A Great Shout

Thanksgiving has come and gone. And with it, we enter a season of milestones. A season of remembrances. This past Tuesday, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, marked 5 years since I took Jennings in for a bone marrow aspirate after an abnormally low chimerism. We were told that he had relapsed before they even did the procedure – his CBC was giving it away.

Next week, on Thursday, we will mark 8 years since his original diagnosis. Those numbers are hard to believe. Hard to believe that the twins, who now walk around like seven-year-olds going on 17, had not yet entered the world. Hard to believe that there are many people in our lives now that don’t know that part of our story. And for both of us, I would say, it’s probably the biggest part of our story as adults.

That truth makes me stop and wonder…if there are that many people around me that don’t know that, think of all of the stories in their lives that I am completely oblivious to. Lauren had put a prayer card in the basket at church a few weeks ago about Jennings’s cure and 5-year mark. The next week, I had a dad of one of Jennings’s old friends from the 2nd grade come up to me and say, “I had no idea!” He was on the care team and had read the prayer card. It’s a good lesson for me in being curious, asking questions, seeing others as mysteries waiting to be discovered. I often walk through life so focused on myself, naval-gazing as a pastor I like to listen to refers to it, that I don’t stop and wonder about others’ stories.

Any who, back to where I was. I went back and read the Caring Bridge post from the day he relapsed. That’s typically my go-to around these milestones and markers of his journey. It’s funny what the mind holds onto as time passes, what memories stick and are still so vivid years later. They often seem, to me at least, to be ones that would have been least likely to land in that category when they were actually happening. I remember the virtual meeting I was in right before I left to take him to the hospital for the bone marrow aspirate. I remember being totally preoccupied with worry as I tried to play Lego with him on the bed before the procedure. I still have the minifig in my backpack to this day. I remember where I sat as I wrote the post to let people know. So many other memories have their edges blurred or have been erased altogether by the passing of time. It makes you cherish the ones that stick all the more.

So many of mine are contained in this “holiday season,” beginning with the lead into Thanksgiving all the way through Christmas and the New Year. It is a special time for most everyone, but it has become intensely more so for me. There have been years when the season has been hard, but now, I am left with a feeling of reverence when I think back. That is my family’s story, and I am so grateful to have it to hold onto. The very fact that I have it to look back on is a testament to God’s faithfulness. Praise Him and praise Him for the stories that He writes and weaves into each of our lives. I lament the fact that our culture and way of life do not lend itself to sharing and discovering them.

Speaking of – I’ll be honest – I did not want to sit down and write today. The commitment I made to myself to see it through to 5-years post-transplant, statistically cured, got me in the chair. Being in the chair, though – remembering, reflecting, wrestling, writing, deleting, writing again – has been cathartic. It’s almost as if I did not consciously realize how much weight this time of year still carries. I pray that I will always be able to hold it in that regard as it was a time when I most acutely felt God’s presence and my utter dependence on Him.

Well, I realize that after all of that, I’ve buried the lead here. Jennings made it another month with no cancer-related medical appointments. We racked up more than our fair share of other appointments though, Jennings included. He’s been to Urgent Care twice for what we thought was a broken thumb (same thumb, two separate incidents 😂). The kids have passed the bacterial skin infection, impetigo, around. And we’ve mixed in a few strep throats and common colds. I’m still advocating for a punch card system at the urgent care that we frequent.

We made it up to the mountains for a long weekend a couple of weeks ago. My soul seems to long for that in the fall. Here’s a few from that trip 👇

Left-to-right, top-to-bottom: A few fierce games of tic-tac-toe before lunch in downtown Blowing Rock. We randomly ended up at the town of West Jefferson’s annual Christmas parade (in the middle of November?). We discovered a new (to us) adventure with Unseen Pass - they rent RTV’s and have pre-programmed routes that you drive all over back roads, two-lane highways, and gravel roads through some scenic country. Smally got a hold of mommy’s phone and that’s the selfie she took…where did she learn that face? Sunrise in Ashe County. A picnic lunch along the New River in the back of the RTV. The boys and I enjoy the view from the top of Mount Jefferson.

Here are a few others from the rest of this past month:

Left-to-right, top-to-bottom again: Jennings’s baseball team went an impressive 10-0 and won the league championship! We were so happy for him – none of his teams have ever done anything like that and this was also a year where he started to see his hard work pay off on the field. The one way to convince the boys to get their haircut is to tell them that it’s right next door to a card shop. #obsessed Thanksgiving morning was extra chill this year since we snuck out of our hosting duties by tearing our house apart…breakfast in front of the parade. That’s Caroline in her happy place with Bella, her cousins’ dog. Pops and the boys taking in some Thanksgiving football while evaluating their latest sports card “pulls.” The season’s first viewing of Christmas Vacation. We indoctrinated Caroline into the tradition this year.

As I mentioned last time, we have a celebration planned for about one month from now for the 5-year mark. Lauren has also been talking with Jennings about the 5-year mark itself and, through that, has started working on what we might do on the actual anniversary in March. Jennings, being the enthusiast that he is, loves to randomly tell me about what they’ve cooked up. Every week or so, seemingly out of nowhere, he’ll say, “Hey Dad, guess what?”

“What?” I’ll ask.

“So for my 5-year ‘no more cancer’ day…guess what?” he asks again, smiling ear-to-ear now.

“Yeah, what?” I ask, feigning genuine curiosity as if I haven’t been told five times already.

“Mom said I get to say the ‘F’-word to cancer. And I get to go to the card store,” he answers with pure pride.

He’s earned it, that’s for sure.

I hope each of you had a great Thanksgiving with family and friends. I hope we can each slow down enough in this Advent season to engage in story with one another and reflect on the waiting, the anticipation, the yearning we feel for something more.

I read through the first part of Ezra this week and the following passage stuck out to me. It captures the mixed emotions that are often an integral part of our profound experiences in life. This is certainly what I feel this time of year.

“But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard far away.” Ezra 3:12-13          

#allinforjennings