When surrender is how you fight

“We fight till we have to surrender and then we trust that surrender is part of the fight.”

I said this to a cancer momma two doors down from me on our last admission after she tried SO HARD to get permission for her daughter to GO HOME because she was sick but her ANC was too low for her to get better and because she couldn’t get better, her ANC couldn’t rise....VICIOUS all-too-familiar cancer cycle.

Phoenix’s pill cup is a metaphor for me of this agonizing relinquishment of control: the fight that feels like giving up.

I watch him hold the blue plastic four ounce container with disgust, hating what’s in there at the same time he knows what’s in there is supposed to help him.  He knows it’s going to hurt him and help him at the same time.  

It reminds me of Jesus right before he died saying, “Let this cup pass from me,” and at the same time, “Your will be done.”  

It’s the essence of the human experience: “I don’t want this but I know somehow I need this.  This hurts like hell and someday I will be grateful.”

I love this story about Jesus because it feels like radical permission to be FULLY HUMAN. If this most Divine being gets to say, “Hell, no.  I don’t want to do this. I know this is going to hurt me and I hate that this is part of what I have to endure. And yet.

I will surrender to a greater purpose that I may not even see worked out in my lifetime,” then we ALL get to say this. 

We ALL get to feel both things at the same time.

We GET to live a Both/And life.

We don’t have to pick a side or convince ourselves to feel one clean thing. 

We can say, “This sucks and I hate it more than anything and I also trust something must be at work beyond my understanding.” 

Our feelings can be messy and contradictory, and not just that, we get to SAY those feelings, out loud, in PUBLIC.

Phoenix holds the pill cup for minutes at a time sometimes, grimacing and steeling up his nerves. 

He has different strategies to make the medicine go down: everybody has to leave the room; nobody can look at him while he does it; fill the cup with sparkling water; fill it with kombucha; fill it with Coke; cut the pill into halves; cut the pill into quarters; make sure he has a sparkling pomegranate Izze to chase it with.  Before the cup, we put pills in applesauce, then it was peanut butter, then we buried them inside gummies for two days before he started throwing those up.  

He has to take upwards of seventeen pills a day sometimes. 

We’re always pushing pills, trying to make it seem casual: “After you watch Teen Titans, we can take a pill and then play Bingo on the TV and then we can build a Lego set!”    

It never gets past him. 

He knows what’s up.

He knows there is no other way through this but THROUGH this, and he has to take the pills. 

This doesn’t stop him from making it a big deal, asserting his will, creating more and more elaborate rituals around swallowing the pill. 

No matter how hard he makes the process, the pill still has to be swallowed.

This is the human condition.

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