Thursday - September 10, 2009
Nurturing - September 2009
This month, our family participates in the Jimmy Fund Walk. Sarah is the captain of our team. We walk alongside other families and friends such as the Ashleys, raising funds for Dana Farber's cancer research and treatment. Their work benefits both adults and children.
The Jimmy Fund Walk follows the Boston Marathon route. We take the same path our family friend and wheelchair athlete Dr. William Tan, who has raced 26 miles every April for the past several years as Jessie's partner...until this year, when he was also diagnosed with cancer, and is now in treatment to save his own life.
Like William, we navigate the Marathon route to honor Jessie's life, and our family's journey. Every mile, we remember all the others who have died during their childhood cancer sojourns...Hannah, Lia, Grace, Connor, Emily, Ryan, Christina, Lucy, Luis, Caleb, Raymond, Shawn, Katie, Robbie, Julia and so many others.
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This month, our family participates in the Jimmy Fund Walk. Sarah is the captain of our team. We walk alongside other families and friends such as the Ashleys, raising funds for Dana Farber's cancer research and treatment. Their work benefits both adults and children.
The Jimmy Fund Walk follows the Boston Marathon route. We take the same path our family friend and wheelchair athlete Dr. William Tan, who has raced 26 miles every April for the past several years as Jessie's partner...until this year, when he was also diagnosed with cancer, and is now in treatment to save his own life.
Like William, we navigate the Marathon route to honor Jessie's life, and our family's journey. Every mile, we remember all the others who have died during their childhood cancer sojourns...Hannah, Lia, Grace, Connor, Emily, Ryan, Christina, Lucy, Luis, Caleb, Raymond, Shawn, Katie, Robbie, Julia and so many others.
We walk to hold up the children and grownups who live with cancer right now. It affects them, and their families, and their communities. Really...who isn't touched by cancer at some point in their lives, if not at this very moment?
We walk to celebrate childhood cancer survivors such as our friend Matt, Sarah and Kassie. They are three former pediatric cancer patients living within our community, and there are other survivors also living in Ipswich. More live on the North Shore, in Boston and throughout New England.
All of these people have benefited from the work of research institutions such as Dana Farber...because this work is being conducted by private organizations, and it is funded mostly through private donors and contributions. Your help has saved many lives. And it gave Jessie hope for several years...it continues to offer hope and healing.
Last month we rode in the PMC. This month we walk. It's part of the journey.
If you'd like to support Sarah or our Bright Happy Power 'walk' team, please click on this link: SARAH's Bright Happy Power Team for the September 2009 Jimmy Fund Walk.
NURTURING: September seems to be a great time for recipes. After all, our culture is have a veritable love affair with Julia Child's career and life right now...movies, books, articles and recipe-tasting parties abound. Meanwhile, fields are bursting with growth, and barns and markets are burgeoning with produce.
We're excited to test our skills. Expand our culinary repertoires. We're blessed with an abundance of harvest goods to use as we prepare exotic cuisines or beloved comfort food.
As we feed the stomachs of those who sit down at our tables, we nourish our souls, too. Heal each other with good cooking.
Among the friends and neighbors of cancer families within our community, delivering meals is a great way to offer real mouthfuls of support and compassion. It's one less task for overwhelmed parents to tackle after long days in doctor's offices, clinics and hospitals...one less worry...a simple and practical way to give practical help. Our family remembers -- all too well -- just how essential those meal deliveries became during 6 years of living with childhood cancer. Now we have the cook for others.
For families undergoing treatment, if they're able to get away from the hospital, plucking crops from the field and gathering up the autumn's bounty is a chance to immerse themselves in the reassuring cycle of life. It's literally a time to walk in the sunshine and kneel close to the earth, to be connected to an elemental part of nature. To partake of the reaping of seeds planted, tended and brought to maturity.
And after the harvest, we have the chance to try new menus and familiar recipes. We challenge palates with new ingredients. We experiment with flavor combinations. We soothe anxious taste buds with much-loved classics. Sometimes we go back to basics. We nourish each other.
From plant to plate, it's a chance to participate in a basic ritual that is healing and empowering. As opposed to the life-and-death questions of survival by which we measured life over the past several years. A question which continues to be the reality for other families among us.
FOOD as an ISSUE: Of course, food and eating don't always go hand-in-hand with healing and wellbeing. For some people, food is a constant challenge.
Perhaps families cannot afford groceries; they're looking at bare shelves and empty fridges. They're getting meals from soup kitchens or handouts. Relying on food pantries for staples, trying to make ends eat every month.
For others, food itself is the trouble. Maybe people have eating disorders. Or allergies. Or physiological conditions that make it impossible to process or safely digest certain foods.
Even among cancer families, issues about food and eating were part of the experience. My lord, the list of experiences. We remember oncology and transplant diets. Intensive care's more acute scenarios. Cravings. Mouth sores. Ulcerations. Infections. IVs. Tubes. Bulking up. Emptying out. Finding a balance.
And of course, medical caregivers monitored Jessie's intakes and outputs. Calories. Ounces. Bites. Contents: weighed, measured and recorded. Analyzed through tests.
For instance, we remember being NPO - not allowed to eat or drink for excruciating hours -- before surgery or procedures. Sometimes the ban on food endured for weeks. Jessie sometimes lived on IV nutrition: liquid meals pumped through tubes and needles directly into her circulatory system, bypassing her digestive tract altogether. Sometimes she slurped ice cubes, because her body was too ravaged to endure the work of eating and digesting, but she craved moisture...anything...on lips and tongue. The simplest bodily processes were dangerous back then. Life-threatening.
If she couldn't eat, we all tried to experience it with her. NPO? Mom or dad went hungry, too, and we all got cranky together.
Unable to eat for weeks or months? We slipped away when she fell asleep, snuck to the shared kitchen down the hall, grabbed a cold snack or quickly zapped something for 30 seconds in the microwave, and hoped that no alarms had gone off while we were out of her room. Brushing our teeth, chewing gum or popping mints before we came back, so we didn't smell too much like food that she couldn't have.
As her caregivers, we remember cooking in microwaves, or eating cold food. Living off cafeteria choices or restaurant deliveries. Meals far removed from comfort or wholeness. Perhaps nutritionally sound, but not emotionally satisfying.
And yet, even in the hospital, the tiny shared kitchen was the meeting place for stressed parents and bored kids. The common space that made us feel human, where we shared stories and retrieved puddings, cereal or crackers to ease a food craving in a desperate belly. Where we paused to savor a cup of tea or coffee, and escape for a few moments. Or cry. Or complain. Or just...breathe.
FED by a WHOLE COMMUNITY: Gratefully, we recall all of the cookies, brownies and individually packaged meals that other families delivered to the hospital. Ferried from Ipswich to the hospital. Or hand-delivered by other cancer families who were outpatient, but made the trip back to the oncology, transplant and ICU units to help others. Meals tucked into the fridge for those who stayed behind, in the hospital. From homes and kitchens filled with love for us. Including one unforgettable Thanksgiving dinner that fed a whole oncology wing of patients and staff.
We can almost taste many of the hot meals delivered to the house. Casseroles. Salads. Soups. Lasagnas. Chicken dinners. Fish recipes. Tacos. Pizzas. Gift certificates to local takeout places. All sorts of cuisine. Comfort foods. A stocked freezer. Groceries. All the cooking that kept us going and reassured us of our community's presence along the way.
MEMORIES RISE from the FIELDS: We remember. Backwards, to autumns of picking apples. Summers of plucking strawberries and green beans. Sarah and Jessie filling bags and baskets at Appleton Farms.
Now when we walk through the fields of Appleton, those layers of experience are always present. Like footprints down the rows of crops. Fingerprints on the leaves. Sown into the farm's environment, ripening every season so that we can come back to them and feel them again and again.
This month, there's the opportunity to preserve the season's vegetables and fruits in jars and bags and containers, to be savored later in the winter and spring. In months to come, when the earth is covered in snow, and bright colors and bold flavors are just a memory, we can pull down the year's bounty from the pantry or freezer, and taste it anew.
Preserved, it lives beyond its first blossoming...a gift in times when we need that reminder of bright skies, brown earth, drenching rains and verdant crops. In moments when we need to remember our sun-kissed daughters bending among the green leaves, discovering the juicy treasures and snapping goodness of life with their fingertips and tongues.
Recipes. Comfort food. From field to feast, it's real. It sticks with us. It nourishes us. It heals us. It sustains us.
The journey continues.