Deborah’s doctors scheduled another surgery for three days later. Deborah, Carson, Regan, and I retreated to Rocky Top to pray and think things through as a family. Maybe “retreated” isn’t the right word, at least not in my case, for the ranch became my war room.
We would probably spend a year in this battle, I told Deborah, then celebrate our victory, maybe even with a parade like soldiers returning from war, or the Apollo 13 astronauts rumbling safely back to earth after a space flight that seemed doomed. On the road from here to there, we knew that pain, tears, and fear waited like assassins. But pain makes life fuller, richer. And I remembered what Denver’s aunt Etha told him: “Good medicine always tastes bad.”
I was confident that the right medicine was out there, and it became my mission to find it. As of that day, supported by my partners, I basically hung an out-of-business sign on my Dallas gallery. It was only days before hired crews were to sweep into Fort Worth to remove the Calder sculpture in the most lucrative coup of my career. But my partners agreed to handle the final operation, and I asked them not to fill me in on the details. It meant nothing now. I was in the army again, this time a field general in the war on cancer.
Our friends Roy Gene and Pame Evans joined us at Rocky Top. An investor, horseman, and the scion of a prominent Dallas family, Roy Gene had built his ranch house one bluff over from ours, overlooking the same crescent of the Brazos and the green valley beyond. We had spent nearly every weekend at the ranch with them for the past eight years.
They hadn’t planned to come down that weekend, but drove the one hundred miles just to come and love on Deborah for a while and encourage her to fight hard. Roy Gene, as another friend once described him, is a little like John Wayne: a big, comforting presence who speaks slowly, softly, and uses few words, but always good ones. Pame is a cancer survivor, a woman of many words who uses them to heal, like salve on a wound.
Conflicting emotions layered those days at Rocky Top. Our optimism and confident prayers for healing were real. But like rain falling from a sunny sky, Deborah and I sensed without discussing it aloud that her prospects for a long life were grim. A few years earlier, we had lost our friend John Truleson to colon cancer of the liver. After multiple rounds of debilitating chemotherapy, he died, withered to a shadow and racked with pain.
Those memories were fresh on both our minds. “Ron, if the cancer has spread outside my colon and those spots we saw aren’t birthmarks, I don’t want to fight it,” she told me on our second day at Rocky Top.
“We don’t have to make that decision now,” I said.
But in fact, the decision had already been made. This was the woman who feared nothing but rattlesnakes and yellow jackets. Who had stared a dead marriage and another woman in the eye and fought to keep her man. Who tamed Denver Moore, the meanest junkyard dog in one of the nastiest ghettos in Texas.
She would fight. She just didn’t know it yet.
And yet for all the courage I knew she had, she had shown this glimmer of fear. Oh, how I loved her then. Fiercely. The passion you feel down in your guts where no one else can see and only you know its frightening force. I could remember that there were times in our nearly three decades of marriage that I had loved her less than at that moment, and guilt pierced my heart like a spike. Though she had always given unconditionally, I had often not been willing to do so in return. She has deserved better than she’s gotten from me, I thought, and nearly drowned in a wave of regret thirty years deep.
Then I resolved to love her as she had never been loved before.
On the day of the surgery, we drove to All Saints Hospital unsure of our future but with a full tank of faith. A team of surgeons, led by Dr. Paul Senter, planned to remove most of her colon and any other cancer they found that they deemed safe to remove. During the five-hour surgery, about fifty friends gathered in the waiting room.
Five hours after surgical technicians wheeled my wife away, Dr. Senter returned. Unsmiling and battle-weary, he asked to speak to me and the children, alone.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said, after we’d moved to a small office. “It’s not good.”
The cancer had pushed outward from her colon, invading her entire abdominal cavity, wrapping itself around her liver like a shroud.
“She needs more surgery,” he said.
I asked for no prognosis, no time-left-to-live, as only God knows the number of our days. Still, God had apparently been busy with other matters. Our most passionate prayers had not triggered a good report after the colonoscopy. Our prayers for healing at Rocky Top had not beaten back the lethal invader doctors had discovered inside my wife. Wounded and nearly blind with fear, I clung to the Scriptures:
“Ask and you shall receive . . .”
“Pray without ceasing . . .”
“I will do whatever you ask for in My name . . .”
Grimly, I shut out another verse, this one from the book of Job: “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”
After the surgery, I sat shell-shocked beside Deborah’s bed. Tubes bristled from her face and arms, probing her sleep, snaking back to boxes that blinked a maddening medical code I couldn’t understand. My insides felt crushed, as though we’d been injured in some apocalyptic accident. Numb and silent, I waited for her to wake. I did not move my eyes from hers. I wondered what she might be feeling. I wondered if either of us would survive.
That Deborah would get cancer made no more sense than a drive-by shooting. She was the most health-conscious person I had ever known. She didn’t eat junk food or smoke. She stayed fit and took vitamins. There was no history of cancer in her family. Zero risk factors.
What Denver had said three weeks earlier haunted me: Those precious to God become important to Satan. Watch your back, Mr. Ron! Somethin bad fixin to happen to Miss Debbie.
Just before midnight she stirred. I stood and leaned over her bed, my face pressed close to hers. Her eyes opened, drowsy with narcotics. “Is it in my liver?”
“Yes.” I paused and looked down at her, trying vainly to drive sadness from my face. “But there’s still hope.”
She closed her eyes again, and the moment I had dreaded for hours passed quickly without a single tear. My own dry eyes didn’t surprise me—I had never really learned how to cry. But now life had presented a reason to learn, and I yearned for a river of tears, a biblical flood. Maybe my bro-ken heart would teach my eyes what to do.