Everything stands still when you’re in the hospital. There is no time, day and night feels the same. You don’t know what day of the week it is and you forget that life actually exists on the outside. Even enemies become friends in the hospital, fighting a war that no parent wants to be part of, forcing you to look beyond your differences.
You are told by the Arab father of the daughter sharing the room, who cannot stop throwing up, that you have to just pray to the One above. You have to have faith. You are told by the Chareidi father in the next door room, whose son had the same type of cancer to your son 4 years ago and now has a different kind of cancer, that you have to have Emunah.
What does it mean to have faith? Emunah? What is that concept when you or your child has cancer? As a relative of mine quite wisely said, ‘I’m older and have lived a life. A child hasn’t started living yet. They should have everything ahead of them to look forward to’’. When you look at these children who have cancer, some of them babies as young as a month old, or who have only started to learn to walk, you start to ask questions. What did those precious souls do to deserve this suffering? They haven’t started living yet and are learning the hardest lessons in life. And what about some of those parents? Some of them who struggled to have their one child, only to discover 2 years later that child has a hard to treat cancer. Or those families? Those siblings? Those families whose children are no longer? The little girl who passed away. The family who’s shiva we went to, who had to bury their teenage son at the prime of his life. What did they do to deserve this? What has anyone, young or old, ever done to deserve this disgusting, deadly enemy?
At the very start of our journey over a year ago, I learned very quickly that it doesn’t help to ask questions. There are no answers. G-d will never share with me or enlighten me to the ways He controls the world. Why some people suffer and others don’t. Will they be rewarded in the next World? Who knows? Are they some souls reincarnated brought into this world for a specific purpose, to finish a job they started in their previous life? No one can answer. And would it really help to have those answers? Will it enable me to handle the situation any easier? The answer is no. It wouldn’t help me. It would probably do the opposite. Make me angry, upset and unable to continue this journey that G-d has put me on. So I didn’t even consider asking.
My thoughts do however keep coming back, time and again, to Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. This book was probably the one thing that I’ve read in my life that has had the most impact. A Holocaust survivor himself, he relates to the concept of Time. He explains how often man puts a time limit on something, and when things don’t happen within that said time-limit, they lose a sense of hope. He describes how he observed people in the Holocaust. They would survive the worst and most dire of circumstances until a certain date or the subconscious time limit they gave themselves. They may have said, the war can’t go on for more than a year for example. They would somehow survive until that year was up, that time-limit and when they saw the war wasn’t even close to ending, they lost hope. And when they lost their hope, it was then that their personal fight for survival ended. Obviously this wasn’t the case with all those that perished, that were brutally not even given a chance to try and ‘survive’. His premise however, is profound when you are experiencing a prolonged crisis.
After Roí’s operation, the head of oncology in Hadassah sat with us and shared the protocol of treatment with us. 56 weeks. More than a year. I couldn’t imagine how I would cope with the next week, never mind the next 56. How does one handle the day-to-day household duties, how does one split oneself between the hospital and home, juggling between one sick kid and his three other healthy siblings? Never mind making time for your spouse or for yourself.
Somehow though time passes. Days turn to weeks, turn to months. And unlike what the Arab father told me, or the Chareidi neighbor said, it is not necessarily the faith that helps you through. Especially when you are seeing so much suffering around you every day. It’s easy to break. You break when you see these children screaming in the hospital. You break when you see those left permanently or temporarily physically disabled, spending months and years in rehabilitation. And you break sitting in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, asking G-d to forgive your sins and be inscribed in the book of life for a good year ahead. What could He possibly have been thinking a whole year before when I asked for the exact same thing?
So no, it’s not realistic to always maintain complete and utter faith in G-d. I’ve realized however that this journey isn’t just a question of faith. Faith can easily be broken. Faith is hard. Faith though isn’t the only thing to carry you through. It is rather what Viktor Frankl suggested – it is hope. And there should be no time-limit on hope.
While we are reaching the end of a major milestone in the cancer treatment, we are not reaching the end of the fight. In the fight against cancer everything is connected to time. Time is when you reach those critical milestones. When you reach the end of radiation. When you reach the end of chemotherapy. When you reach the end of the rehabilitation process. When one year has passed cancer free. When two years, when five years, when ten years have gone by…
The fight is most likely to continue for a very, very long time. But so is the hope. And hope is timeless. And over time it will be the hope that will help the broken faith to return.
