This I Believe

I spent a large portion of my youth watching my grandmother die. Whether I knew it at the time or not, this was true. I was born in 1977. Sometime in the late 1970s, she had been diagnosed with lymphoma, a specific type of cancer that attacks the lymphatic cells of the immune system. And while certain lymphomas are treatable, others are not. Some are entirely progressive and reach beyond the lymph nodes to other portions of the body, including organs, the bones and the bloodstream. Ravaging the immune system apparently is not enough. This type was my grandmother’s cancer – the one that she fought for the seventeen years that I knew her.

Anyone who has experienced cancer, either directly or indirectly, understands that there are ebbs and flows. Some days are good. Life continues as close to normal as can be expected. Then, there are the others that become stunning reminders, just in case one forgets, that cancer can be crippling and capable of draining the life right out of the living. I distinctly remember one of those more difficult times near the end of my grandmother’s life. It was in the fall of 1994.

Relegated to extended hospital stays, visiting my grandmother became one of life’s weekly routines. Frequent trips to the hospital to lift her spirits and monitor any progress were common. I remember standing in the hallway with my father, just outside his mother’s room, watching the final seconds of the Colorado-Michigan game in late September. When Kordell Sterwart flung a football nearly 70 yards in the air to find it land in the open arms of a Colorado receiver in the end zone, the “Miracle at Michigan” was made. Uproarious shouting in the halls of the ICU hardly seemed appropriate, and it was quite difficult for two Ohio State fans to suppress our joy at the misfortune of the Wolverines. But we tempered our glee. There was to be no “Miracle at Mount Carmel”.

It was less than a month later that I remember standing in the very same hall ready to walk into her room for another visit. You see, in addition to many other similarities, we both shared October as a birthday month and the time had come to “celebrate” our days. There were the customary hugs and the trivial small talk about how everyone was doing. That moved quickly to an exchange of cards and birthday wishes. You can imagine my surprise when I opened up my birthday card and a check made out to me in the amount of $10,000 fell gently into my hand. I had never held that much money in my life. I remember standing at the foot of the hospital bed and gazing down at her vanishing frame in astonished wonder. As I looked back down at the check, she replied, “I always have known that you wanted to go school there. Maybe this will help.” It was hard to hide the tears in my eyes looking back at her from underneath a worn, navy blue baseball cap stitched with a gold, interlocking “ND”.

My grandmother watched over me from my birth until her final days. She doted on my successes, praised my progress, and kept an eye on my academic exploits with the keenness of a hawk in flight. As a child of the depression who married young, there was little opportunity for her to explore her intellectual potential beyond graduating from high school. As farmer’s wife, she fulfilled her duties and obligations set forth by the life she chose. Yet, she read voraciously, studied medical journals as if she were a practicing physician and never missed the chance to teach me something in the hours I spent under her care. I often thought that she longed to be a teacher. There was always a certain wistfulness in her words when she commented on a few of her contemporaries who fashioned careers as educators. Looking back, I wonder now if in some way she was able to live vicariously through me.

My grandmother died in December of 1994, just before the holidays. It had been a long battle and one that she no longer had the energy to sustain. She knew that it was my dream to attend the University of Notre Dame. There is a selfish part of me that is relieved to know that she was not here to discover I hadn’t been accepted – I wouldn’t be fulfilling that life-long dream. Nevertheless, I believe in the power of dreams.

Dreams are curious things. They sometimes come to us when we are unaware and plant seeds of thought in our fertile minds. Occasionally, these seeds grow and blossom into beautiful visions that we spend days, months, years, even lifetimes chasing. Had I not chased mine, I would never have wound up walking into a classroom each day with the chance to plant some seeds all the while thinking about my grandmother. This I believe.