cancer

Unexpected Love Story

02.24.2017 by Nicole Kristin Twedt //

Originally from February 2011

At a MOPS Christmas meeting I shared an experience my family had in the midst of cancer. For Valentine’s Day I’m sensing the need to push past all of the sadness and heartache and bring on a good old fashioned, life-is-good, mushy love story. Who doesn’t enjoy a good love story? It just so happens that I have the perfect one to share.

David came into my life very early on, before I was born actually. His wife Diana even threw mom a baby shower when she was pregnant with me. Diana was mom’s best friend and David, a fellow fire fighter like dad, was the most cherished and trusted of dad’s friends.

Sadly, Diana died the same year dad’s cancer returned. David was widowed and left with 2 young adult sons.

It came to pass that in March of 1996, dad, after battling cancer 6 separate times in 6 years, was really going to die. Family and close friends were called to his bedside to say good-bye for the last time. Dad hadn’t spoken much in days. He had so much morphine pumping through his broken body that when he did talk he spoke mostly as a child, speaking of flying airplanes, something he’d never in his life attempted. But the afternoon dad spoke to mom for the last time he was fully conscious and very intent on giving her a specific message. It went something like this:

“We’ve enjoyed over 20 years of married life together and I’ve cherished every moment of them. It grieves me to think of leaving you behind. Nothing would make me happier than to know that you are taken care of, that you are happy and that you will love again.” He went on, “I really can’t think of anyone who I trust my family with more than David Andrews. When I die I want you to marry Dave.”

Dad’s proclamation was enough to really knock the wind, the socks and just about everything else off and out of my poor mother. But the good sport that she is, mom didn’t say much. She gently assured dad of her love for him and that she would be okay. In the back of her mind she was probably thinking, David Andrews! He’s Diana’s husband, Ew! Then again, maybe mom didn’t take what he said seriously.

After all, dad had a lot, and I mean a lot, of morphine pumping through his body.

Shortly after midnight on March 6, 1996 Dad began a new life free of pain as he slipped into the presence of our Savior. I can only imagine his joy. Mom, Scott, David, grandma and I witnessed the event. It was the most precious moment of my life, next to my wedding day and the birth of my children, it was also the most tragic.

When you are grieving life seems to stand still, but as much as you’d like to hide under your covers, hold your breath and wait for things to get better or just give up all together, God shows up and reveals a new season. Winter turned into spring rather quickly the year of dad’s death. And those spring days found mom and Dave spending a lot of time together, taking long walks strictly as friends, both knowing the tragedy of loosing a spouse.

On one such walk, mom, trying to be funny, gently joked about dad’s last words to her, saying something along the line of “You’ll never guess what Steve said to me when he was on all of the morphine…” She proceeded to tell Dave of dad’s shot as a matchmaker. Dave didn’t laugh. Looking into her eyes Dave told mom that at the end of Diana’s life she whispered to her mother-in-law that if anything ever happened to my dad, if the cancer returned and his life ended, she knew that David was to marry my mom. I don’t know how long it took mom to recover from that one. What I do know is that something changed that afternoon between mom and Dave, something completely unexpected, something new and very beautiful.

You see, the great love story is that God brings beauty in times of despair. Just when life seems to end as we know it, he brings something fresh and completely unexpected. The enemy will try his hardest to tear us apart, hoping that we will be ruined by the trials we face. But the Bible tells us that God is in control. “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them” Romans 8:28. Not only is he in control, but the Bible tells us in Psalm 56 that God is so near to the broken-hearted that he keeps track of all of their sorrows and actually collects their tears in his bottle. God was with my family as we said good-bye to dad. I know this without a doubt. And although it was completely unexpected and honestly difficult at the time, God was with us when mom said that she loved David and would marry him. None of this took God by surprise. He knows the plans He has for us, and they are good plans, safe plans, plans we can trust him with (Jeremiah 29:11).

I promised you a love story. And what I delivered was probably not the kind of love story you expected, but it was a love story all the same. I don’t know what your life experiences are. I don’t know what your walk with God is like or what this Valentine’s Day holds for you. But I do know God, I know him well. He knows you well. And he wants you to know him well. Since before time began, he has written a beautiful love story on each of our hearts. Right now he is speaking to your heart. If you haven’t already, he longs to help you discover how much he loves you and cares for you even when life isn’t going the way you thought it would go. I challenge you to open your heart to him. I promise that you will encounter the greatest adventure of your life and the greatest love story ever experienced.

Christmas Angel

02.23.2017 by Nicole Kristin Twedt //

Originally from December 2010

My dad was first diagnosed with cancer in the early nineties. Although dad was in remission at the time, in the fall of 1994 the board of firefighters recommended an early retirement from his career as a firefighter. He had survived the deadly battle of cancer, but his body was no longer able to fight fires. Early retirement presented a huge financial burden for my parents. Mom was a stay-at-home mom and dad was now retired with a pension half his normal salary. Money would be tight and Christmas was just around the corner.

But money was not my parents only concern that weekday afternoon. Dad’s cancer was back. My parents were crushed. Dread filled their hearts as they neared our family home in Shoreline. They would have to tell my brother and me that cancer had returned. And this time the prognosis wasn’t positive. To make matters worse, mom and dad didn’t have the money to provide for Christmas the way our family was used to celebrating. Not that Christmas was about the presents, but mom’s heart broke with the thought of the financial pressure they faced at this time of the year. The Lord’s birth was always the central focus of Christmas in our family, but how could she ignore the festivities of this special holiday when this could very well be dad’s last Christmas?

Like many family homes, ours had two main entrances, the front door for visitors and a side door adjoining the driveway for close friends, neighbors and family. Earlier that afternoon, my brother Scott and I returned home from school to find an envelope taped behind the screen of our side door. Certain this was a note from my youth group’s Secret Santa, I ripped the envelope open. What I found inside was a typed note attached to a bundle of bills. Knowing this was clearly not for me, but a blessing for my family, Scott and I shoved the money back in the little envelope and anxiously awaited the return of our parents.

Knowing nothing of this financial blessing, dread seeped into my parents’ hearts as they neared our home. But something caught the corner of their eyes as they slowly turned down our steep driveway to the little house in Shoreline. We had a large picture window in the front of our home. And to their surprise, my parents could plainly see Scott and me jumping and dancing around the living room like wild hooligans. Teenagers at the time, Scott and I were not prone to such displays of emotion or excitement. Mom and dad knew something was up.

As soon as we saw their little Geo pull up, Scott and I dashed to meet them. We threw our arms around our parents, laughing and crying, oblivious to the news we would ultimately hear. When we finally let go of them, with tears streaming down our bright eyes, we presented our findings. Slowly, mom and dad opened the envelope to discover ten crisp one hundred dollar bills with a typed letter explaining that we were not supposed to know who the money was from but that we had a friend who knew that we needed a little extra help this Christmas. As a family we praised God, rejoicing that an anonymous friend, a Christmas Angel, had it on their heart to bless us with a generous gift when our family needed it most.

Then came the hard part. Once inside, mom and dad sat us down and explained all that they had learned from the doctor. With more tears, Scott and I learned that dad’s cancer was back and that his future didn’t look promising. Ironically, it started to rain at this point. But when all of our questions were asked and answered around our dining room table, mom and I looked up through the sliding glass door and noticed that it had stopped raining. There, to our surprise, was a glorious rainbow, bright in color and promise. Immediately I was reminded about God’s covenant with Noah. The Lord would protect and bless our family, even in the deadly realm of cancer.

Over 15 years has passed since we were visited by the Christmas Angel. Still, the verse from Jeremiah is clearly impressed upon my heart when I think back to that late fall afternoon: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11).

I once thought that God sent the rainbow and the Christmas Angel as a promise that nothing was going to happen to my dad, that cancer would never take his life; and that we would always have plenty of money for Christmas presents. Now I understand that the promise extends past the physical world and into the eternal, spiritual world. There is no promise against cancer. There are no promises that we will always have the funds needed to celebrate Christmas elaborately. That’s not the point, is it? However, God promises something better. He loves His children so much. He has something better planned for us than what we understand from our given circumstances. We will go through trials, believe me we will, but He is always there. And what He kindly offers is a love relationship with him that stands against even death.

Merry Christmas.

Thirty-eight Minus Twenty

02.23.2017 by Nicole Kristin Twedt //

Originally from early February, 2017

I originally and inappropriately came up with the title Crazy Town for this blog post. After all, the shoe fits. A little too well. I thought about Twenty Years or maybe even Battle Wounds. But I’m partial to Thirty-eight Minus Twenty.

With a smile on my face I admit it’s true, the part about life being a crazy town. My sanity is in question most days. I have three children and a small dog, after all. It’s crazy town all the time. But this is different. I’ve been wondering why I’ve been highly-emotional this year. Highly-emotional, even for me. I tend to fly on the side of highly sensitive by nature. It just seems that I’m a little too quick to get teary about everything just about all the time these days, which is unlike me. I may be highly in-tune with my feelings, but I prefer not to let anyone know what’s going on. No one is going to see me lose it. I’ll do my falling apart in private thank you very much. I’m Scandinavian, after all.

I’ve been sick lately, really sick. I’ve had a sinus infection since forever. One of the perks (if you can call it a perk) during the initial fever-laden days was that I was too sick even to read, which forced me to sit on the couch and do nothing but watch TV and think. Everything else hurt. No complaints here. When mama is sick and the kids are old enough to somewhat fend for themselves, being sick and homebound is honestly a little like a mini-vacation minus the spa. Just me and the couch and season one of Bones. Quality Netflix, I tell yah. I’m living the life.

Someone like me needs time to process just about everything, and with three busy kids I don’t have the luxury to sit and think about much of anything. But it hit me, this last week on the couch with season one of Bones in the background. I know what’s up.

I turned Thirty-eight in June. I love being thirty-eight. The year began triumphantly. For it was on my birthday that I pretended to be brave and bought myself this domain and purchased all that needed purchasing to get this blog dream into my actual life (even thought this baby isn’t launched). Thirty-eight-year-old me took a very important first step.

But thirty-eight minus twenty equals eighteen.

I don’t know why I was doing the math. I’m a word girl, after all. Though lately I’m contorting into some sort of hybrid number girl. If only I can view a number by its name rather than numeric form (like five instead of 5), which has nothing to do with anything.

Back to thirty-eight minus twenty equals eighteen.

I randomly came across a picture of a guy I went to high school with on Instagram. I was thinking it’s been twenty years since I’ve seen him, which put me just shy of eighteen. Suddenly all that happened right before I turned eighteen came rushing back. I believe the kindness of the Holy Spirit led me to the make the connection: It’s been twenty years, closer to twenty-one now, since I was almost eighteen and lost my sweet dad to cancer. This is a fraction of what I don’t want to write about.

I can hardly breathe, but it’s not the sinus infection. I’m reliving the horror that was 1996, but in many ways I’m experiencing my emotions for the first time. During the real-time first time I wasn’t ready to face the darkness. I focused on God’s grace in the situation, but didn’t allow myself to experience the full range of emotion that trauma calls for. In other words, I set my feet firmly in the land of denial. I remember how my throat used to hurt, burning as I held in the screams. I couldn’t face them, couldn’t let them out, couldn’t bear to hear them. I wasn’t ready. So I watched many a sad movie so I could cry for the men and women on the big screen. What was I thinking? Why couldn’t I cry for me?

For all the times I said everything was okay, it wasn’t. How could it be okay?

And it’s more than my dad’s actual death, the most horrific, yet gentle at the same time, beautiful moment of my life. It’s his illness and the overlapping time when I lost my hearing that haunts me so.

Almost two years ago God set me on an adventure. Not an exciting adventure. It was quite the gruesome one. Through a writing assignment at a Story Retreat near Leavenworth, God set my feet back through time to show me that he was always there, during the darkest moments of my life, of cancer and the trauma of loosing my hearing on the cusp of high school.

God was tender, so tender to me during the writing activity. I had always known that God was with me in dad’s actual death because I was getting to know him then. But God spoke to my heart about how he was there in the darkness before I knew him. And he spoke to me about how these experiences, these hurts, didn’t come from him, but he’ll use them for good, and I believed him.

Then last fall, maybe the end of summer, our church did a Sermon Series titled Do Hard Things. I remember very little of what was said, but I can’t stop thinking about how it occurred to me during one of the sermons that it’s hard for me to ask for help. Again this winter we are revisiting the Do Hard Things series. I guess I’m not the only one who needs a repeat. Anyway, I remember clearly in January one of the pastors saying that Doing Hard Things means it’s time for some of us to deal with our stuff (raises hand).

And that has to be why I’m running from writing. You see, I started the blog in June but have written precious little since. I don’t want to deal with my stuff. To write is to process and make sense of my God, myself, my world. But to write is to hurt because writing involves facing what I’m feeling, what I’ve been feeling and what I haven’t let myself feel for over twenty years.

Today was a much-needed snow day for our school district and neighboring towns. The kids played for quite a bit in the back yard dusted in white. The kids had fun and the dog came back with her beautiful long hair dreadlocked in snow balls. Don’t ask.

After showers to warm their bodies and lunch to warm their bellies, even if it was only organic instant oatmeal, we watched the rest of Pete’s Dragon, the newer version.

Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the park ranger. She rescued young Pete from the great Forrest of the North where he has lived for the last six years, alone she thinks. Pete is an orphan. His parents died tragically in a car accident on an adventure six years ago. Grace tells Pete that he is a brave, brave boy and I felt the Lord whisper to my younger self and my heart, You were so, so brave. You were a brave, brave girl. You were so brave when your dad was sick and when you lost your hearing.

As the movie comes to an end, Elliot the Dragon brings Pete back to Grace, her boyfriend Jack, and Jack’s daughter Natalie. Even a dragon knows it isn’t good for a boy to be without a human family. As I watched Pete being welcomed into his new family, I could practically hear the Holy Spirit whisper once again to my heart. It’s not good for you to be alone with all of your thoughts and experiences. It’s time to process what you went through. You are going to make yourself sick if you keep holding onto that time. You were brave but I never wanted you to face it alone. You can’t hold onto it any longer. It’s time to deal with your stuff. It’s time to write.

I don’t know what this means for the blog. But I finally know what I’m supposed to write about: grief. And it’s the last thing I want to do.

I don’t want this blog to become a pity-party for one. I want to write to encourage others, not to drown in a sea of narcissism. It’s going to be hard, this writing. But it’s impossible for me to move forward unless I deal with what’s behind. Now is the time to release some of these toxic feelings, the ones I’ve held in for the last twenty-odd years. Now is the time to let the bottle containing my deepest emotions explode, just a little, so it can be mended and filled again with beauty, truth, wonder and love. Once again, it’s time to write. Before I have it figured out.

Thirty-eight minus twenty.