A Miracle Woman

Photo By Chris Meadows

Miracle Woman

By John Atkinson

Life can take a turn and we are never the same.  I’ve been married to Renee for forty years.  The last 5 years she has been fighting cancer.  What Renee goes through, I go through with her.  I don’t have to imagine anything.  April 2008 her doctor said Renee had a few months to live and was eligible for hospice.  Lovely people, but I thought Renee would give up if I let them in our home.  I’d learned to cook and clean house the year before, so I would nurse her.

We decided to try experimental drugs in pill form, medicine the medical community said were dangerous.  Four different pills and any one could kill a healthy person.  In two weeks Renee lost her hair a second time in three years.  This time she was too sick to mention it.  Twice I rushed her to the hospital from dehydration.  Sometimes I fixed six or more tiny meals a day to keep her stomach strong enough the take the medicine.

On her deathbed: I want to say this part of life wasn’t about me, that I wasn’t the one dying, but it may have well been.  What saved me was writing and staying busy taking care of my bride.  But each hour I had death rubbed in my face and there was nothing I could do to change that.  The spring in my step had vanished.  Something in me died.  To tell our three girls that I’d bought burial plots, something I’d refused to do for years, and write Renee’s obituary, reduced a fighter to a humble child.

She took half the regiment of pills and could not take more.  I nursed her around the clock for 30 days.  One morning she spoke from under the covers.  She said she felt better.  I smiled.   Later that day I knew things had turned for the good.  She greeted me with an angelic smile.  She was never more beautiful.  To Renee it was the first meal served in bed, and she knew nothing about the thirty dark days that had passed.  But I did.  I knew where Renee had traveled.  Like Siamese twins, we are connected spiritually.

The day Renee began her recovery a white buffalo came upon my lap top screen in my prose.  “What are you doing in my story,” I asked.  Deep down I had to search for the answer.  Something needed to be addressed before I could go on with my life.  Since our union, Renee has helped me with something, my finding myself.  I had done that through my writing.  Now she is the miracle woman . . . that’s what folks call her at our post office, and the medical community speaks the same way.  But I’ve always known the miracle.  Two Junes have passed and we don’t take our time together as trivial.  Renee is the miracle woman and to her I’m the miracle man.

 

John Atkinson is the author of TIMEKEEPER, a magnificent book about a young boy who fights to overcome illiteracy. Timeekeeper, ISBN 978-0-9776076-5-5, is available in hardcover or paperback .To order your copy call 1-800-228-9316. International orders call: 00-1-831-238-7799 or visit: www.fisherkingpress.com