Day By Day

On the journey, ODAAT. – D

My friend D died last week.

Cancer is an inherently lonely experience, and D was my friend who understood. He and his wife sat in the row behind us every week at church and we knew each other in a passing way, until one week he turned to me after service and said, the strangest thing happened. I’m feeling fine, but a routine blood check came back abnormal. He couldn’t really bring himself to say cancer but I knew that’s what he meant. You won’t believe this, I told him, but the same thing just happened to me!

D was a tall, larger-than-life man in his sixties with irrepressible energy, an incisive mind and great force of personality; I was forty-three and had never felt healthier. We passed the next few months in the same surreal daze. We both had backgrounds in medical research and gathered all the facts we could; I passed him articles on DNA synthesis inhibitors for acute myeloid leukemia and he tracked the receptor profile of my pathology results. Oh, I found out a word for what we’re going through, I told him one day. It’s called dysregulation, this unsettledness, this not being able to sleep or eat normally even though nothing has really happened yet. Yes, he replied. That’s it.

Three months later, he didn’t show up for church. Later that week, he was admitted for an urgent blood transfusion. It happened to be the same week I was scheduled for my mastectomy, and on my way out of the surgical suite we wheeled by his room. D was a perennially optimistic person, but that day he came out in his hospital gown, held my hand and we both cried. This is really happening.

I was discharged the next morning; he stayed for ninety-seven more days in the long leadup to a bone marrow transplant. When I visited, he’d be sitting up in bed with a baseball cap on and multiple bags of colorful fluids (the antifungal one was hot pink!) running into his veins, and we’d talk about his latest cell count numbers, the newest doctors coming on board to manage the latest side effects. He’d talk about his old research projects, his family. He gave technical updates about his disease that made the complexities of hematopoietic cells so clear I’d tell him he ought to write a book. We celebrated the birth of his grandson, though he was unable to see him.

As we both started chemo, things got harder. We commiserated about fatigue, nausea, PICCs and ports, needles. We coined the phrase ODAAT (One Day At A Time). His wife wrote when he wasn’t feeling up to it, and the three of us shared verses that kept us going from Psalm 121, Isaiah 43, Psalm 32, Revelation 21. One day, during a particularly bad round of chemo, D broke down as he quoted 2 Timothy 4:13: “when you come, bring the cloak that I left.” What is it about that verse? I asked him later. Don’t you see? he said. It was real. Paul knew what he was up against at the end of his life, being poured out like a drink offering, and this out-of-the-blue, specifically personal request just makes it real. Yes, I thought. Like someone reaching out to grip your hand. This is really happening, and I’m here. D, in his hospital gown. Paul, in these words across the ages. All of us, pilgrims on the same road, however near the end may be.

D finally received his stem cell transplant around the time I was finishing my rounds of chemo. Afterwards, he got to go home, hold his grandson, go on walks, broaden his diet, think in terms of one week or even month at a time (“I almost miss ODAAT. Ha!” he wrote). Still, he was continually in and out of the hospital grappling with the various effects of what his body had gone through. Blood cancers are terrible—unlike soft tissue tumors, you can’t cut them out. There is no part of your body, no organ system, they do not touch.

This past Easter, he came to church for the first time in over a year. That was a good morning: sitting together, singing songs on a sunny day full of promise. But just a week later, he was back in the hospital. Last week, he took a sudden turn for the worse, and by the time I went in to say my goodbyes, he was non-responsive. The next day, he passed away. Just like that, he was gone.

I suppose, in some small corner of my mind, I had thought we had both made it out of this together. That one day, he and his wife would show up behind us in church every week like they used to. But looking back, D knew his odds. He was that rare person who knew exactly what he was up against but went into each day with clear-eyed faith. I once wrote him about the fear and terror of it all, and he replied, dread, yes. But not fear, not terror. I’m not afraid to endure that test again, though I may dread having to.

At one point, six months out from the transplant, he wrote: “Today I am living (again) Psalm 23. I will have my 180-day bone marrow biopsy and total spread of blood tests. ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.’ I may get good test results out of it. I may not. I myself have no way a priori to know (I feel good and what I do know seems okay). But it’s a special joy to rest in His arms.”

No fear, no terror, for You are with me. It doesn’t feel right that the end should have come so suddenly, but I think if D were here he would say, it was always ODAAT all along.

In the end, I only knew D a short fraction of his life, but I’m so glad God allowed us to walk this part of the road together, and isn’t that all friendship is? I will miss him. The journey won’t be the same without him. But I’ll remember the way he found joy even in the face of unrelenting uncertainty about the future, even when going through the worst things a body can go through. It’s a special joy to rest in His arms. One day at a time.