Steve’s post “What to pray for” brought the following response before he clarified that “this is not a report on my present condition medically, but rather a projection of possible feelings if the next few months go as predicted.”
I feel nauseous.
Steve’s verse rings so bloody true and real, but I don’t want to hear it. I want the cancer to stop! I want my friend alive and well. I want him fully alive with pleasures abounding — his kites soaring high over the prairie, his dog Blazer sitting by his side as he (Steve, not Blazer!) sips some Fireball watching the sun go down, his fingers texting the latest poem that comes to mind at 3:00 a.m., his bass voice grounding the choir in a Bach Chorale.
“What to pray for” comes from a bad day and future projection at the Shoemakers’ home far away in Illinois — a request for a prayer not for length of life but for peaceful days moving closer to the end. “One is still what one is going to cease to be,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in Nausea, “and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.”
I pray for peace for Steve and Nadja and Blazer. As I watch him slip away, I’m throwing up along the way, grateful for the privilege but grieving the impending loss.
Steve’s subsequent assurance that he is still enjoying the morning sunrises leads me to pray differently, focusing on the penultimate line of “When to Stop Praying”:
No kneeling after knee replacement,
But can still sit and bow my head–
So not yet
Prayers unanswered for another:
Disease, decline, and death–
But not yet
Aged, depressed, diminished,
But want to see tomorrow’s sunrise–
Still not yet
But when cancer has taken body and mind,
Life is lifeless, no pleasures are left:
Please pray for my peace, not my life.
[Steve Shoemaker, posted on VFTE yesterday]
- Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN April 3, 2016