Hannah's Gift (4 page)

LAURAJANE, THE NEW PASTOR OF OUR SMALL METHODIST
church, was standing across from me on the other side of Hannah’s bed. She didn’t look like any church leader I had ever seen. She was thirty-one, the same age as me, with a short, thick body and a head of wiry red curls that refused to be tamed. She wore a long, green velvet dress, and a gold cross hung from a chain around her neck. She clutched a wad of tissue in her hand, because her eyes kept filling with tears.

Two days before, surgeons had lifted a tumor the size of a small soccer ball from Hannah’s abdomen. Now she was lying on the bed, tethered to a respirator and heavily sedated. Plastic tubes and the tips of her red shoes emerged from the edges of her pink blanket. Monitors with zigzagging green lines hung from the ceiling above the bed. The only sounds in the room were an occasional beep and a periodic whoosh from the respirator.

Laurajane bowed her head and started to pray. I closed my eyes and tried to quiet my mind. It was doing crazy things. In one moment it was a model of efficiency, deciphering the whooshes, clicks, and beeps of the various machines so quickly that they no longer frightened me. In the next, I couldn’t even remember when I had last eaten.

I desperately needed someone to take care of me. Since Hannah’s surgery, I hadn’t slept more than a few hours at a time, and yesterday my body had given up the tiny form of our dead baby. I knew that I couldn’t depend on Claude to do any more. After five days of juggling work, errands, phone calls, visiting me and Hannah, and shuttling Will between the hospital, play dates, and home, he was as exhausted as I was.

At least my mother was now here. She and Will were moving into the Ronald McDonald House, a beautiful facility with lots of toys and activities to keep Will busy, across the street from the hospital. Claude would continue to sleep at home. It was probably just as well; he and my mother had, over the years, only barely managed to get along, and these days I couldn’t handle being a referee.

One of the monitors began to beep. I realized my mind had been wandering. The beeping stopped. I tried once again to concentrate on Laurajane’s words. It was too late.

“Amen,” Laurajane said.

I opened my eyes. Tears were streaming down Laurajane’s cheeks and dripping off her chin. She was looking at me as if she was about to say something; I didn’t yet
know her well enough to imagine what it might be. For days, people had been telling me, “God only gives us what we can handle.” I hoped Laurajane wasn’t about to tell me the same thing. I knew these words were meant to comfort me, but I was finding it difficult to accept that what was happening to Hannah and our family was part of some benevolent God’s plan. I also suspected that when people said this, they were secretly comforting themselves, imagining that since
they
couldn’t handle what was happening to us, their God would never give it to them.

“I have no choice!”
I wanted to scream. I couldn’t wall myself off from pain and fear. To turn away from them would be to turn away from Hannah. No matter how bad things were, I wasn’t willing to do that.

Laurajane cleared her throat and reached for another tissue.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, pausing to blow her nose, “but I can’t lie to you. I want more than anything to make sense of what is happening to you guys, but I can’t even begin to pretend that this is something I understand.

“I became a minister because I loved and believed in God and wanted to help other people, but now, seeing what you are going through, I’m not sure I have what it takes. This whole scene doesn’t jibe with what I thought I knew about Him; it’s hard to believe that the God I love would let a child suffer like this.”

I couldn’t decide whether to kiss her or fall on my knees. Laurajane’s humility and willingness to acknowledge out
loud the unfairness and insanity I was feeling came as a profound relief. I realized then that what I needed most wasn’t for someone to make me feel better; I needed people like Laurajane who were willing to stand with me in the face of the raw truth.

CLAUDE AND I WERE SITTING ON FADED PLASTIC CHAIRS IN
an old supply closet that was posing as a conference room. Dr. Kamalaker and his partner, Dr. Bekele, shuffled through folders and papers that were strewn on the table in front of them. They were pediatric oncologists who worked for the children’s clinic attached to the hospital and were now officially in charge of Hannah’s case. A nurse sat to one side with Jill, the clinic’s social worker, trying desperately but unsuccessfully to appear relaxed. Claude and I held hands and sat so close together that the legs of our chairs overlapped.

Dr. Kamalaker lifted a long printed sheet from the pile in front of him.

“We got the report from the lab in California,” he said softly, raising his head to look first at Claude and then at me.

I felt very, very quiet; I knew the truth was coming in a way I had never known it before.

Claude squeezed my hand tighter and leaned in to me until he was almost sitting on the edge of my chair. The nurse looked away. Jill crossed her legs.

Something was happening. I could feel the weight of my body pressing my tailbone into the seat of the chair. I felt breath pouring in and out of my lungs, and my heart pounding in my chest, but my awareness had expanded beyond my body and thoughts. Although my eyes never left Dr. Kamalaker’s, I had a sense of being able to see the whole room, then Hannah in her room down the hall, and then the whole hospital block. Eventually I saw everyone I loved and everything else, until the whole universe was contained in one place.

“The news is not as good as we had hoped. The tumor
is
cancerous; it’s called a Rhabdoid tumor of the kidney. It’s malignant, aggressive, and rare, but there’s still about a twenty-percent chance of remission. We’ve been in touch with a hospital in Washington State that has been treating a little girl who was diagnosed fifteen months ago. That’s good news, since most patients die within a year.”

He paused. The room was still. Someone’s chair scraped across the floor. A throat cleared. Four pairs of eyes watched us. As the silence grew, the nurse turned her gaze politely, painfully away. Claude stared straight ahead and said nothing.

As quiet as the room was, there was a deeper silence in me; my heart had jumped beyond the diagnosis, beyond the prognosis, beyond the treatment.
I knew that Hannah was going to die, and I was not afraid.

I do not know where my fear went. I simply knew that if Hannah was going to die, I needed to face the truth and make the most of the time we had left. I also knew that when
it was time, I wanted her home, to let her go as gently as she could go.

I opened my mouth and let the question fall out of my heart.

“Dr. Kamalaker, when it’s clear that Hannah has had enough, when she’s ready to die, will you help her go?”

Claude turned to look at me. Everyone else did, too. Dr. Kamalaker studied me thoughtfully without answering.

Dr. Bekele spoke. “You realize, don’t you, that we are not giving up hope that Hannah’s cancer can go into remission. We intend to do everything we can to help her.” Jill and the nurse nodded emphatically in agreement.

I knew they were probably horrified by my question; part of me was stunned by it, too. Even if I knew in my heart that Hannah was going to die, wouldn’t saying it out loud clinch the deal? I didn’t think so. I wasn’t giving up on the possibility that Hannah could be cured. I was simply acknowledging something that is already true for everyone: Death comes to all of us, ready or not. To know that Hannah was going to die couldn’t
cause
her death any more than denying it could
prevent
her death. The truth was going to be what it was, either way. The only choice I had was to decide what I was going to do with it.

Dr. Kamalaker and I were still looking at each other. His eyes were soft and sympathetic. I felt as if he was seeing into my heart.

“I am not willing to give up in the face of this disease,” he said finally. “I am going to do everything I can to beat
this cancer, but if we are not successful, I am also willing to help you with what you asked.”

Waves of relief surged through me; not only had I been able to give a voice to my deepest fear, but I had found someone else willing to face the truth with me. If Hannah was going to die, I now knew that I wasn’t going to be alone in it.

DOCTORS HAD GRADUALLY DECREASED THE AMOUNT OF
Hannah’s sedative and then removed the respirator tube from her throat. After all she had just been through, I couldn’t believe how good she looked. Although she had lost a lot of weight, her voice was hoarse, and the skin on her cheeks was raw where strips of tape had held the breathing tube in place, Hannah had spent the day laughing, talking, sipping juice, and watching videos with Will. I had even managed to wash her hair, using a plastic bowl and a sample of baby shampoo that one of the nurses had scrounged around to find for me. Hannah had insisted that we pull it back into a huge pink bow.

Now, she was about to eat her first solid food in over a week.

“Dinner!” the nurse announced with a flourish, lifting the lids on the tray in front of her to reveal a plate of mashed potatoes, cups of Jell-O and pudding, and a bowl of chicken broth.

Hannah frowned. She wasn’t impressed. She poked her
finger into the potatoes, and then folded her arms across her chest.

“No way, José. I’m not eating
that.
I want pizza,” she said. The nurse smiled.

“Hannah, the doctors ordered these foods for you because they will be gentle on your throat and tummy. Tomorrow, maybe, you can have pizza.”

Hannah looked steadily at her for about ten seconds. The nurse didn’t move.

“Get Dr. Tony,” Hannah said.

When Dr. Tony arrived, the nurse explained the situation. Dr. Tony tapped a finger on his clipboard the way he had that first morning when Hannah had stopped him in his tracks. He looked at Hannah. She returned his gaze.

“Well,” he said finally, “I
am
Italian, so I know why Hannah feels the way she does about pizza. If I hadn’t eaten anything in a really long time, I’d want pizza, too.”

Twenty minutes later, a second tray was delivered from the cafeteria. The nurse set it on the table in front of Hannah. Dr. Tony peeked his head into the room and winked at me, grinning from ear to ear.

“Ta-da!” Hannah said, lifting the lid. She let out a shriek, and I saw the reason for Dr. Tony’s grin.

There, in the middle of the tray, sat two slices of pizza
and
a dish of chocolate ice cream.

EXACTLY TWO WEEKS AFTER I HAD CARRIED HANNAH
across the parking lot to the emergency room, we brought her home. It was a lovely late-summer evening when we pulled into the driveway. While Will and Hannah clapped and cheered, some part of me wanted to turn and run. Hannah’s cancer and my life had somehow felt more manageable in the hospital. Now, looking at the relief on Claude’s face as he unloaded the suitcases from the car, I imagined he was expecting things to return to normal. The problem was, I couldn’t remember what “normal” looked like anymore.

Stepping through the front door of our house, even the smell was different than I remembered. As I wandered from one room to the next, I saw my life through new eyes. I wondered what had happened to the woman who used to live here; it was hard to believe it had ever been me. I realized that my old routine—Friday morning moms’ group, play dates for the kids, church on Sunday—was a
beautiful life for someone else, but not for me. I had no idea what my life was; I simply knew it wasn’t this.

Hannah seemed tentative, too. She walked slowly into the house, climbed the stairs, and stood quietly in the door-way of her room. Will came bounding up behind her, his arms full of the dolls, books, and stuffed animals people had sent to the hospital.

“Hannah, let’s find a place to put your new things,” he said.

“Okay,” she agreed.

While Claude finished unloading the car, I began clearing a shelf in the laundry room to make way for boxes of gauze, tape, antiseptics, vials of saline and heparin, syringes, caps, and a bright red container that read “Hazardous Materials—Medical Waste.” Where I once had a hospital floor of doctors, nurses, and residents to care for Hannah, I now had a space above the washer and dryer.

I heard peals of laughter coming from Hannah’s room.

Peeking in, I saw the contents of Hannah’s dress-up box strewn all over the floor. In the process of unpacking Hannah’s things, Will had found a short, blond wig. He was wearing it now, with Hannah’s rhinestone crown, dancing around the room, his solid boy body packed into a tutu with electric-blue sequins and a shimmering, multicolored skirt. Hannah was doubled over on the floor, laughing so hard she couldn’t stand up. I started to laugh, too. Claude, hearing the commotion, bounded up the stairs and joined in.

Listening to our laughter, I was filled with relief that we were together, that we could experience this much love and joy in such an ordinary moment. I realized, then, that home is not some familiar place you can always return to; it is the rightness you feel,
wherever
you are, when you know that you are loved.