Julia part 3: Deliverance continued....

I was reading a thing the other day where Jesus was talking about the apocalypse and the end of the world (no mention of snow)... and he described the worst of it like "labor pains"... Like maybe all the crap in the world was just labor pains for something else that's coming.  Something better.... More Beautiful.

I was sitting across from Julia.. trying to answer her question about God..... But my mind was still flying through thoughts and images..

I had learned it was a dangerous world...  That's what nursing had taught me.... (and life).  And sometimes I felt like I had been tricked.

Like a fast, hard labor contraction... an image flashed into my head.  A dark room.... A distant light..... the sound of running water....  (... maybe an after-death experience? I wondered)...
My wife Lisa and I had spent 3 years trying to get pregnant the old fashioned way but then suddenly I was spending all my time in a waiting room.... Ultrasounds.... Tests.... Physical exams... (humiliation)...  And within 2 years we were beginning the process.. (invitro-fertilization)... And then I found myself kissing my wife (dressed in sterile hospital blue) as they rolled her back.

30 minutes and she was done.  And then we went home and waited for two weeks and a blood test to see if we were finally pregnant.

                         •

A lot of really good things happen in a hospital room...  Birth's.... (pregnancies.... evidently)...  Healing happens...  Obscure diagnosis's made and confirmed.... And treated...  people can overcome cancer in a hospital room...

When I walked into my patients room, (7616) she was glowing.

(not just the jaundice).

And she was calling me over to her bedside (no one else in the room.  I was the first person seen since she had heard the news).

Come over here....  I just got the news.  She said.  I'm in remission.  My cancer's gone.

(she was jubilant).

I don't like getting too close to patients.  And for a second.... my legs locked.

Come here.  She said.  It's gone.  The doctor just left and told me that my cancers gone.
She was holding her bruised arms out to me ready to receive my hug like we were old friends and I felt some panic run through my legs.  But then suddenly... Like that freaky quantum particle on it's unpredictable path... My legs loosened and my feet began to move and suddenly I was hugging her and from that moment on... all I noticed was how happy she was....  Happy like we were.... my wife and I... when we found out that we were finally pregnant.  Our one and only chance... coming down to this moment, and it had worked.  We were pregnant.

There was a flash of light, like another labor pain.  The light was blurry and distant...  I was laying in a bed in the middle of a dark room...  There was the sound of running water and there were muffled sounds.  Crying.  Sometimes sobbing.  And then I remembered where the memory had come from... And how it had all gone down.

                          •

I remembered holding a video tape like a proud father.... handing the doctor the tape.  It was a routine check.  And I remembered that he didn't start the tape right away... But first started into the Ultrasound... scanning for images that I could never make out... no matter how much he described them.    

But he wasn't describing anything.  And I reminded him to begin the tape.  And he said he would as soon as he found what he was looking for.  And then a bunch of time and silence went by.

After a few minutes he said... guys I'm not seeing what I want to see here.  And I began to realize that what was happening wasn't good.  And then a few minutes later he was saying that we wouldn't make any official decisions without another Ultrasound... But he couldn't see a heart beating.... And he added.... we would return in a few days and check again.

After that there was shock and silence...  And the long drive home in more silence... And there were calls to friends and visits... and prayers... And sometimes there was pleading... But then after everyone went home... We were alone again... tears in our bedroom... lying in our bed... then the lights off... and restless hours till sleep.

But then in the morning.  In that moment of waking... just like all the crazies that I knew... there was the struggle for reality... (was it all real?... .....Maybe it was just a horrible dream).

A flash of light came from across the bedroom.  My wife... turning on the bathroom light.  And the sound of running water... the shower.  And then crying... sometimes sobbing... the confirmation that it wasn't just a dream... But it was true... We had lost our only baby.

I lay there in the dark trying to say something... anything... but my tongue was stillborn thick... and my words wouldn't come out...

But then suddenly as my tongue loosened I said the only words that came to mind...  What if there's no God..? I thought.

                         •

Julia was looking at me... from across the break-room table... waiting on a response.    

Do you believe in God???  She had said.

My body was in the break-room... but I was still lying there in the dark... motionless... sweat running over me like amniotic fluid.... jaw clinched shut with an umbilical cord around my neck so I couldn't speak...  And while I lay there blue from lack of oxygen... I wondered again if we were all alone in this world...  And what would happen next... And if there could be a good answer for Scott and Julia...  And ultimately I wondered if anything beautiful could ever come from something as "fucked up" as this.      

(part 4 to come)...

Julia (part 2): Deliverance..... (see below for Julia part 1).

How about you?  She said.  Do you believe in God?

I'm always amazed at how the mind can flash through a lifetimes worth of memories in just a few seconds.  My answer came out after several awkward seconds (felt like minutes).  And in the time it took between her question and my answer I thought of a bunch of (seemingly random) things... like...

my first kiss....

the time I pee'd my pants in right-field... (little league).

the day my father left....

But probably the most difficult thing was an unidentifiable thought splintered into a bunch of images...

a dark room... a bright distant light... running water.....

and then nothing.

blankness....

just an unnerving feeling of fear... and dread.

I have to admit that if God was all knowing (OMNIscient) all powerful (OMNIpotent)... and all the other OMNI's....  it didn't really make sense that everything was all so "fucked-up" like it was...  (That's how he had said it).        

My mind skipped again and conjured up an old conversation..

                         •

It was a few years ago and I was at work trying to get pain medicine for one of my patients.  And then out of no where I heard him say...  If there's a good God...  Then why is it all so fucked-up?

He was angry, and he said it with a Manford twang...  Okie-style.... like poke-salad and fried-potatoes with cornbread and beans.  His name was Scott and he was a redneck (..... and he was in a bad mood).  

When I first met Scott, he was scary... with a thick, scraggly beard.... like a mountain man in the movie "Deliverance".

It always seemed to me that he was a walking contradiction.  A nurse by trade but overly concerned with masculinity....

(as a man?...  you gotta know who you are before entering the nursing world....).  

*  He liked to randomly grab dudes from the hall and arm wrestle them like he were wrestling wild pigs... as if in some perverse way he had something to prove.    

The only time Scott had ever talked to me about God before was when he had told me that if there was a God that it was probably a big, giant, space-alien like the one on the TV show Stargate....  Just a creature like us... But more evolved... bigger and smarter than us....

In the med room, he had just got off the phone with his wife.  There was evidently some kind of crap he was dealing with but he didn't want to talk about it.  Instead he wanted to talk about God.      

                          •

I put my hand up... and gestured for him to wait a moment...  (told him... I'll be back), and went to give my patient her pain medicine.    When I walked into her room... I saw how sick she was.  Jaundiced pumpkin orange.  Her hair was still unshaved... in sparse strands from the Chemo.

As I gave her the drug she became more cheerful.

"I get my results back today", she had said. (She was talking about her bone marrow results.... She had Leukemia).

We'll certainly hope for the best, I had said to her...  (I said it from a thick, safe distance... I didn't like to get too close to patients).  She smiled at me through reddened... ulcerated lips.

                         •

When I returned to Scott, I gave him answers to his question.  They were good answers.  Smart answers.  I talked about free will and how God doesn't want a planet of robots, and I said things like "the crap in this world isn't God's fault.... It's our fault".

But as I was saying it, I was thinking that some crap that happened in the world was pretty bad crap.  And I thought about a young preteen girl who had recently made headline news when she was abducted on video by a man in broad daylight.

It's not God's fault... I had said to Scott, it's ours; and I remembered how I had prayed for the safety of that girl... almost like a test.  "If you're real God... then save this girl", I had said.  And I remembered how I had awakened the next day to more headline news and the discovery of the girls body.  And I thought of her family and the desperate pleas and prayers made on her behalf, and the hopes of an intervening God who might swoop down and rescue her as sometimes it appeared that he did with others.

I continued to talk to Scott... "Sometimes in God's providence.... he allows evil for the greater purpose of the forthcoming good", I said...  But as I said it I was thinking that maybe we were all alone in the world... And I thought that if God existed, I wondered where he was...  And I wondered what he was thinking and what he was doing.  And sometimes.. I wondered if he was even listening to us at all.

                         •

Julia was waiting across the table for my response... but to be honest... in that moment I didn't know what I believed.  It was like the next thing from my mouth would be my own ritual... a confession of faith (or doubt)... and as I tried to answer her, I felt myself slipping from my seat, out into the hall, and out the door.... Holden Caufield-style.... but then my mind flashed again with that same unidentifiable image...

a dark room.... a bright.. distant light... the sound of running water...

and then the awful feeling of pain... doubt... and fear....

and then nothing else.  (Part 3 to come)...