part0008

I t feels so cold and strange to begin with the diagnosis, as if the whole of Rebecca’s life centered around her cancer. I have to begin here because our life together collided on the battlefield of her diagnosis. They say that when you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. I learned that day that the same is true when you hear that someone you love is going to die. When the doctor started using words like “inoperable” and “life expectancy,” it was like the world drifted away. It didn’t go silent. It was more like a radial hum. The type of sound you hear right before your ears begin to ring. Somewhere in the background I could hear the doctor still talking but it was more like I could feel him talking. I stepped outside of my body and watched the whole thing as if it was happening in a movie. Happening to someone else. I kept waiting for the credits to roll and for none of this to be a reality .

The wholeness of our life up to this point collapsed like a film reel coming undone and crashing slowly to the floor. A million little images trampling on each other. The day our dog died. The night we made love for the very first time, nervous and scared. Her liberating screams as she brought forth our daughters. Blowing out candles as birthdays came and went. Fighting over the bills. Putting together bicycles on Christmas Eve. A whole life lived together. Kisses. Hugs. Late-night sweats as the children came home sick.

All of these little insignificant moments suddenly were everything. This is what life was. But there was so much more life to live and I was going to be living it all alone. No, not alone. We had three daughters. Jesus in Heaven, I thought. What am I going to tell them? I screamed aloud into the void of my own mind. Jesus? Where the hell is Jesus? Rebecca had served him fervently no matter which faith tradition she was a part of. She was a good Catholic. She was a good First Lady. She was good to God and where was He now?

“I will never leave you or forsake you,” Jesus said. But in this moment, I felt left. I felt forsaken. I was abandoned completely and fully. And worse, even science seemed to have no antidote to offer in place of our absentee Father.

The stories of our life continued to crash in my mind. Fighting for space, my remnants of theology were being dashed against the rocks of these damning words the doctor was murmuring in the background. Little novellas. Short films of moments lived together. I was rushed away, standing there in my hallway again with her, different this time from when my father condemned me for going off to college. My father was demanding that if she did not convert, we could not be married. She was resolute. Part of me wanted to convert to being Catholic and abandon everything that I knew, trading it for a life of less chaos, finally blowing up any chance of ever being called to pastor the church my father lived his life for. She wouldn’t let me. Her family would never abandon her but mine would. Love was conditional in my family and in our church. I had watched as kids were rejected for “choosing lifestyles over the Giver of Life” and I knew that I would not be spared the consequences of being disowned.

The day finally came for her baptism and she sat there on an old pew that lined the hallway of our house. I could smell the casserole my mother was cooking for the potluck to follow. Rebecca looked up at me, the waves in her hair flowing from the breeze making its way through the front door and out the back of the house. One long drafting hallway that led to every part of my life, the study, the kitchen, the den, the dining room, and the long stairway that led up to the living quarters. I loved and hated this place. But she looked radiant in it. She gave it a glow and a spirit and in those moments I completely believed in God because of the joy that flowed out from her spirit.

“I am so excited for today!” She giggled.

“Excited? Why?” How could this be what anyone wanted? To willingly join this chaotic world.

“Because it’s the beginning of our beginning. Today, it all becomes a reality. Soon we will be married and start our lives. Have children.” She smiled.

“Of course! Lovely children that will look like you.”

“God! I hope not. They better look like you. And anyway, we will see about these children.”

She looked at me knowingly. “Maybe seven or eight!”

The doctor coughed. I was dragged out of the world where she was well and our life was just beginning. I was sentenced back to the reality awaiting us in this room, this dreadful room, full of degrees and awards and books with words I didn’t understand. Like a tidal wave the emotions flowed over me in anger and rage and concern. Every doubt I had ever had in my life rushed over me in a flush of panic. I could feel my world closing in on me like a tunnel. The doctor’s voice came into focus and the humming subsided. He now sounded intrusive and as if he was echoing in my brain. The tunnel closed tighter and tighter and then, like a flash of light, the love of my life, the mother of my children, flesh of my flesh, her voice rang with confidence. The sound waves flowed delicately through the air and took me by the hand, walking me back away from the darkness and the doubt and brought me right back where I needed to be: next to her.

“How long?” Her question cut through the room with surgical precision.

“Six months.” A long pause lingered with the doctor. “A year, if you are lucky.”

I waited patiently for something else. An apology? Some form of condolence. It was so matter of fact. No emotions or mercy.

“A year,” he restated. “But you will have to undergo intensive treatments. It will prolong your life, but I will not lie to you, it will only buy you time.”

“Can we have a moment alone?” she asked, turning her glance to me .

“Take all the time you need,” the doctor said, standing as he said it.

It felt cold and pointless. The film reel was still crashing to the floor of my mind. All the stories and smells and adventures. Everything came back to me. Things I had long forgotten. Like the time I bit on a piece of rope during a tug of war game and Benny Claiborne pulled my front tooth straight out. There came Rebecca to my side, tough as nails, picking up my tooth and chasing Benny down the road with it. She knocked him straight to the ground and told him he was a “fool and a lug” and left him there in the dust. My family didn’t believe in the Tooth Fairy or Easter Bunny. But Rebecca led me, tooth in hand, up to my room and placed my tooth under my pillow. That next morning, it was gone and I had a shiny silver dollar waiting for me.

I could feel her warm hand enter mine.

“You are going to be alright.”

“You aren’t,” I responded. It felt colder than I meant it. She smiled bigger.

“I’m going to be just fine. It just means I get to go home a little ahead of you. You and the girls will be fine. I just wish…” Her voice trailed off. “I just wish I could see them grow older. A little bit more time. ”

For the first time in our marriage and life together, I watched her optimism betray her. It happened in the most fleeting moment. She was fully confident of God’s sovereignty and yet wanted just a little more time, maybe a decade or two, just enough to see how this was all going to end. In that moment our knowing each other betrayed the fullness of her faith and her deep wish to be strong for everyone else. In that moment she faltered for half a second. But no sooner had she felt it than the feeling dissipated into the fullest knowing I had ever seen. She was ready to face this challenge together. To begin preparing to say goodbye.

With whatever faith she was infused with to face this challenge ahead of us, I was suddenly hit with the most profound doubt I had ever felt in my entire life. We are promised Heaven. Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you.” My father taught about Heaven with such absolute certainty that it seemed like he had been there. I had watched many a person from our church die. Sometimes I would visit them with my father in the hospital or in their homes. From the time I was a child I had seen death with front row seats. At the end, everyone was a little scared. A little sad. Even Jesus, at the end, wished to have this burden lifted from Him and have just another day, just one more sermon, a few more loaves of bread. I used to wonder, as I watched the dying people negotiate with their Maker for just a little bit more time, if they were so certain they would be seeing God, that they would be welcomed into the loving arms of Jesus. Why were they afraid? Why did we fight death? Wouldn’t we welcome it?

Maybe they were like me, just a little concerned that they wouldn’t make the cut. As certain as my father was of Heaven, he liked to speak the most about Hell. Of all the eternal afterlife destinations, Hell is the one my father understood the most and preached with zeal. Sometimes Hell became like his own personal Dante’s Inferno. He would place the mayor or the president or some celebrity that gave a bad speech at some award show right there in the violent fires of the devil’s pit. I was often afraid I would join them.

One summer, I was allowed to go to camp, a time for escape from all the chaos of my life at home. Rebecca’s parents allowed her to come as well. She got her first taste of what our life together would be like. The boys and girls were divided into factions, but we found time to see each other. At chapel services, we boys were sat on the right and girls to the left.

Imagine my shock when at one of these chapel services the youth camp leader said, “We are lucky! NO! Blessed to have one of the most profound voices of our generation here today, a man that took his father’s small church and has turned it into a global ministry. A man who’s become an apostle to the nations. Let’s give a voice of praise for Apostle Thackery!”

My heart sank into my chest. There was my father, moving and flowing and dancing and screaming. He gave a sermon to these children just as if they were the adults who tuned in each week or sat in the pews of his massive complex. I knew deep in my heart that he was there just to keep an eye on me. To groom me for what my life was supposed to become.

I was so embarrassed that Rebecca was seeing this.

He would preach from any pulpit and to any audience about the fornicators and the adulterers and the sodomites. Somewhere deep inside me, none of it resonated with my soul, but I was also powerless to fight his absolute knowing. He believed the Apocalypse was coming and so he didn’t worry himself with little things like recycling or not throwing trash out of his car window. “The Almighty will burn this whole place. Climate change? Hogwash from the devil. The devil wants to postpone his coming judgment. The world will be destroyed sure enough, my boy. It has been told. It has been foretold. It is part of what is to come and there ain’t a damn thing you or me or some brat from the other side of the globe can do about it. The end is coming.”

This was my apocalypse. This was the end of the world. My beautiful Rebecca sat there, so certain that her savior would greet her on the other side. But even the prospect of being with God did not stop her from mourning the loss of this temporal life. The promise of heaven seemed cheap compared to being able to see her daughters meet their loves or graduate college or become mothers. Heaven seemed like a poor consolation prize indeed.

Rebecca and I were not the type to plan. We didn’t have some long-term vision. We were content living life with each other and letting every day hold whatever adventure it might. The farthest we had ever traveled was to Nashville for college and then to a small Florida city called Pensacola where I went to seminary. There had been moments when we discussed going to Europe or the theme parks in Orlando, but those events never seemed important because the business of our own lives as they were kept us happy. We would wake up in the mornings and eat breakfast with our daughters. She would tend to their education. I would begin working on my sermon or meet with congregants or visit the hospital. Sometimes I would be late for dinner, she seemed to always understand.

Our relationship was built on a foundation of absolute trust and understanding. Sometimes we went without the finer things like steak and potatoes or always having enough gas in the car by the end of the month. We never lacked in love. We loved each other with a pure and deep love. It was an old love, older than our own age. We had grown up with each other. She had seen me get my first hair on my chin and I remember her panicked look when she started her first period while we were at the skating rink. I went and purchased a pad off the lady who rented us the skates. She charged me a quarter. I never left the house again without my little period pack after that. I always kept pads and medicine and peanut M&Ms.

What was life going to be like now, with her gone?

I don’t remember leaving the doctor’s office or going down the elevator or getting into the car. I do remember the drive home. She played “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison over the Bluetooth in the car. We laughed and danced until we cried.

That night, after dinner, we sat the girls down. Penny was 15, Millie was 12, and Emily was 10. We were married at just 20 years old. We got pregnant on our wedding night. Nearly our whole life had been raising these girls. They cried. We cried. That night we held each other and made ice cream and watched The Notebook . I realized I would never see Rebecca old.

There’s no direct memory in my mind of when someone taught me about God. He had always been there, hovering around in my head. I didn’t like Him very much from the beginning. I had a very different feeling about Jesus. I understood that they were both God and I understood the concepts of the Trinity, a hotly debated topic amongst the Assembly of God congregations. I remember someone showing me how the Trinity worked at a youth camp. They took out a hotplate and a skillet. They had the twenty or so of us stand around the counter the hotplate was on. They dropped a piece of ice into the center of the skillet. It hissed and a small puddle of water began to boil about it; steam began to rise .

“You see that?” the youth pastor asked. “That is how the Trinity works. Everything you see in front of you is the same substance. They are all H2 0. But they are in three separate and distinct forms. Ice. Water. Steam. God is the same way. He is the same but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit present themselves to us as three distinct persons.”

The Holy Spirit always seemed flighty and dangerous. My father used the Spirit as a weapon. Sometimes I felt like the Spirit was whispering in his ear, telling everyone’s secrets. The Father, I saw Him like I saw my own father, a man who was determined, had a plan, didn’t want us to get stuck on His past, and would do whatever was necessary to get His way no matter who it harmed. And then there was Jesus. I had spent hours of my youth walking the creek and the woods talking to Jesus like He was my older brother. I told Jesus everything. I imagined Him standing in between me and our Father, making excuses on my behalf. Promising I would do better. Asking God to give me another chance.

In my mind, I could feel Him walking there with me. I told my big brother everything. Sometimes I would tell Him things I couldn’t even tell Rebecca. Sins and fears and delusions. I never prayed, at least not in the way my father prayed, I would just talk. I’m not even sure I had an image of Him in my head. Probably I did, like a white Jesus with blue eyes and a beard wearing a long white robe. But He was blurrier than that in my brain. Like He was there and He wasn’t. I never pretended like He actually spoke to me. Though I had often heard people at church insinuate that God had given them a word or prophesy, I had a hard time believing it. God seemed to always like what they liked and hate what they hated. I had a hard time finding that Jesus in the Bible when I took the time to read it. I suppose the Jesus I spoke to along those walks through the woods I had made Him up too, to fit my own liking. I was not different, just because I had made my Jesus gentler. I was still not taking the time to listen. I was just giving Him my laundry list of fears and anxieties.

I felt better about myself because I didn’t beat my chest or add syllables to words like my father did, ever the showman that he was. I thought that made me better since my conversations were long and intimate and spontaneous. The words I spoke sounded genuine. In the end, I think we were all just making God in our own image. That’s why in my mind the Father looked so much like my father. I had been worshiping an idea of my own dad each Sunday. I guess, in the same way, the Jesus that didn’t rush through the door that day at the doctor to save us all from life was also made in my image. It’s what I would have done. If I were God, I would have rushed to my defense. I would have saved us from all this pain. I wouldn’t let someone who loved me so much, like Rebecca did, suffer in this way. Because I wouldn’t do it, I couldn’t understand how this Heavenly Father would let us feel so much pain. Wasn’t killing his Son enough of a sacrifice to feed his bloodlust? I judged the whole Trinity that day for not being more like me.

That night, as I brushed my teeth, I hit the floor hard and I cried out to my brother, the only God I wanted to talk to just then. I cried out to Him for the first time in a long time, the way I did on those long walks with Him when I was a child. I let out all the pretenses I had built up as a preacher, now made in my father’s image, and I let out my heart before the only one who could truly save us from all this. At least if He wanted to He could. If He would just be a little bit more like me and less like the great mystery. I cried out, “Jesus, if there is a way. If you have ever loved me, please.” That was all I could get out, and I lay there, on the soap-scummed floor. Auburn hairs lacing the corners of this old bathroom. Soon, this mess of hair would be all I had left of her.