked up to him to shake his hand and said, “Good luck to you and many blessings on you.”

And then I walked in for my last treatment session.

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