Reflections on my 35th birthday

I turned 35 last year. My wife and I aren’t ones to sentimentalize occasions, but this time we went so far as to have a party with a few friends. So what, you may ask, was the big occasion?

My wife sees 35 as a bit of a landmark – half-way to 40, I guess. Perhaps she expected it would be the beginning of my move out of boyhood and into maturity. (We all have our dreams.)

For me, 35 has a new significance, because it’s an age I wasn’t sure I would reach. My birthday marked two-and-a-half years since the discovery of a malignant tumour in my brain. It marked a year and a half since the completion of the treatment process that included surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

A co-worker who survived cancer says that each birthday is a victory. Since my various doctors have told me my tumour will likely recur in a more malignant form in five years (give or take), my co-worker’s statement takes on a new significance: I may not win the war, but a birthday marks the winning of another battle.

In the book Beyond the Mirror, Henri Nouwen shares his experience of a life-threatening accident. He writes about the calm he felt while in recovery, but reflects “I have lost much of the peace and freedom that was given to me in the hospital. . . . I am no longer as centred and focused as I was during my illness.”

Nouwen’s words could have been written by me. Surprisingly, treatment was not a particularly difficult experience: it had goals, it was a process toward health. Friends and family members remarked how well my wife and I seemed to handle the experience.

The difficulty came after treatment had ended, when I was faced with a five-year lease on life, an ominous black cloud in the west. What do you do with that?

My wife’s approach is that since we don’t have any certainty when – or even if – the cancer will recur, we should live in the healthy present. There’s a great deal of wisdom in her approach.

Unfortunately none of us are entirely rational beings. In this instance I find myself at the mercy of my emotions, and I struggle with the fear of death. Last year there was a period when my doctor thought she detected the beginnings of a recurrence. For four months, as I awaited the results of further tests, I was absolutely floored. While I wanted to live in the peace of God’s love and will, the reality was, I was depressed and angry. I found myself bargaining with God in a way that I did not, in my saner moments, believe was theologically correct.

Having a term put on my life has eroded my sense of direction. If I only have three years left, how should I live them? Should I let go of ambition and soak up as much of my kids and wife as I can, resting, as they say, in God’s hand – experiencing, as Shakespeare said, the universe in a walnut shell? Or should I grab hold of the piece of life I’ve been handed and live as intensely as possible, achieving as much as I can? The question paralyzes me.

These two issues – the fear of death and the struggle for purpose – are like crude oil which, if allowed to flow, will coat everything else in my life, and spill onto my wife and children as well. Somehow I need to find the appropriate place in which to put that black smelly oil. I need to voice the fear of death and the struggle for purpose, and acknowledge their place and power in my life. But they can’t be allowed to coat the flowers and lawn and chairs and the three lovely people with whom I share the most intimate parts of my life.

They need to be poured into a container of the proper size. Not a pickle jar that I hide behind some bushes, because there’s too much oil for a jar to hold. And I can’t indulge in a swimming pool, because it would take up my whole yard.

I need a 50-gallon oil drum in which to place my fear and my struggle for purpose. The drum will be there in my yard, a part of my landscape forever. And when the oil occasionally spills out, I need to bend down and begin the slow and dirty job of scooping it back up, bit by bit, into its container. Then I need to go through my yard and wipe up the smudges that remain.

So my 35th birthday celebration was part of that process: in small part a victory celebration, but more so a recommitment. I will celebrate, enjoy, and tend this yard that is my life, with its flowers, its beautiful people, and its big barrel of crude oil. It’s the place God has given me, the only gift I have to unwrap each morning.

Brad Thiessen is director of public relations for Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary, Fresno, Cal. and a member of North Fresno MB Church.