It was nearing 5 p.m. on Monday afternoon, and for the first time since I learned I had cancer I felt my strength beginning to break. The previous Tuesday I had been operated on for a melanoma on my right leg. The surgeon was guardedly optimistic after the initial pathology report showed no more cancer in the area around the malignant mole. But only guardedly. I had been cautioned several times that even a provisional prognosis would largely depend on whether or not the cancer had spread to my lymph system.
My physician told me the lab work on the lymph glands would be done sometime Thursday afternoon and that he would be in on Friday with the results. Friday came and went with no word on the results. I knew that meant I’d have to wait until Monday, when he came back on duty. It set the tone for a heavy weekend.
Monday seemed terribly routine, no doubt because I was anxious to receive the lab report. The food, the nurses, even my friends did not seem to reach me at the level they had until now. In the afternoon my wife came and read the mail, filled me in on what was happening at church, and talked about things our two-year-old son had said. Janie was a great strength to me, but she also knew that under pressure or anxiety I become quiet and introspective, and she respected that. She said a word of prayer, told me she loved me, and left.
I had a feeling the doctor was not going to come and I thought I knew why. The lymph glands were cancerous and the doctors were discussing with my family how to break the news to me. In the few moments since my wife had left the room, no news had become bad news. I suppose that defendants in courtrooms or prisoners on death row, or other cancer patients, also experience what I did: They had bucked up for a long time, but suddenly the inevitability of death breaks upon them.
When I was wheeled into surgery the week before, I had desperately needed my wife, my mother and father, my closest friend to go down that hallway with me. Without them I wasn’t sure I could fight back a fear I had not known before, even though I had faced death on my motorcycle and as a mountain climber.
But on that Monday it was nearing 5 o’clock and I wanted to be alone. There are some ultimate moments that one must face alone, and this was one of them. I hoped I wouldn’t get any more visitors, because I didn’t have the strength to bear them, to start conversations when they came in with their helpless looks and stood beside my bed with awkward pauses. I prayed for time alone.
About 5 p.m. the door opened gently and a figure entered the room. I didn’t look to see who it was. I looked steadily at the wall facing me, bare of everything except a crucifix. I kept my eyes on it. The figure walked across the end of my bed, and as he entered my field of vision I recognized him. He had worked for Young Life for years in the inner cities. I knew him as a tough person, but there was also an undeniable gentleness and kindness about him. I waited for him to speak, but he remained silent.
He passed out of my vision and slowly lowered himself into a chair in the corner of the room. My pulse rate picked up and I wondered how uncomfortable the silence would become before one of us would break it. Five minutes passed, perhaps even ten. It was an odd situation: There was a person in my room who had come to see me but didn’t speak, and I was somehow unable to speak. There was a strange but somehow necessary silence between us.
I continued looking at the crucifix. I felt I was going to die and I sank into self-pity. I sensed my partner in silence knew this, but he didn’t break the silence with a saccharine word of encouragement or a more-deserved word of reprimand. He just stayed there, perhaps praying, perhaps not. It had been quite a while now, and I allowed myself to think or pretend that there was some connection between him being there in silent and the crucifix on the wall.
For he past six months I had been writing a doctoral dissertation on the Son of God in the Gospel of Mark. I had been impressed by how closely Mark follows the Suffering Servant figure of Isaiah in his portrayal of Jesus’ passion and death. Somehow these ideas that had so moved me intellectually were now mysteriously bound up and present in the crucifix and the visitor and the silence of the hospital room. I began to experience in a small, quiet, and unmistakable way the nearness of this Son of God who communicates love through suffering.
“Like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth” (Isa. 53:7) … silence. “He poured out his soul to death and was numbered with transgressors” (Isa. 53:12) … suffering. “He shall bear them” (Isa. 53:11) … the silent visitor.
The nurse came in promptly at 6 P.M. with dinner. The visitor had left only two or three minutes earlier, as quietly as he had come. He had never spoken. I believe God gave me that hour, and the crucifix, and the silence, and the visitor to bear me up on the wings of love. The next day the doctor would come and report that the lab report was negative. Yes, I was relieved, but not nearly so moved as I had been the afternoon before when I came to know that “neither death nor life …, nor anything in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:38–39).
I never asked the doctor why he was late.
James R. Edwards is professor of religion at Jamestown College, Jamestown, North Dakota. He is coauthor, with George Knight, of A Layman’s Overview of the Bible (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1987).
