[2.256] There is no compulsion in religion; truly the right way has become clearly distinct from error; therefore, whoever disbelieves in the Shaitan and believes in Allah he indeed has laid hold on the firmest handle, which shall not break off, and Allah is Hearing, Knowing.
Clown Carrying His Clown Father's Coffin
Photo by Richard Byrd
My husband looked as if we'd just asked him to eat a live goldfish.
He stood by the garage doors, speechless and obviously quite embarrassed. My sister-in-law looked at me sideways in her usual conspiratorial manner. Jack looked as is his usual like the cat who ate the canary and her babies.
She said, "So do you want to hold my breast Mel?"
My poor Arab husband just stood there, another helpless victim of our various Laundry Hill demons. We three are so used to these things and so enjoy getting a bite out of someone who doesn't understand the ethics of growing up on Laundry Hill.
So she reached inside her blouse and felt around on her left side and pulled her breast right out of her tank top. There it was.
Jack made it himself out of some old gray foam. He sized it properly and smoothed it out on some kind of lathe from inside his shop on Tombstone Canyon.
Breast Cancer. It's been an interesting few months with those two, Jack and Pat Porter. Two of the most ethical people alive and two of the most death ignorant people I've ever met. And, in the past, two of the most committed beer drinkers in town. They admit it. They gave it up after one of their acquaintances (a profound lush) shot himself in the head. That was enough for them and they quit cold turkey...over two years ago. Over two years before Pat discovered she had a malignancy in her left breast.
Their youngest son was the one to tell my son, his cousin, that his mom had cancer. "My mom has cancer." I think most people can conceptualize to a certain extent what that phrase sounds like but only those who have had it uttered to them or had to utter it to someone else can truly fathom the gamut of emotions a person and their family goes through when they hear those words for real.
For me, as a nurse with a long history of dealing with people in crisis, I felt that old familiar feeling. It is like watching a car wreck in slow motion. You know how it ends, you know the players at the scene but still, you cannot predict if a person who walks away from that accident won't be in another one the very next day. That is how life is and how death is.
I told Pat in the first few days and weeks that cancer wouldn't kill her. I said that Allah gives life and as well, Allah takes life away. "Your day is your day and there is no averting it." At first she wasn't too thrilled about that presumptuous statement coming from her very religious baby sister in law. I say "baby" because I grew up with Pat. She grew up with my brother. No one ever expected those two to end up getting married. I'll never forget their wedding out in Ventura, California. Jack's hair back then was longer than Pat's. He'd made a bet with a buddy of is that he would not cut it for five whole years and he didn't. He made fiddy bucks on that one. At their wedding (I was only about ten), one of their guests known only as Dirty Dave (uh...he came on to me too) tried to drive off with a loaded .45 on the roof of his car. Her parents weren't too thrilled about the match either and didn't attend the wedding which was home made, a nice little "personal affair" that took maybe two days to plan and execute. Not what I'd call a Crystal Shaw-Hayden type of shindig.
Pat was the sweetheart of Bisbee and still is actually. Dance classes, flawless skin and a special mixed breed (her father is an Okie and her mother of Mexican descent) beauty. She was never without a boyfriend and it was usually the captain of some team or another. But not Jack Porter. No...not a Porter. We used to be considered....on the bad team. The poor side of town and willing to defend ourselves from anything and anybody. We were rough and my mother could barely afford tuna on sale most of the time, never mind the dance classes at Crystal Shaw-Hayden's Dance Academy where Pat and those types of girls went to learn tap, ballet and jazz. I remember the sign even said " ...and Charm School".
I used to go up to Patricia's house all the time. Her father treated me like one of his own and used to carry me around on his shoulders and he built me a special swing out under the tree at the corner of the house because I was too small to play with all the older kids on the big tire swing out on a massive oak tree in the drainage channel in front of the Alexander homestead. And it was a "homestead" complete with a fire pit for garbage burning, three free standing shacks used for various things and a "workshop".
The Alexanders (and everyone else back then) were avid hunters. Almost every Sunday Mr. Alexander would be serving the catch of the day: frog's legs to havelina to duck. He'd try to get me to eat some but I'd just plug my nose and run away. I was from a deer, trout and rabbit only household even if my mother used to love brains and eggs. The workshop was covered with every set of antlers that Mr. Alexander and the two Alexander boys shot. The workshop was so picturesque that Richard Byrd (who traveled with the Beatles and studied with Ansel Adams) took one of his most popular photos using the zone system which was ideally suited to the boney white antlers against the grainy exterior of the shop.
Yes...their house was the place to be and sometimes Patricia would put me beside her on the piano bench and teach me a little 1-2-3, 3-2-1, 1-2-3-2-1-1. Or better yet, she would take me to the storage shack and pull out her old Barbie case which was turquoise with a line drawing of a fashion doll on front wearing a pink poodle skirt. And they had a dining room! They dried their dishes with hand towels and put them away whereas ours just dried in the rack. They had two bathrooms even! or at least, I believed they did. We had one and an old enamel chamber pot that someone would hand out if you couldn't hold it. Usually, when it comes to chamber pots, you can. Trust me.
It was heaven up there and they were a stable family in the midst of so much that was so unstable. No one though including her parents imagined that one day she would be under a car in a garage tightening a drive shaft or pulling out an oil pan. What kind of work is that for a woman with a Master's Degree in Social Work?
It's my brother Jack's work and so, it is her work because they are two people meant to be as they are, just as all people are as they are meant to be. She is his wife. Jack trained his wife to rebuild an entire engine. She does the ordering and the phone answering too, tends to the social work of a Bisbee business and is the wife of Bisbee's Ward 1 councilman, WJ "Jack" Porter. And Jack makes the breasts. Rather good at it actually.
One day after Pat had started her chemo, I was up at the garage on one of my weekly visits. It was very important to the two of them that people not over react to what they both must have seen "back then" as a death sentence. I kept repeating to them day after day, "Your day is your day." I followed this up with the explanation that even if you do get cancer then who says you aren't going to die on your way to see the oncologist? Neither one of them likes to wear a helmut as they cruise around town on their Harleys. Hers is red and Jacks is home made and silver.
On my visits Pat would vary between wanting to talk and not wanting to talk. She'd rush over to one of the grimy shelves and bring out a pack of papers her mother (also an RN) sent to her via email which detailed the various side effects and risks of her chemo. I'd just look at them and have to say, "I'm not a "cancer" nurse. I know about as much as you do." I know what I know about. I know about car wrecks. I've carried a few dead bodies myself from time to time and I've also seen the most miraculous things.
That day though I wanted to say something a bit more religious. It was clear to me that Pat was chosen to experience something and it was becoming more clear to her each time I'd pay her a visit. Our conversations grew deeper and more hushed. She said to me at one point, "It's strange, I feel kind of blessed by this." And I nodded to that one. I said, "Yes, you've received a warning."
Not everyone gets a warning you know. We are the lucky ones. Many people just venture forth every day and take life and death for granted. They assume so much and even assume that they might even die. So what! All very normal thoughts people have. Not many of them however understand something really fine about life and death. People think death is the exceptional day. Afterall, it only happens to each of us once. Fact of the matter is, the death day or as we say in Islam "The Hour" is not exceptional at all. It is guaranteed and shared by every single living thing. What isn't shared by every single living thing is the exceptional quality of life under the clause: you only wake up each day because you didn't die. Sounds simple enough but until you've seen death up close most people cannot possibly comprehend it on a personal level. Allah prevents people from dying each and every day. It isn't about how many people died today in Iraq or Utah. It's about how many people are allowed one more day to change something. Each and every day is a chance to change something.
So, on this particular day I looked at Pat. I hesitated to say the religious things to either one of them because they both believe they are athiests or at best, agnostics. The reason being is that the three of us had a bit of a conflict when I first arrived from Lebanon last year during the Israeli War Crime of 2007. They weren't used to me at all or the manner in which I express myself (constantly) about Islam. Non muslims really cannot understand Islam you know and for sure, cannot understand those of us who submit to it (even though they all think they are quite smart and can). In some realms this is called arrogance. In the case of Pat and Jack, I chalk it up to ignorance. That is a whole story in itself...the altercation between the three of us which threatened to alienate us forever. It actually made me look up into the night sky the evening I ran away from Jack after beating him in the chest and ask, "Why Allah, why?" Patricia...my big sister "in law" and my favorite brother Jack. Of Jack and Fish. Jack like Grandfather. THAT Jack and THAT Pat. My other sister. The one in the photograph in front of the Atlantic Richfield station where she is carrying a plaid lunch box and I'm trying to squirm away and obviously, laughing.
Well. We settled those differences just in time to get ready for Patricia's earth shattering diagnosis of breast cancer. Just in time.
So, on this particular day, although still a bit fearful and hesitant to express something even quasi religious to her, I knew I had to say it. I knew why I'd come to America. I knew why I couldn't leave. I said to her, "Now then, how on earth do you think you could have coped with chemo if you and Jack would have still been downing a twelve pack every single night?" Well...I didn't say it exactly like that but the reader must get the profound point I had to make to her.
Her eyes grew large and began to shine. She asked then, "Do you think I was being prepared for this?"
I said, "Absolutely." Not even a tiny doubt. She knew I was right. Pat runs over a hundred miles a week. Gosh, even when she and Jack were tossing down the Buds she ran at least that or more. Although being an athlete puts you in a certain "class" of nonbeliever it certainly does not cure cancer in and of itself.
And now, Pat is getting better. She showed me her head today. Lots of tiny hairs coming in and even a few eyebrows on her still gorgeous fifty plus face. She's almost done with her radiation now and told me today that her docs put her in the 90 percentile group of survivors. She is one of the reasons I took hijab. She was wondering whether or not to buy a bunch of cheesy wigs and I said, "Why on earth would you cover such a beautiful head? I mean, you are beautiful. I can see if you were a really unsightly person but you don't have to worry. You always look great and you'll look just as great bald." And I look just as great with a rag on my head. I really do. Or, so some people say.
And that is why I am here. Probably for even more reasons than that. A long time ago, another muslim questioned me about my American family. He wanted to know if they had accepted Islam. Back then I thought, "Oh...never. They just never could do that. Impossible." I gave up on that idea right there and then. I mean what do you do? Just come out and tell a person, "Look, I have proof that you are lacking something incredibly important, I know what it is and I'm gonna tell you what it is and you are going to accept it?" You just can't do that even though you might sometimes try. I guarantee you though, you only try and fail at that once to learn that particular lesson that is constantly reiterated in the Quran.
Miracles take time. I'm here to tell my family something and perhaps a few other people who see my covered head bopping around town and turn their heads in a state of shock, "What! A muslim here in South Eastern Arizona! In Minuteman territory? Right here next to the illegal alien Wall of China?"
No way.
Yes way. And Miracles take time. And yes, I smoke. It is a real fitna for me. But I also know how and when I am going to die.
When Allah chooses.
No comments:
Post a Comment