VL - Issue 18 - November 2015

The Train Ticket by
Becky Coursen
By middle June, my husband and I knew there
was a problem, but we didn’t yet know the extent
of the threat. I listened to Gary’s account of the
alarming doctor’s visit, but I didn’t join in his panic.
Gary always seemed to expect the most disastrous
outcome of any threat, and after twenty-five years
of marriage, I was really good at resisting worry.
He did enough of that for both of us. My more
southern, laid-back nature meant I took one day
at a time and assumed that nothing would be as
disastrous as predicted.
So if Gary was panicked when we went for the
biopsy, I was not. I was caring and concerned, but
felt it was just something more he and I had to
handle that day. I didn’t think it would prove to be
much. Until that point in life, this state of mind had
served me very well.
But by July third, such naïveté had left me. And
without my papier-mâché security, I was the closest
I had ever been to what I imagined as hell.
Gary and I sat on the front porch that evening,
and he tortured me with a long, tedious list of
instructions of what to do after he was gone. We’d
only heard his sentence that afternoon—I was in
no shape to hear about how to sell a house or to
whom I should give his kayak, but he heartlessly
went on and on. My sister Cindy interrupted by
phoning in response to my text. Cindy is a nurse
and the best for relaying information to my family. I
wept and told her what we knew: the pain in Gary’s
forehead was a malicious, cancerous tumor, and the
constant drippy nose he’d dealt with for so long was
not mucous, but spinal fluid from the brain, leaking
from a hole the tumor had created.
Gary talked to her, and he said, “I’m amazingly
okay with it all—I’m ready to die and have a strange
peace with it.” She later told me his words, as well
as his recitation of orders for me, were classic shock
symptoms.
That night, I simply didn’t know what to do with
all my arms and legs. I went outside for a bit and
worked off my agony by spreading mulch on my
flowerbeds and shedding my tears on the hostas.
WHEN YOU GO THROUGH
DEEP WATERS, I WILL BE
WITH YOU. WHEN YOU
GO THROUGH RIVERS OF
DIFFICULTY, YOU WILL NOT
DROWN. WHEN YOU WALK
THROUGH THE FIRE OF
OPPRESSION, YOU WILL NOT
BE BURNED UP; THE FLAMES
WILL NOT CONSUME YOU.
ISAIAH 43:2
The night air was wickedly steamy, and the mulch
was hot and foul smelling. I went back inside
and aimlessly paced the house. We had no air
conditioner, so the windows were open. I knew Gary
was back in our room, probably not sleeping, but
he was stone silent. Everything was hellishly silent,
and the hot, fetid air suffocating. I was experiencing
an overwhelming combination of heartache, panic,
fear, loneliness…and the stink of that hot mulch
coming through the window physically gagged me.
It was a taste and even smell of hell—and I
believe it truly was—because faith was absent.
I know now why I was there in that earthly hell.
I was taking all of the pain, sleeplessness, fear,
confusion, sorrow—everything I feared I’d be facing
in the next however many months—and I was
trying to carry it all in that one moment. I begged
for God’s help all through the night, wondering why
He didn’t comfort me or raise me out of my hellish
hole. All night long, I recited this phrase in an eerie,
breathy chant: I can’t do this. I’m not able.
And on July 3, 2013, I wasn’t able to do it. And
my Father didn’t raise me out of my hellish hole
because, quite honestly, I wasn’t in it yet—I was
only anticipating it.
Winter by
Becky Coursen
It is dark and it is cold today, and spring seems so eternally far away. It is silent
and tasteless, soggy and pasty. Someone has opened a spigot somewhere and
drained every drop of color away that used to decorate my life.
It might as well have been my blood.
I don’t intend nor do I want the shell of a heart left in my chest, but it’s all
I have holding me to the earth. All the good stuff that used to be in it has fled
like the warm sunshine and everything else, abandoning me and leaving me in a
frantic search to find some kind of path in life. And just where does one walk who
has been rudely shoved off the path of hope and joy? I’ve never done this before,
and I’m not good at it. What in the world will I do to keep my feet moving for the
next fifty years?
Oh, God, help me somehow to keep buying groceries, cleaning my house,
eating, bathing. Lord, give me strength to hold down the lid atop my tears when a
cashier pleasantly asks me if I have my card. Pull the corners of my mouth up into
something that resembles an average smile when that little girl says something
cute and everyone laughs. It’s so hard to smile when laughter seems ghastly.
The problem is that he was just here. I saw him and touched him. He was just
here, and I don’t know where he went. The Bible assures me he went to be with
the Lord, but where is that? I don’t know. I sometimes hear his big awkward
slippers clumping through the house, and I turn with a lightning flash of hope—
that fades just as quickly because he’s not there. There really was no clumping—
just some weird echo from last year. I simply don’t know where he is—and yet I’m
so aware he is not gone. Not gone at all. Just not here.
He was my husband and my constant companion, but a cancer came crawling
out of a dark nowhere, reached its wicked fingers around my lover’s throat, and
choked the blush right out of his cheeks. It broke him, and he fled his broken case
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