Unthinkable

I was the Athletic Director of St. Cletus School for ten years, and had retired from that position just before Erin was diagnosed with cancer, and continued to hold the secretarial position in the school office until December of 2006. The Athletic Board and my coaches were a fine group of men and women with whom I had established a relationship of mutual respect, all of us with the same ultimate goal in mind ~ to provide the best possible sports experience for the boys & girls in 5th-8th grades while at St Cletus, and to give those with the ability to play at the high school level the tools of readiness to begin that next step.

The position held many responsibilities, but what I liked most was the constant interaction with the kids, their parents, my coaches and referees; those associations that built the foundation of many of the relationships I maintain to this day. To heck with the scheduling, budgets and mountain of paperwork!

I'd like to introduce my extended family, including that very special friend to so many of us, scrunched on the right side of the picture above and rockin' with the boys below, who always reminded us ~ "It's a great day to be a Cardinal!"

We sure knew how to make The Barn one loud and happy place!


I like to think that Nancy and her "Er Bear" are doing some good rockin' together these days...

The basketball coaches were a very special group, and I soon found the easiest way to make "my men" happy was to give them gym time - the hot commodity in our school, with a facility that was not only the practice venue for sports but also the site of many other parish functions. Coaches turn to mush when the big game is on the horizon and you hold some extra hours of available practice time in your hand in front of them. It's a beautiful thing!

Gosh darn it, St. Johns is winning AGAIN! Hmmmmm... I wonder if some calls might go our way during the second half if I get these Stripes some donuts to go with their coffee. Dennis? Wayne? What do you say?

Seriously though, I absolutely loved my job.

The communication with many of these people, with whom I had very regular contact, shifted to email correspondence when Erin got sick. Gradually, this became my link to the outside world from which I had to disengage, as I went from a job in a very busy setting where I spoke with countless people each day, to the isolation of both staying at home and also spending weeks in the hospital with Erin during the required in-patient hospital chemotherapy sessions.

I CRAVED conversation. The emails helped fill the void a bit and, without realizing it, they were also becoming a valuable journal, as I chronicled the events of the time to those in the outside world while I was struggling to navigate my new existence in the Land of cancer. Reading words now that I wrote early on is often an eye-opening experience.

I've not always been terribly organized in my storage of these emails, however. Some are in categorized folders I created over the years, in the attempt to separate them into more manageable piles, much like the pieces of paper on the kitchen counter that graduate from the heap of - I can't get rid of this because it's really important, or it might be important sometime in the future, so I'll put it here!

Others remain strewn about my inbox, as though the wind blew through an open window and with one gust hurled them about in random fashion. At the moment I have 700 emails in my inbox and just as many in my outbox, so apparently I have some organizing and purging to do! I know. I can't help it. People keep writing such lovely things, and this continues to somewhat bridge the chasm that still isolates me as I work to establish my footing in the Land of Normal, with my compass still spinning, seeking direction. I think I know what I want. I just don't know how to get there.

When I delve into that scattered lot I often find gems, and recently found one that I sent as a thank-you to those sweet basketball coaches who had tucked a card in my mailbox when Erin first got sick; a note of support, signed by all those great guys, that also included a gift certificate for a massage ~ one of my favorite pleasures in the world.

I gulped my way through, as I read my words ~ so filled with resolve, so naive of what was to come, so filled with hope of triumph after surmounting what we confidently tried to look at as a speed bump under the pumped-up tires of our determined vehicle that would carry us to the future...

Dated January 25, 2007, six weeks after Erin's diagnosis.

Dear Coaches,

You guys sure know how to treat a girl right! A massage sounds like heaven. A perfect gift. I've told Erin many times that it may be her body going through all this, but I carried her for nine months and gave birth to her, so I feel as though I'm going through it as well.

Thank you all so very much. I find email to be a very impersonal way to convey a message like this (you can tell how old I am now!) but with so many of you to contact I guess it's the most efficient.

We woke up on December 15 to learn Erin's/our lives had changed forever. The why me?/why us? may some day become clear. Erin was told by her doctors that the average life-expectancy of a woman is now 82 years, and this is one year of her life to give so she can have the rest.

But when you are 15 years of age it sucks to get cancer - you are stuck in the hospital for 14 sessions of chemo. You will have surgery and radiation, the extent of which is still to be determined. Your beautiful, long, thick hair falls out in handfuls, You can't go to school - you must be tutored. You can't play volleyball, your passion.

Ands here's the best part - you get to spend quality time with your mom day in and day out!

In spite of all that fun stuff, Erin is one tough girl. She is the youngest of four children, the exclamation point at the end of our family. She has the resilience of youth and the physical and mental strength of a trained athlete to help her through. She has no fear of doctors, tests, machines or needles.

She will win this battle. The alternative is unthinkable and unacceptable.

A friend of mine, whose husband is a cancer survivor, sent me a note with this saying on the front of the card -
"The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning."

Indeed...

In gratitude and with love,
Mary

"The alternative
is unthinkable
and unacceptable."







indeed