And She Rests

Being a cancer patient is what it is.

Being the wife of a cancer patient is hard work. My wife must not only pick up the slack for what I am not able to do (I cannot do much these days. I have not, for example, driven our car since February), but is mired in extra paperwork, phone calls, keeping up with medications, and a dozen other details that must be attended to on a daily basis (all in addition to the normal tasks of a wife and mom of three children).

Even for a hard-working, Energizer-Bunny-like, organizer like my wife, such caregiving is taxing on the body and mind.

Each day she begins with a list of tasks that must be accomplished for the day. To that list, several dozen other tasks are added throughout the day. [You know the routine - she tells me she is going to take a shower; thirty minutes and seven tasks later, I hear the water running.]

The best that I can do to help her is to pray continually and to encourage her as she attends to each task. Asking her to slow down or to take something off the list is absolutely out of the question!

Today was a particularly taxing day for my wife. She, of course, has to deal with her feelings about my condition. But she has to keep on working through the hurt and pain.

We began the day with prayer and she set out to complete her list of tasks. There were moments of near melt-down in the early part of the morning, but things got better by mid-morning.

By mid-afternoon, after much prayer and hard work, with great help from my sister and a friend who cleans for us, my wife's tasks for the day were completed and . . .

she rested! She actually reclined her body on the sofa, pulled out a magazine, and rested. [If her family members look closely, they will observe that she is reading a magazine article about her aunt, Kay Farrell, the President and CEO of the Greater Omaha Chapter of the National Safety Council.]

Later, she traded the magazine for a blanket and took a short nap. For this, I was and am truly thankful. The rest was needful. And God provided.