1994

 I took the phone with me to the back patio when I heard my friend's voice, weak and tenuous, on the other end of the line.  My face began to flush and already I was asking God to help me know what to say.  In May, only two months earlier, I had visited my dying friend and had held her close as she spoke of her desire to stay on earth for her husband and two young sons.  As the journey onto earth from the darkness of the womb to the light and hope of living and breathing is a solitary journey, so death must be borne alone as a passing through the shadowy unknown into an uncertain light. My friend, while readying for the pilgrimage, faced the fears inherent in the process of her death.

"Kay," she was saying, "this will be the last time I will be able to talk to you."  My friend was choking on her  tears.

Slowly I eased down into the padded lawn chair that faced my beautiful back yard.  Hummingbirds in flight around the bottlebrush trees and the bright happy faces of the magenta and gold gazanias that smiled at me from the back slope made Cathette's message surreal on that August afternoon.  How could she be dying when so much life abounded?

"There are many things in my life that I am thankful for.  And you are at the top of my list."  Composing herself.

I cannot seem to speak. Words will not even form.  Only an impression.  The face of my beautiful friend, fair lovely skin, uncommonly large dimples, perfect lips, and the thickest, most luxurious dark hair I have ever seen on a woman.  Before me are her enormous blue-green eyes, and I can see her tiny hands move to her mouth to cover it as she giggles.  I only want to touch my friend.  I cannot bear her voice.

"The doctor has begun my morphine and already it makes me tired and often incoherent.  The pain is great; I am told I will need more and more medicine; so, before I cannot say it, I must thank you.  Thank you for always being my dearest friend.  Thank you for introducing me to Jesus.  Without you, Kay, I would not know HIm; I would be without peace that I will see Him soon."  Controlling a sob.  " I called to say good-bye."

"Oh, friend."  I wished to be eloquent, but could only weep and call her friend.  "I will miss you so much!"  Bursting from both of us were heaving sobs of sorrow, uncontained for a few rending moments.

When we could speak again it was of friendship and the joys of knowing so deeply another's very heart and soul.  Oh, I loved my friend!  I did not understand why she had to leave so soon.

When the line went dead, sounding like a heart monitor that no longer has a beating organ beeping its significance, I greeted loss; it had become my companion in recent years.  At the time I could not have identified it by name, only by the haunting doubt it brought and the detritus of disappointment it left behind.  Where is justice in the battle for life and death?  Surely my friend will see the Lord to whom I introduced her, but what could be His purpose for a mother's death and a family's grief?  I am a Christian; I do not want to blame my God.  But I am now afraid of Him; He seems untamed and capricious in His choices.  It is clear I do not think like He does, but what I could not yet admit was that I judged my God to be wrong again.

God had taken Becky "home" almost exactly two years before - also in August, like Cathette...and Mother.  A mother with a husband and two children, she was felled as Cathette was, with metasticized breast cancer.  I had first met Becky at Calvary Chapel when we worked together in the nursery.  Though she had a gurgling, gorgeous baby girl close in age to my youngest, she began to tell me of the daughter, Lisa, she had just buried.  Lisa arrived with microcephaly, a condition which caused the fontanel to close, making brain growth impossible. Lisa's severe disability was the catalyst for Becky's faith in Jesus.  She wanted to tell Lisa's story, but knew writing was not her gift.  For the hour or so we were in the nursery, Becky told me the heart-breaking story of her little Lisa, and I just knew I would write it.  It was published in 1980 by a major Christian publisher and went on to be translated into Spanish and Portuguese.  Becky and I traveled to Canada together to appear on Christian television there; and, she and her husband, Sam, were guests on the 700 Club in the United States.  The book was a great blessing; our friendship, an even deeper gift.

We could not have known at time how evanescent our precious relationship was.  Her hand brushed across an unfamiliar hardening in her breast on what began as an ordinary day.  The tumor had been hiding, a covert enemy that would prove deadly.  After her mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy, Becky chose to have her breasts reconstructed.  Life seemed to settle back into its normal routine; we all relaxed - her husband, her children, her friends.

A few months later, Becky called to say the pain she had been experiencing in her upper body was a recurrence of her cancer; this time in her bones.  The prognosis was grim; the chemotherapy brutal.  Ultimately a hospital bed was brought into her home, and Becky wasted away a day at a time.We had several conversations toward the end of her life about leaving her children and Sam. As a Christian, there were questions about God's purposes and miraculous healing.  We prayed, begging God to touch her body and bring her back to health.  When she became too ill to have visitors, I would talk to her for a few minutes on the phone.  The last time I heard her voice was three or four days before Becky died when, with some help from her mother-in-law, she phoned me.  Her voice sounded very far away, as if she were already suspended between heaven and earth; and, I found myself trying to take deep breaths for her as I listened to the struggle her words were having in their desperation to manifest.

"I have already given up my family - Sam and the kids.  I've made peace with that."  Her breathing is labored; her voice very small. "...but, Kay...I just didn't thing it would take this long to die."

So profoundly weary of the hopeless conflict with her unvanquishable foe and so fully given over to the victory that is her imminent death, Becky lay in a netherworld between heaven and earth.

"He will come and get you soon," I promised as my heart cried silently to her Savior that this be true.

"I hope so," she breathed. "Pray for me."

I did.  I prayed for her as I heard the raspy breath from her closing lungs push in and out of her, awaiting the command to cease forever the effort.  I did. I prayed for death, though that meant leaving a son and daughter and a man who loved her.  I did.  I prayed for her deeply, deeply weary husband who had watched his lovely Becky fade away; who needed solace that she suffered no more, but saw the face of God.  I did. I prayed that in her last moment here on earth she would not be afraid, for her first moment in heaven would be the salve that healed for eternity any suffering here on earth. I did pray.  But when I put my phone back on its cradle, I had many questions that my God had left unanswered.