There was that miracle that gave us five years.

I need to remember that gift now, to let it rest in my heart and dispel the fog that swallowed those years whole.

I never wrote about it, not in the way I need to. It’s probably because the memories of that time dissolved in a fog of grim forgetting when her cancer returned. Her triumphs, all of the positive things we’d experienced together, including the cure, were obscured in that fog. Even today I feel like I’ve lost the five years her healing bought us.

It’s well past time to reclaim it, it was one of her many gifts to us.

When Terry’s cancer first showed up she wouldn’t let me tell anyone. She knew she wanted to only use alternative treatments and she knew that many of our family members would be horrified by her choices. Their fears, their thoughts would only make her task harder. She wouldn’t have it. That meant we were going it alone. Which meant I was freaking out all the time.

I begged her for weeks to agree to let me tell my parents. I felt like I needed someone in my corner, someone to talk to about what we were dealing with. Driving our four year old son to school I’d stare at him in the rear view mirror thinking “how the hell am I going to raise him on my own if Terry dies of cancer?” I don’t think I’d ever been so scared in my life, not in a sustained way. I couldn’t share my fears with her. She was not up to thinking about this cancer taking her life. I needed my own support system. Finally she relented.

“I understand you really need this. It’s not what I want but I do want you to feel supported. You can tell them.”

I was so relieved I almost celebrated. I sat down immediately to write them. I knew I wanted to tell them in a letter to make sure I detailed everything in the most thoughtful, kind way I could.

…Terry has breast cancer. She has one lump in her right breast…

As soon as I wrote those words I knew she was right. I could feel the chorus of fear building around me. Both of my parents would be terrified. My Dad would also likely be outraged over her medical choices, start a pressure campaign to get us to the best medical clinic money could buy. We would be stepping into a storm of well meaning, but overwhelming pressure and probably, at times, intense criticism.

Terry would say no to all of their treatment choices. That is just who she was. I would be torn in two, trying to broker harmony between their irresistible force and her immovability. I stopped writing, I never finish the letter. Terry was right. We could not tell them. What was the point besides creating suffering for all of us? We can do this alone, together.

I didn’t know if she could find a cure. We both had training in alternative healing modalities, it wasn’t foreign to either of us. She was much more informed about cancer treatments than I was. Up until then she’d been a full time Mom and homesteader. Now her job would be to find a cure for her cancer, everything else would come second.

The following weeks were filled with calls to friends and friends of friends. We reached out to the shamanic healers we’d trained with and all of our fellow students. Michael Harner, the main teacher of our healing tradition committed to doing healing for her regularly until she was cured. She traveled with friends to sit with a mystic, Braco, who purportedly healed through gazing deeply into peoples eyes. No stone was left unturned, no woo was too woo-woo.

She began a course of treatments with Stephie, an MD in the UK who had healed herself of incurable cancer in the 70’s using her intuition and supplements. She started Terry on a rigorous protocol of a variety of supplements. Terry’s conversation with Stephie had the biggest emotional impact on her.

“Our bodies are always producing cancer cells. We just have to get your body moving in the right direction. You can heal this.”

Terry left that phone call glowing like a warrior goddess. The strength she had derived from that one conversation was astounding. It was as if a dormant light had suddenly found fuel deep inside her and ignited to its most radiant capacity. I surrendered to following her into this battle, come what may.

It was several months before we would see any change, before the miracle arrived. At times she worried over the tumor, but her sense of purpose was strong. Terry had been a competitive athlete and was able to achieve and sustain a singularity of focus. She traveled to see healers, meditated, journeyed and worked with local practitioners relentlessly. She poured her soul into her healing, she was ready for a miracle.

I got used to living on the edge. Stress was never far away. I turned it into energy for taking care of our son or getting projects done on our land. The change in her after she started working with Stephie gave me confidence. There’s a peace that comes from working towards the same goal with your partner. Neither of us held anything back. We kept moving forward together.

Then, just like that, a miracle.

She had been working with healers for months, taking her supplements and processing everything she was going through with great devotion and thoughtfulness. The night it started she called me into the bedroom just before sunset.

“Look, the lump is red and inflamed. It looks like an eye!”
Sure enough the lump had risen, looking like an angry red eye staring out at the world.
”Touch it, gently. It’s hot.”
It was hot to the touch and obviously sensitive.
”It’s OK,” she said. “I think this is good.”

We made a few calls to get advice and finally resolved to watch it closely. We would check it again first thing in the morning and possibly go in to see her doctor if it had not resolved. I went to bed thinking we could very well wake up to a massively infected breast with cancer spreading throughout her body. I did not sleep well that night.

When we awoke it was gone.

I know it might sound too good to be true, but it was that simple. I felt the area where the lump had been very clearly defined. Nothing. Her breast was normal again. What was a solid lump about 1/2 the size of a golf ball was now undetectable to the touch.

She cried with deep, racking sobs of relief. I was in shock for days. We held each other and celebrated with our son who didn’t understand but loved to celebrate. We called everyone, thanking each person profusely for whatever they had given us on this unexpected path. We did not tell people we had elected not to tell. It was OK to just let this chapter lay silent in our lives for a time. I was more than ready to let this be part of our past. I wanted to just say to myself, “that was amazing, we made it through it…” and then let it go and forge ahead with our lives.

Is there a narrative in which this is not a miracle? Sure, of course there is. Terry never opted for the needle biopsy of her tumor because the insurance company insisted upon placing titanium pellets near the site to more easily measure its growth. Even though the cancer surgeon said “yeah, it looks like cancer” we really couldn’t be absolutely sure. I do think her developing stage 4 breast cancer from the same site five years later is a strong sign that it was a cancerous tumor, or well on its way to becoming one.

What satisfies the criteria for a miracle in this age of science? What instrumentation would we have needed tracking our every move to give that gold stamp of “spontaneous remission”? How can you draw a line from a shamanic healing to a cure? We couldn’t really know which treatments she participated in that had the impact her body needed to evaporate the tumor.

So we just settled on miracle.

Terry came away from her cure with a renewed focus on life. It was time to accomplish everything she wanted to accomplish. We became a foster home and adopted our second child. She started training in an organic farming program which eventually lead her to found a small, women’s farming cooperative. She was over two years into an MSW program when her cancer returned.

We looked for a second miracle, but I think she knew that wouldn’t be happening. She was already very sick. It was a brutal 14 months before the end. Given how hard that road was, its understandable how easily I forgot about the five preceding years her miracle had bought us.

Five years sounds like a treasure of immeasurable value now.

That time gave us our radiant daughter Truly. They brought our family into farming, which gave us some of the happiest, most gratifying moments of our lives. Five years grew our friend circle exponentially. We built more earthen buildings on our land, cooked and fed and loved people from near and far. Our little family grew in its love and warmth. We were all deeply nourished by life.

It was so easy for me to forget the miraculous time her cure gave all of us. My mind simply erased it, insisting that things were fine until she got sick and then died. Things were far more than fine. Our lives were filled with incredible gifts, all sprouting from the singular miracle she was able to manifest through her trust, passion and devotion.

I need to remember that gift now, to let it rest in my heart and dispel the fog that swallowed those years whole.

Even today, her light can still dispel the darkness