Sunday, March 29, 2009

Live like you were dying

Gary was videotaped yesterday morning for a piece that will be featured at all four services on Easter weekend at our church. The sermon series, “Live Like You Were Dying,” is inspired by the Tim McGraw song of the same title:

I went sky diving I went Rocky Mountain climbing I went two-point-seven seconds On a bull named Fumanchu; And I loved deeper And I spoke sweeter And I gave forgiveness I'd been denying; And he said, "Someday I hope you get the chance To live like you were dying."
	This is our nephew, Brett (and not Gary), sky diving.

Gary and I have often thought of cancer as a gift (but certainly not one that we would re-gift). Interestingly, when I interviewed survivors and caregivers from across the country, almost all of them had similar thoughts. One young man said that cancer was the best worst thing that ever happened to him.

Without a drastic wake-up call, most of us think we have all the time in the world to someday spend with the people that are most important to us, to do the things we've always wanted to do, to make a difference in the lives of others. I am grateful for wake-up calls.

As the song goes, I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying.

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Sunday, March 22, 2009

Working our way out of our day jobs

A perfect weekend involves a combination of several of the simple pleasures we know in life: our weekly date, connecting with family and friends, writing, hiking/snow-shoeing, Chai tea, attending church, cooking, a good movie and/or book, housework (not that I enjoy housework but I enjoy having a clean house), and accomplishing something in the direction of our vision.

Friday night date. Gary made up this rule that he gets to eat whatever he wants on his birthday. And then he revised it to read, “Whatever I want on my birthday and my half birthday.” (It won’t surprise me if he changes the rules to take in quarter birthdays, as well.)

So, on September 22 and March 22, he invariably chooses a steakhouse to make up for the fact that he has to eat basically healthy stuff the other 363 days of the year. We celebrated at The Outback on Friday, which wasn’t the 22nd but close enough. It was a fun date, although beef is a bit overrated.

Hiking/snow-shoeing. Spring has come to Central Oregon, and we have the snow to prove it! Because of cloud cover in the mountains, we took a couple of brisk walks in our neighborhood, bundled up in layers against the cold wind. Not the same as hiking in our beloved Cascade Mountains, but it’s always good to get outdoors and get the blood pumping.

Housework. I won’t bore you with details. Suffice it to say that my good husband kicked in with the vacuum cleaner.

Movie/book. We watched an old Jimmy Stewart movie this weekend, You Can’t Take it With You. It doesn’t rank up there with his other classics and it had its silly moments, but it was fun.   As for current reading material, I’m in the middle of The Golden Road, the second in a 2-part series by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Homey, endearing – the perfect book for a cold, wintry spring weekend (is that an oxymoron?).   Writing. I worked on an essay about training to hike the Swiss Alps … only it’s really not so much about alpine training as it is about

choosing to live well despite cancer. The plan is to submit the essay to a periodical in the next couple days. 

Cooking. Southwest Chicken—a new recipe featuring black beans, corn, chicken breasts, salsa and cilantro layered in the Crockpot—was quite tasty, although my gringo husband gave it one thumb up for the combination of ingredients and the tender chicken breasts … and one thumb down for being a bit spicy.

And, because gray skies put me in the mood to bake, I made a healthy version of an old family favorite - Raisin Bars. Yum! (They’re almost half gone.)

Vision accomplishments. Gary and I are tentatively scheduled to be at a joint National Institutes of Health (NIH)/Chordoma Foundation survivorship event in Bethesda, MD, at the end of June. We’d like to take the week before to visit New Jersey family and connect with a few cancer centers in the DC/NJ/NYC area. I spent some time this weekend researching East Coast cancer centers that host survivorship programs. Books and cover letters will go out in the mail this week, with follow-up phone calls.

Slowly but surely we are heading in the direction of working our way out of our day jobs.

So you see, the perfect weekend!

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Sunday, March 15, 2009

Connected!

Our daughter, Summer, talked me into opening a Facebook account. “I don’t need one more thing to manage,” I whined. But she won out. And then Gary kept writing status updates in my name so I told him to get his own account. Now he’s addicted. 

It’s great to be in contact with people through Facebook. Not to mention web cams that allow us to spend part of Christmas with family on the other side of the country. And cell phones for instant conversations … that also snap photos and shoot video that can be posted online. And e-mail that allows us to write and receive instant letters from near and remote places – no postage necessary.   I’m part outdoors girl – always ready to strap on snowshoes, lace up hiking boots, explore mountain lakes via canoe. And I’m part e-girl – enjoying the electronic connections

with family and friends via cell phones, digital photography, Web sites, Facebook, web cams, text messaging, YouTube.

Of course, the best of both worlds would be to have a writing assignment with my hiking partner, Gary, beside me and an internet connection high atop one of our local mountains. A girl can dream, can't she?!

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Monday, March 9, 2009

CAN Cancer

I spent the past weekend working on a grant submission to an Oregon Trust Fund and a Letter of Inquiry to a foundation based in Florida. Now that I’ve come up for air, I need to tell you about an event Gary and I attended last Friday evening at The Loft – a lovely “upper room” in downtown Bend refurbished with tin ceilings and hardwood floors and a cozy fireplace.

The occasion was the launching of a cancer fundraiser. It seems that the local garbage haulers got together and came up with an idea to include lavender envelopes in their April billing. If everyone in their service area enclosed a minimum of $1 in

the envelope, they would raise $65,000 for St. Charles Cancer Services. They call their program CAN Cancer … and they want everybody to pitch in (pun intended!).     

And here’s the cool thing – the funds are intended to assist with non-medical living expenses for people dealing with all types of cancer. Up until now, we've mainly had funds to help breast cancer patients (it’s because breast cancer women have their act together and got organized a long time ago and now have long-standing, reputable programs with funding for the sisterhood).

Speaking of assisting patients with all types of cancer – Wendy’s Wish has reached its endowed level and now has funds to spend toward its mission, very similar to the CAN Cancer mission.

We had our first “customer” today. It was a simple thing, but the patient couldn’t afford an expensive over-the-counter product. I made a mad dash to the local Safeway pharmacy in the below-20 temperatures, purchased the item, bravely bypassed the Starbucks stand on my way out of the store … and our oncology nurse was able to give the product to our patient. Very cool!

I forgot to say that part of the CAN Cancer program was a fun, promotional idea. We purchased paint and brushes and recruited cancer survivors to paint ten 65-gallon garbage carts. The carts have slits on top and will be placed in businesses throughout Central Oregon for year-round collecting of loose change.

It turned out to be a community thing. I think only one survivor painted her cart entirely on her own. The others enlisted family members and friends and co-survivors.

My favorite was painted by the 4^th grade students of Karen Brockway, breast cancer survivor. They were asked, “What do you think people need to help them go through cancer?” These smart fourth graders responded with words like, “love” … “friends” ... “courage” ... “laughter”, which they painted on the roll cart in between their handprints. See what you think!

Karen Brockway (standing second from right) and her 4th grade students 

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Sunday, March 1, 2009

The power of one

I recently read two non-fiction books: Three Cups of Tea, a gift from our daughter, and a book that Gary's sister sent, Same Kind of Different as Me. They are two entirely different stories, but have some interesting parallels – they both illustrate how one person can make a difference in this world and, in both stories, the more privileged person benefited from the friendship and wisdom of the seemingly underprivileged.

Three Cups of Tea is the amazing narrative of an American mountain climber, Greg Mortenson, who wanders into a poor village in Pakistan after a failed attempt at climbing K2. The villagers nurse him back to health and he keeps his promise to return and build a school for their children.   Mortenson’s story doesn’t end there. In time, he builds dozens of schools on a shoestring budget in an impoverished part of the world that is not considered a safe place for Americans.   There’s a point in the story where the first school isn’t being built quickly enough to

satisfy Mortenson. He has become a hard taskmaster. The village chief, Haji Ali, finally takes Mortenson’s plumb line, level and account books, locks them up, and asks his wife to prepare some butter tea.

“If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways,” Haji Ali says to Mortenson over tea. “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die.”

“We Americans think we have to accomplish everything quickly,” reflects Mortenson. “We’re the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills … Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.”

(The book is well-written but with a lot of detail, which makes it hard sometimes to keep all the locations and names of people straight.)

At first glance, you would think the other book, Same Kind of Different as Me, is about a wealthy international art dealer that befriends a homeless man who has drifted to the streets of Fort Worth, Texas from a brutal sharecropper’s life in Louisiana.   But really, it's about how the homeless man, Denver Moore, befriends the rich white guy, Ron Hall - offering his strong shoulders and wisdom as he helps Hall navigate a difficult period in his life (an event, by the way, that came too close for comfort and required nearly an entire box of tissue).

The underlying theme of both stories emphasizes the power of one – how we each can make a difference in our own corner of the world without any special training, but with passion and persistence and a recognition that relationship-building is critical to being successful in our vision.

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