Wednesday, September 19, 2007

The Power of Believing


This summer, now past, was full of surprises. Good and bad. One came in late July when I found a lump in my breast and couldn't have it checked out right away (thank you, fabulous American health care system where there is no waiting like the damn ferrin ones). For about a week, I was certain I would die because that's how all our stories end, isn't it? I rode a tearful plane to Chicago for YearlyKos. I drank and shared lump stories with other middle-aged women. I began to wonder if I was just having a typical mid-life story.

During that bad week, I harkened back to the family legend of my father's cancer that he turned away by making a deal with the Virgin Mary. He'd say a rosary every night for the rest of his life if she took it away. Never mind that he never had a medical doctor check out the lump. He was an M.D. himself, and as we all know, that means he is this close to godlike.

The lump disappeared and the rosary came out every night for the rest of our lives together. The large, worn back beads moving through his finger tips as he murmured Our Fathers and Hail Marys while yelling at my mother.

But this summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about the depth of his faith - that he could actually believe some spiritual being had the power to take away physical disease. Even more importantly, he did this as a doctor who didn't believe in illness. To Daddy, illness was weakness, so all his patients were inferior to him. I don't think he was alone in this belief in the medical profession. Just look around.

As I felt my lump and let my imagination run wild, I had to admire the old man, though. To have that level of faith in ANYTHING is amazing. And to turn that faith into the physical manifestation of easing a lump... though, today, I can no longer feel my lump so nature seems to take care of itself. Or is that the way I see it because I'm an atheist? Perhaps Daddy reached down from the other side and took it away and I should be praying to him.

Huh? Do tell.

The fable of my father's lump and subsequent deal with the BVM struck me as an amazing story in mind-body connection, something he never believed existed (being a doctor who earned his M.D. in 1929). Yet when I went to my surgeon in Eugene, she spent most of the time talking about stress and its effect on the body, particularly the breasts for women.

How the world has changed, but how the power of belief doesn't. Whatever the physiological equation with Daddy, he believed what he believed and he found peace with his fear of dying. It's amazing how powerful the fear of death is for us - yet I realized that week that I feared years of doctors' appts., chemo, radiation and being a science experiment much more than I fear death. For me, it would have required an active choice to fight cancer. For Daddy, it was a matter of faith and - more importantly - his love for his wife and children, who he refused to die on just yet.

So what really happened in that story? Was it Divine intervention? Was it the physical power of my father's fear of death? Or was it love?

That week I realized I'm a pragmatist at heart. I am not my father's daughter.