HUCKLEBERRY

This week I am filled with musings of life and death, of our comings and goings and all the juicy living in between.

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On Mother’s Day we sat on the dock and talked about burials. I wondered more than once if this was the kind of conversation a family typically has on these kinds of sunny, celebration days when ‘normal’ life is put on pause and for just a few hours we place in front of us, with great deliberation, what and who is important.   

At first dangling my toes in the freezing water, I then decide without second thought to jump feet first into the lake.

Treading only long enough to catch my breath, I scramble up the ladder, my shivering body reminding me how marvelous and fleeting life is. And that, in my mind, is a really good thing.

As a mother of three sons, it seems appropriate to wish upon myself what my middle son, Cameron, deems a “Viking Burial.” I describe in great detail, while sipping cabernet and popping a deviled egg into my mouth, a fantastical image of a woman lying still on a handmade makeshift wooden raft, her head wrapped in a dressing of flowers and all around more flowers still. While her loved ones stand on shore she is softly pushed out into the water while her three sons, with fire arrows poised just so, wait for the moment that provides just enough drama to draw back and release.

If to speak of one’s own death is morbid, then deem me this. For I have imagined it more than once and never once with disdain.

 “I’ll be your Huckleberry,” a line in our most-loved movie [we have watched as a family more than two dozen times] that has always brought both tears and an uncontainable gasp. In appropriate everyday moments we whisper it to one another when wishing to convey a depth of the loyalty felt, a breathtakingly haunting line that goes so much farther the distance than simply muttering, “I have your back.” It means I have your eternity as well.

I can’t tell you when I learned this, but it bears repeating in this dramatic season of my now—

It is possible, perhaps even probable, that what is said is not “Huckleberry” as most of us have always believed.

Instead, the writer employs the intensity of the character’s drawl to mask what is actually being said—

 “I’ll be your huckle bearer.”

As I write I am stunned how vividly the image of my own daddy’s body, tucked inside his silk-lined resting place, is hoisted into air, knuckled into place by men who loved him best, their fingers wrapping through the bronzed huckles flanking each side as they struggle under the weight of it—the man, the casket, the loss.

Ron. Kyle. Cameron. Quinn. Kevin. Dan. Huckle Bearers for my beloved daddy, Jim.

Long ago I emotionally ‘opted out’ of the casket idea but not of the imagining of who my huckle bearers would be—

Have I lived the sort of life that would draw six people to bear my weight?

Have I been the kind of weighty friend who has been by your side?

Have I loved enough and told you of it often and with no holding back or regret?

Have I been the kind of companion who has your back through every hard thing?

To be a huckle bearer. Not in the after, but in the living, breathing, now.

The day after these words find their audience, I will turn sixty-five. My dear friend, Cindy, [upon seeing the face of my newborn grandchild] said it best, “I know there were times you wondered if you would get to experience these days with your boys and their children,” in response to seeing the face of our newborn grandson. She concludes with the very same sentiment I felt, my body plunged into unearthly cold water, “God has done a wonderful work of healing in your body and a wonderful work of grace in your life.”

NOTES:

My Journal entry is shorter than normal this week. As much as I love to write, I love holding my new grandson even more.

Grayson was born three days before my own birthday…imagine dark hair, olive skin, dark eyes.

This has been a week of life-giving moments, including my best lab reports to date—

My circulating tumor cells measure, for the very first time, 0.00. A trifecta perfecta of zeros.

That Viking Burial? It will just have to wait. Hopefully, for a very long time.

More about Circulating [TUMOR] DNA: Every six weeks I have my blood drawn to determine my current circulating tumor cells. For those who are “medical geeks” like me, this is how it works: Somewhere in San Francisco there is a lab that has my frozen tissue specimens from my original life-saving surgeries three years ago. Through a sophisticated, scientific process, that tissue is used to create my own unique assay composed of 16 DNA mutations that, like a thumbprint, identify my one-of-a-kind disease. Once this thumbprint is built, it is used to identify circulating tumor cells in my bloodstream identified through recent and continual blood draws that can be analyzed and compared to map the stability, or progression, of my cancer.

Apart from my overwhelming thanks for the sophisticated science that allows us to learn more about my specific cancer and the disease in general, I am sending up an enormous praise that my current circulating tumor cells are undetectable. In my next Journal entry I'll share my unique integrative metabolic approach to living with Stage IV Cancer…get ready to be encouraged!