I Prayed for a Cure

God Sent a Dogwalker

Sarah Shannon

The stats for my sister’s stage and type of cancer put the odds of her five-year survival rate at around one in a hundred.

“Come on, Lis.” I told her. “You’ll be that one. You’re the one, Lis.”

I brought that same insistence to God: Please let her live. Let her be the one.

She was dead in two years and four months.

From My Lips to God’s Ears

Here are a few other prayers that met with what felt like a consuming silence:

God, please save her soul (only God knows what passed between them, but I saw little outward evidence of a turning or a seeking in those years); God, let her live to see Jack graduate high school (Jack is Lissy’s son—she died halfway through his sophomore year). God, please let this trial work (she was the first to be kicked out and the entire study was shuttered inside eight weeks). God, please, please lessen her pain (a few weeks after this one she fell down the stairs in the middle of the night, shattering her shoulder where the cancer had spread).

The quiet from God some days felt deafening.

To be clear, there were some answered prayers too. And a few that felt miraculous. Here are just a few I distinctly remember:

God answered a prayer for a dogwalker. Maybe that sounds ridiculous to you, but I assure you, it was not. There was a massive logistical tangle at the end with Lis’ beloved dog, Sampson, and it seemed impossible. I prayed and it was solved.

Additionally, God answered a prayer for a private nurse. Her name was Tracy. She miraculously responded to my help-wanted ad within seconds of my posting it. An excellent nurse, she was also the only person Lis allowed to do her make-up in the final weeks, a high honor.

God granted my final prayer, too, which was that it would end, that she would die. More a wild, crying rant than a prayer, I’d called the local priest who’d been kind enough to pay a visit to Lis in the weeks prior. Lis was not a member of his parish and ostensibly not among the faithful. But he came and sat with her and blessed her.

When he returned that second call, I was nearly hysterical, stammering and sobbing into the phone: I can’t do this anymore. She has to die. I have to go home to my kids. She’s suffered enough. God has to take her now.

Father Peter said he would pray for us both after the 5:00 p.m. mass which he was about to offer. That night at about 6:30 p.m., Lissy’s breathing changed and became labored; then something began to rattle in her chest. She was gone the following morning.

Questions and Hope

I don’t think I’ve ever really questioned God’s right to do as He wishes with all He has made. But I am at times unnerved by Him. He is, after all, the God who went quiet for four hundred years while the Israelites were brutally enslaved. Scripture doesn’t even really account for the time.

The psalmist asks, Why do you stand far off? But my question is—why do you seem to stand far off sometimes and other times not? Why does God allow tsunamis and massacres and then gently tend to a Lissy through a Tracy?

What metric is He using? One that would deliver us a dogwalker but appear to pass on my sister’s soul?

I keep thinking: if only there were more of a rhyme in it, a pattern or a rhythm I could better discern or predict, something my hands or heart could trace.

Years after Lissy’s death, my very first pastor, Dr. Timothy Keller, announced his own stage-4 cancer diagnosis on social media. He expressed gratitude in advance for prayers but also soberly included the prognosis: a year or year and a half, I think.

I’d learned of his illness a few days before because I had still had friends who worked at the church. I was not shocked by the public announcement. Instead, I might have been flush with embarrassment when I saw how straightforward he was in offering the prognosis.

I’d been convinced back then that as Christians we were called to those urgent, wild miracle prayers—the faithful audacity of ‘You’ll be the one.’ But Tim’s posture instead felt in sum grateful, yearning and realistic.

I have yet to resolve this tension which, if I’m honest, rises to the level at times of disorientation. How do we pray like a child, with abandon, but cultivate the realism of a hospice nurse?

The closest I’ve gotten to understanding the tension was something my friend, Kari Jo, said over coffee a few months before Lis died:

Is it okay to give up hope? Can I stop praying for Lis to live? She’s not gonna make it.

Yes, she said, surprising me. It’s okay. It’s okay to give up hope. With a small ‘h’.

But we never give up Hope, with a capital ‘H.’

Unto the Progress of the Inner Man

In those final weeks, we had to install some metal grab bars in the bathroom for Lis. Of all the things I saw over those few years, those bars and that plastic shower chair for when she was too weak to stand were among the most harrowing. The day they arrived on her front porch wrapped in plastic, I knew—death had darkened our door.

Tracy called a carpenter friend, David, who happened to be on a job right in town. He was a believer as it turned out. After he was done with the installation, he called out to me and I arrived in the doorway, hesitantly. I was trying to look at him without seeing the bars. He got up and handed me an old leather-bound book.

“When I moved the vanity”, he said, “this fell off the top.”

I opened the old, wrinkled cover and saw it was a Catholic prayer book inscribed more than forty years before by my mother, who’d died herself that Spring. I’d never seen it before.

“It was totally covered in dust”, he said. “It fell open right there, right where that page is folded down…”

I stood there in the bathroom holding it open, tears starting to come.

This was the page my mother had marked:

May he grant you from his glorious riches to be strengthened with power through his Spirit unto the progress of the inner man.

And to have Christ dwelling through faith in your hearts: so that, being rooted and grounded in love, you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge, in order that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God, with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

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The File

Unanswered prayer: Two great sermons I heard recently that tackled it so well: Renaissance Church, Pastor Jordan Rice, Luke—Don’t Stop Praying and Journey Church, Pastor Darryl Bellar, The Thief of Joy and the Killer of Peace.

Poetry: And Death Shall Have No Dominion, by Dylan Thomas. If my file caught fire, this would be among the things I would grab. My favorite lines:

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

Summer Shakespeare: Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival: it will lift any soul from dust or darkness. Picnic beforehand. It’s so beautiful at their new permanent home.

Jessica Van Kipp’s Chocolate Granola: I’ve been in the kitchen a bunch recently. This is my friend (in need and indeed) Jessica’s recipe for granola. She taught me how to cook when the kids were little and my mom was starting to forget who she was. It was incredibly grounding. She didn’t just teach me how to cook. She taught me the power of food and that preparing it is a form of love. This is fast and nourishing in the heat of busy summer days. Eat it with Greek yogurt or berries. I love you Jessica Van Kipp!

Kitchen Dancing: Who You Share it With, Layup.

My Piper, my love. She wants a walk too.