Keeping losses in perspective

Why did you turn the TV off?  There’s still a few seconds left in the game,” I asked my son, Dave.

“It’s over. I don’t watch the other team celebrate.”

I didn’t argue. I felt the same way.

It’s not fun when your team loses, especially when they get so close to the championship game and an undefeated season.

Losses like that are disappointing. Before drifting off to sleep I thought, “If only they had…”

Then there are other losses, ones that are not just disappointing. These are the ones that are devastating.  

Standing just outside my backdoor a couple of hours before dawn Easter Sunday morning, I thought of the two Marys preparing to visit the tomb of Jesus.  Did they hear leaves rustling in the trees like I did as I stared upward at the stars? Or were their heads bowed in sorrow as they trudged along the path to his grave, unable to hear anything but the echo of his pained cries from the cross? Was the moon shining to light their way? Would the darkness in their souls have snuffed out any light that was there?

Some losses are disappointing; others are devastating.

“We had plans to go to the Fleetwood Mac concert,” my brother, Mark, told me the other day. “We were really pumped to see them. How do you cancel a whole concert?”

He and his wife, Joy, had planned to see the band after she had completed another check-up to make sure she was still cancer free. But the concert was rescheduled when Mick Fleetwood became ill.

“Man, were we disappointed,” he said.

“But something put our disappointment in a whole new perspective,” Mark continued.

Joy has battled breast cancer, the scary triple negative kind that is aggressive. Mark and Joy were happily enjoying their first year of retirement when she was first diagnosed. We’ve prayed with them, as have many of their friends. And God has blessed them. Joy is a survivor.  Since she finished her last treatment in November of 2013, she has been going back to the doctors for follow-up exams every three months, and there is no evidence of the cancer.

But this last exam, the one before the disappointing rescheduling of the Fleetwood Mac concert, had an unexpected twist to it.

Confident that the exam would proceed without incident like the previous ones, they were caught off guard when the doctors called Joy back in.

They needed more pictures.

Now the questions ricocheted in their minds: “Why do they need more pictures? What’s wrong? Is the cancer back? What do we do if it is? What’s the prognosis?”

And the disappointment over the Fleetwood Mac concert? It suddenly meant nothing.

Angelina Jolie went public last year about her decision to have a double mastectomy. She carries the BRCA1 mutation, putting her at high risk for breast caner. Her mother died of breast cancer, as did her aunt only a few weeks before Jolie revealed that she had undergone the double mastectomy.  Recently, she had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed as well.

Jolie reflected on one positive from the experience: “The beautiful thing about such moments in life is that there is so much clarity. You know what you live for and what matters. It is polarizing, and it is peaceful.”

The first pictures had not been clear enough, the doctors told Mark and Joy. And thankfully, further investigation showed no evidence of cancer.

I pulled my bathrobe tighter around my shoulders as the chill of the early morning air reminded me that I was no longer with the two Marys on their walk to the tomb.  Peering toward the field below my backyard, the darkness seemed heavier as a cloud obscured the moon’s light. The wind picked up, and I tightened the sash of my robe.

Then, dead silence, when just a few hundred feet from where I was standing, a songbird prophesying that morning’s light would come, interrupted the still of the night.  He sang all stanzas to his revelry, and was still merrily chirping away when I left him for the warmth of a second cup of coffee.

The disappointing game had faded long ago, somewhere on the road with the two Marys.

Now I was anxious for sunrise as I hurried along my way to celebrate an empty tomb.