It was this time of year in 1984, June 25 to be exact, and the wheat had already been cut in the fields outside the tiny northern Oklahoma town of Garber. As it does by this time every summer, the heat had come on and the rains had dried up. He was lying in the back bedroom of his double wide mobile home. His children had gathered together in the living room, while his second wife, Judy, directed traffic, letting in just one or two people into his room at a time to sit with him. He only had a few grandchildren then. After all, he was only 56 years old. My two older sisters and I, who had traveled 1,000 miles from South Carolina to be there with him, made up the majority of those grandchildren. I was only six years old, the same age my son Wyatt is now.
I had met my grandfather, my dad’s dad, several times in those early years of my life. Although I didn’t know it at the time since my family always called me by a nickname, I had the same name as him: Everett Lee Miller. I remember that every year we used to make the long drive halfway across the country in my parents brown Ford Pinto station wagon. We’d go in early summer so my dad could help his dad with the wheat harvest. I remember riding in the combine with my grandpa as he cut wheat and afterwards riding with my sisters and younger aunts and uncles in the back of a wheat truck filled with wheat kernels and thousands of spastic grasshoppers as we crept down the dirt roads to the Garber grain elevator. I remember my grandpa’s farm dogs, Pepsi and Tubby, and watching him pull swollen ticks off their bellies and backs. But in the early summer of 1984, he’d had to give all that up and lease out the land. Farming is always hard work, but it’s too hard, impossible even, after you find out your body’s filled with cancer.
I cannot remember all the details, but when it was my turn to go back to see Grandpa in his bedroom I cannot imagine that at that age I understood the gravity of the situation, that when I said goodbye to him this time that meant that I wouldn’t see him again next June. I can still see in my mind him lying in white sheets with the sheets pulled up to his chest. As we talked he pulled the sheets down and joked about the “railroad tracks” all over his belly while he mapped out a transcontinental course in the stitches that covered his swollen abdomen. I remember that he spoke quieter than usual, and although I cannot remember it, I can’t help but think that he kissed me before I left the bedroom to return to the crowd holding vigil in the living room. How much longer we were there I do not know, but at some point word came from the back of the house that it was over and the hot living room air filled with a chorus of sobs. That is how I remember June 25, 1984.
I could also tell you the story of how I collapsed on the floor in November 1995 in the arms of my best friend’s mom when I received the phone call that my other grandfather, my mother’s father, Orville Butts, had died at the age of 68 in his bed of lung cancer that had spread into his brain. I could also tell you all the details of sitting beside my friend Darla Smith as she lay unconscious, just weeks after her having been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. She was 72, the clerk of session at my first parish in Newkirk, Oklahoma, and she had taken me under her wing and filled my belly with banana bread. I could tell you much more details, many more sad stories, but the truth of the matter is that most of you know what it is like. You’ve been there. Some of you have lost not just a grandparent or a friend, but a husband or wife, maybe even a child or grandchild. Cancer has scarred my heart again and again as it has yours.
Theologically speaking, I cannot understand cancer. Although it makes me sick, I can understand murder and rape, genocide and war. Those are tragic, violent, and selfish choices made by sinful human beings. But cancer I do not understand. In many cases it seems to be random. What does a child do to deserve leukemia? What choice was made that caused my late grandmother to lose both of her breasts to cancer? It doesn't fit. Some people think that God does this to us to teach us something. I can think of many more appropriate ways to teach people to appreciate life than to strike a fourth grade boy with a cancerous brain tumor. I simply cannot believe that a God who is love could do that to those whom God loves. I do, however, believe what Romans 8:28 says: "We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." This does not say that God causes all things, but that God goes to work in all things to bring good out of them. I do believe that with all my heart.
Psalm 23, as familiar as it has become, is my mantra when it comes to questions like these.
Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me...
Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
If your heart has been scarred by cancer and both the grief and questions it causes, please join our church in supporting the Relay 4 Life this Saturday at the high school track. Saturday night at 9:30 pm I have the honor of praying the memorial prayer at the luminary service. I hope you will make a point of being there with me to thank God for the lives of our loved ones who we've lost to cancer, to thank God for the survival of so many, and to beg God for help in finding a cure.
Grace and Peace,
Everett
