A Holy Experience

After He Said Cancer | A Memoir

The sun was shining behind her, and I could almost feel the tropical breeze kissing my face. Mary Lynn Garner had an organic farm on the western flanks of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. I had been to the Big Island once for a scientific conference. Unknowingly, I had probably been within 15 minutes of her farm, but at that time we hadn’t known of one another.

Each time I spoke with her on video call, the idea of trading the cold Seattle rain for the sun of the Big Island crossed my mind. The rich volcanic soil made it possible to grow almost anything on her farm including coffee, tropical fruits and plants, papaya, mango, avocado, guava, vanilla, and almost any vegetable one can imagine. Seeds could germinate and turn into fruit at a clip that wasn’t imaginable by gardeners in the Pacific Northwest. It must be like watching a racehorse come out of the gate.

Tropical hibiscus flower from Mary Lynn’s farm.

She stopped farming about five years ago when her wife of 24 years was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. The cancer had shown up in the lymph nodes and lungs. She needed chemotherapy, but her body couldn’t tolerate the treatments. Each new treatment came with a new complication. Mary Lynn became her full-time caregiver, until the treatments stopped working.

The entire process from her wife’s diagnosis until her death took four years. If anyone understood the complex journey of the caregiver of a person with metastatic cancer, it was Mary Lynn. I thought she could help me sort through some of my nearly constant worries about my husband’s health since his diagnosis. What would the next test show? Were we seeing the right doctors and was there anything else that we should be doing? Despite working as a physician for two decades and caring for family members after surgery, I had been unprepared for my fear.

When I sat down to talk with her by video call, Mary Lynn reminded me that she had also been a caregiver to her mother, who also died of metastatic breast cancer. Her mother’s diagnosis came out of the blue, as she was finishing the first year of an exciting post-graduate program at the age of 25. I thought of myself at this age and how much I was still maturing and learning about life and relationships.

To be frank, I still had a lot to learn about these things and I was more than twice this age.

“My father told me that my mother was being isolated in a hospital room to get chemotherapy. Both her arms were pinned to a board for IV fluids,” she said with tension in her voice. The treatments had sapped her strength, and the picture of her mother alone and suffering was too much for Mary Lynn. She got on the soonest plane and became her full-time caregiver.

“I knew that the biggest grief of my life was coming, and I didn’t want to regret that there might be something that I could have been done,” she said plainly. “What I could have done, I did.”

She paused for a moment, and we both sat in silence. I was still taking in her clear-eyed appraisal of the situation at such a young age.

“The tumors exploded in her lungs, and she could barely breathe,” Mary Lynn went on. “Soon, my mother became unable to do further treatments of any kind and was sent home. I camped out with her in the living room until her death. During our time together, she shared incredible stories with me. Day and night ceased to have meaning.”

Although my profession was delivering babies and taking care of women’s health, I had seen people die during my training and in my own family. Most people do not have the strength or capacity to be with someone – in this way – to the end of their life.

“A lot of 25-year-olds would not have the maturity to do what you did,” I said. “Even many adults are not capable of being present in the way that you were with your mom. How did you know what to do?” I was also curious to know where she found this well of strength.

“I think that I was just inclined,” she replied quickly. “I was training to become a naturopathic doctor and had classes in death and dying. But what made an even greater impression on me was being at a home birth. The birth was such a miracle. I remember thinking, we must come from somewhere. We don’t just happen upon the Earth, and we don’t just disappear. I had this strong feeling that my mom was going somewhere.” She paused for a moment, and I felt electricity running up and down my arms, and then a shiver.

“There is something more than what we know,” she continued. “And it is to be marveled at and awed by. The end of life and death is a passage to what comes next.”

I hadn’t expected her to say this, nor had I ever thought about the end of life as a transitory state through which we pass.

“I can’t imagine a more painful place to be than by the side of someone you love who is dying,” she said, drawing in a breath. “When it was clear that cancer was going to kill my wife, she decided to go gracefully. It made it imperative that I go gracefully with her. I wanted to give her what she wanted, which made the process both exquisitely painful and beautiful.”

Again, I was struck by her emphasis on the end of life as a state that could blend love, grief, and the sacred.

“I have never felt more able to give of my entire myself,” she said. “For lack of a better term, it was a very ‘holy’ experience. I felt deeply blessed by the chance to be with her in this time.”

I couldn’t hold back my tears anymore. The caregiving that she did for her mother and wife was a generosity of spirit that was so rare. More than anything, I wanted to emulate her sacrifice.

“Through these experiences, what have you learned about yourself?” I asked, wiping my tears.

“I don’t wonder how strong I am anymore,” she said. “I don’t have a lot of fear that life is going to throw me something that I can’t handle. What have I got to lose that I have not already lost?”

Her question was a good one, and it made me think about the way that traumatic events shaped a person’s character. If you had survived the hardest thing in life that you could possibly imagine, what was there left to be afraid of? Nothing was the only answer that I could come up with. I wouldn’t fear the dark or anything else if I had walked through my worst imaginable hell and come out on the other side.

“What would you recommend to someone who is struggling with grief,” I asked. It was the last question on my list, but it was one of the most important ones for my own learning.

“I did two things after my wife died,” she said in a happier tone. “As you know, I am a farmer. I went outside and put my hands in the dirt and worked my land. In about two months, I stood in the middle of a fecund garden. Who in this world is going to eat all this food, I asked myself.”

“It was early in the pandemic, and when tourism shut down, jobs on my island evaporated,” she said woefully. “Restaurants closed. So, I began delivering boxes of produce to the doors of people living 45 minutes from my farm, who are the poorest in the entire state of Hawaii.”

“My heart was broken, but I was afraid that I was in danger of closing my heart down entirely,” she said. “And I did not want a closed heart to be the legacy of my experience and love for my wife. I decided to take singing lessons in the hopes that singing would prevent my heart from closing.”

“Did it work?” I asked.

“It did,” she said with a small note of joy in her voice.

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If you would like to read other posts, here are a few:

1. How It Began. This story is the origins of my Substack and tells the story of the first moment when we learned of my husband’s breast cancer diagnosis. https://www.afterhesaidcancer.com/p/how-it-began

2. A Beach Surprise. A nice day at the beach turns into something else thanks to our mischievous animal. https://www.afterhesaidcancer.com/p/a-beach-surprise

3. A Queen. The story of a dear friend that lost her husband to breast cancer.

   https://www.afterhesaidcancer.com/p/a-queen

4. The Phone Call. He waited to tell his family about his cancer until the last moment. https://www.afterhesaidcancer.com/p/the-phone-call

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