I’m sitting here in a hospital room watching my Michelle sleep as she recovers from surgery. I wrote about her cancer here and here.
While I watch her sleep, and help her sit up, and order her meals, and watch the hospital’s medical staff come and go and do their work, I’m thinking about what’s most important to me right now.
I think it’s courage.
I’m not going to pretend that Michelle has more courage than anyone else. Every one of us has to find the courage inside to deal with life’s challenges and disappointments which catch us by surprise at any point in time.
The ancient boy shepherd, David, killed both a lion and a bear while protecting his sheep. Those events led him to enough courage to accept Goliath’s challenge and win.
But in reality, it may have taken more relative courage for a younger David just to get through his first night alone with his father’s sheep.
I once drove through sheep grazing country in the Wasatch Mountains in central Utah while my co-worker told me about his grandfather and grandfather’s brother who tended sheep all summer in that same region — on their own at 8 and 10 years old.
Think for a minute about those boys’ roles within their family. That’s an old-world responsibility, and courage, our society doesn’t comprehend now.
Most of us find courage as we need it, and the greater the invitation to change, the faster we typically step up to meet the inevitable.
Michelle has shown tremendous courage this year, and I’m so proud of the way she has responded to her cancer diagnosis. She has lived the proverb about keeping our enemies closer and she’s gotten to know her adversary intimately. As of this evening, by all appearances, she has won.
I’ve been able to mostly work from her bedside and I’ve seen her at her best and her worst the past few years, and even more so the past several months. Likewise, she’s seen me cope, and sometimes not cope very well.
What I understand less well is how much courage it’s taken for our youngest daughter, Olivia, to be a young teenage girl who didn’t know whether her mom would live or die. Or, how much it took for Olivia to comfort her mother when a handful of her hardest days coincided with me being away from home. I’m proud of Olivia’s courage too.
Courage is hard to verbalize, and I suspect we each underestimate how much we have, or how much we can access when we really need it.
[Article 0009 of Samuel Said]
