I’m familiar with the burdens and the honor of caring for a spouse with cancer. I know the emotional dance between hope and the reality of mortality. I’ve experienced the deep pain of losing my beloved. And when my husband’s journey on this earth ended, my journey continued into this whole other wilderness called “the aftermath.”

This is my story of finding hope in the aftermath.

My background

I was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, in a Christian home. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, I eventually settled down in Columbus, Ohio, to live near my grandparents. Over the years, our roles subtly switched places as the care receiver became the caregiver. As I matured, they grew in age and need, and it was my honor to be their caregiver for nearly a decade. I didn’t know it at the time, but those early caregiving years would help prepare me to later take care of my husband.

Meeting my husband 

Tim and I met at our local Chinese church. Co-leading our singles fellowship, we grew closer through ministry and friendship and eventually married to start a family together. He was my first love, and man oh man did I love him!

I had everything I had prayed for: a simple, ordinary life. With a husband, a house, and children on the way, I was good to go. And then the adventures began.

Dances with death

One rainy April evening, Tim and I were going out to dinner when he lost control of our car on the exit ramp leading to a head-on car collision. I was six months pregnant at the time and suffered injuries in the car accident.

John was delivered via emergency cesarean the next morning on Easter Sunday. He was just two pounds. His extreme prematurity and condition kept him in the NICU for over three months, followed by four years of specialized therapies. It was a hard season for sure, and our community covered us in prayer throughout.

Two years later, I was pregnant with our daughter. Though a supposed rare occurrence, at 7-months, my uterus ruptured while I was at home. Only explainable by God did Maria and I survive just 20 minutes shy of death.

Maria was delivered via emergency cesarean and was three pounds at birth. After a two-month stay in the NICU, she came home. It was an even harder season with Tim and I both working full time, all the trips back and forth to visit our preemie in the NICU, while also having a toddler at home. And once again, our community covered us in prayer.

In those two years, the kids and I each had a dance with death. Sure, life was emotionally and physically exhausting, but we all survived and came home. And how could I ask for more?

Tim’s diagnosis 

Just as Maria turned one, Tim’s own dance with death began. Observing blood in his stool led to check-ups, and a colonoscopy led to a colon cancer diagnosis.

What was first believed to be a confined tumor caught early was soon found to have spread. And years later, I can still feel my heart sink so heavy at hearing those three cursed words: Stage 4 Cancer.

Striving

Our experiences with our kids’ birth stories had built up this belief or expectation that even as life can get increasingly harder, if we “keep the faith,” pray without ceasing, and push forward, God will come through for Tim just like he had done for the rest of us.

I believed we would have this incredible story of how God delivered us all from death. Between my fierce love for this man and my being a researcher by trade, I poured myself into learning how we could supplement standard of care with adjunct integrative protocols—all to save this man’s life.

Holding the family together

At the time, I was working full time, nursing my daughter, potty training my son, managing Tim’s appointments, meds, and bills while serving as his caregiver and trying to keep my own emotions in check to hold the family together. It was exhausting in every dimension of a person’s life, striving at its best (and worst).

And as we did before, we enlisted our community to cover us in prayer, especially for Tim’s complete healing. But after a 17-month battle, he died…. along with my marriage and this dream I had for my life. Suddenly, I was widowed with a two-year-old and a four-year-old along with a broken heart.

Wrestling in the aftermath

Even as I felt God’s presence throughout Tim’s cancer journey, and even as I believed in God’s power, it didn’t mean that I was without questions. In fact, I was dumbfounded. A NICU parent for five months, I had watched (twice!) a fetus grow and develop outside the womb only to turn around and watch as cancer breaks down a person’s body. And not just any person—my person.

Within four years, I had front row seats to life and death both watched with equal measure of shock and awe. And for God to save three of us but not the fourth just seemed so very cruel. 

In the aftermath of Tim’s passing, I’ve had my seasons of darkness and depression, of disappointments and bitterness towards God, and times when I closed my Bible and turned away because doing so felt easier than to wrestle with him.

False narratives and hope lost

But when I stopped praying and reading the Bible, I started to believe in lies like, God must be spiting me to allow so much suffering, that a blessed life is for everyone else but me, that maybe God’s not so loving nor so good after all.

I would look at my life and everything that I went through, and suddenly, all I could see was wreckage, suffering, and this aftermath called trauma. And when Tim died, it was game over. Hope lost.

How I found hope, strength, and peace against cancer

At my darkest, I had two close girlfriends come alongside me and pray for me. They contended for my faith and spoke truth over me when I couldn’t. And slowly, but surely, their prayers and the truth about God found in the Bible started dismantling the lies.

I think wrestling with God over the questions we have can be so helpful in reconnecting with him and finding hope. As a believer in Jesus, I find hope through a relationship with him and reflecting on promises in the Bible like how “God is close to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18)” and how God “loves me with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3).”

Hope in the aftermath

It’ll be 10 years this November since Tim went to heaven. So much time and distance have passed that I’m able to look back with first person familiarity yet third person perspective.

I used to look at the big events in my life—the car crash, the preemies, the NICU, the cancer diagnosis—and view each one as a separate, isolated event. But if God is the author and perfecter of my faith, then life is a continuum, an ever-unfolding eternal story. And that means that my aftermath is not my ever-after because my hope is in Christ.

Advice for others

For those who are in the thick of their cancer journey, surround yourself with people who can contend for your faith when you cannot. Be open to receive love and help from others; it’s such a gift. And look to God as your source for truth, comfort and hope.

For those who don’t have a relationship with God, I would offer this thought: Suppose life—namely yours—is your greatest catalyst for knowing God? What if you approach him through prayer and reading the Bible with a posture of curiosity? Perhaps you’ll discover that what the Bible says is true—that God is love and that he loves you and has good plans for you.

I pray that you find hope in your journey. And for those who may find themselves in an aftermath, know that there’s hope there, too!

 

For more about how to begin a relationship with God, see Knowing God Personally.

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