Beyond Crisis

A misty morning does not signify a cloudy day.
Anonymous

Ireceived an amazing call the other night. It was from Cory.

You’ll remember I began this book with the story of Cory, the one whose family had pushed her out of the home onto emotional “black ice.” For over eleven years I’d heard nothing from her. I’d assumed she had died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the terminal disease she had the last time I saw her, blind and deaf, in a hospital.

As I wrote the chapter, however, I thought of another pastor who knew her. I called him to talk over what he remembered of Cory, and he surprised me with an address where he thought she might be living. I wrote, and Cory called a few days later.

Cory is doing great!

She eventually left that Burbank hospital in which I last saw her. Her eyesight and hearing had returned, and she had regained some use of her limbs. She set up life in a studio apartment with a visiting nurse to help her. But although she was determined to make it, she didn’t. Her disease, which turned out to be multiple sclerosis, a debilitating disorder but not nearly as life threatening as ALS, struck again with a vengeance. She was placed in a nursing home.

For over a year she lived as the only young person among worn-out and senile residents. She felt terribly alone. “There is scarcely a way to describe the despair of gathering darkness in a convalescent home,” she says, “hearing the moans of the gloomy and the forgotten, listening to the weeping in neighboring rooms, and having one’s lifeless arms and legs being bathed by girls my age who had Thanksgiving or Christmas plans at the end of the evening. I loathed self-pity, but during those endless nights I often wondered, Is this how it’s going to be forever?“

She lost her sight again, and her limbs failed to the point she couldn’t walk or even feed herself. Her spinal column played nasty tricks on her brain, sending signals that her body was on fire. The pain was so excruciating that her doctor kept her on morphine. People would call on her a couple of times, but only one or two continued. It was too difficult to see her in that state; they couldn’t take it.

But with the help of a couple of people who wouldn’t let go, Cory dug deep one more time and began to fight her crisis. “When my sight returned after one episode, I’d look out the windows,” she recalls. “I’d picture myself as one of the many birds I could barely see circling the hospital roof. Symbolically, I became that bird. In my mind, it was going to take a belief almost equal to believing I could fly to keep me from spending the rest of my life in my bed. The birds, in their soaring and enviable freedom, always seemed to say, ‘Hey! Look at us! We don’t know how we do it, but we are flying!‘ Of course, I knew who was responsible for their flight. So every day, likewise, I believed I would walk, which was on an equal level to flight in my realm. Then, eventually I was saying, ‘Hey, look at me. I am walking!‘”

Cory never gave up, and Someone else didn’t give up on Cory. “Somewhere in all my messing around,” Cory says, “amid all the games playing with people and with him, I started thinking about God. It was like he was a strict dad, and I was a kid full of mischief — you know, snitching food from the table, teasing other kids, being a real pain. And every once in a while, I’d look over at him to see how he was responding. Finally it was as if that Father said, ‘That’s enough!’

“I had pushed as far as I could, and now I found the limit. It amazes me that he’s so patient. I think I was tired of messing around with God, too. So we had a big talk — God and I — and we came out of it with a whole new relationship.”

Cory amazed the medical people working with her. Out of compassion, they’d wanted her to face the reality that she’d be institutionalized the rest of her life. She told them she’d walk again, and what’s more, she’d leave that nursing home!

She did it. Her MS eased, as it sometimes does, and one day she emerged a victor. “I walked out that front door and smelled the fresh air for the first time in months,” she recalls, “and I knew I was free! I’d been hurt, and I’d be hurt again, but life goes on. I told God, ‘Now I know you’re really there!’ There’s nothing in the whole world you can’t handle once you have that relationship and start seeing how he has sustained you all along.”

Cory got another place to live, found a job, received a grant, and returned to college. She became part of a church. Before long, she almost miraculously received custody of a baby girl. That baby gave her renewed spark. She was proud of being able to give her the proper care. “There were times when I wheeled my wheel chair around a college lab with a baby in my lap,” she laughs.

Within a couple of years she met and married a remarkable man who had lost his first wife to multiple sclerosis after several years of tenderly nursing her. He and Cory legally adopted the little girl, and since then they’ve added a baby boy to their family. They’ve been married six years now, living a regular life, attending church, having the normal ups and downs any family does. I’m thrilled for her.

As Cory reflected on her life, she said softly, “It’s scary being vulnerable. As I look back on all that happened to me and how I scraped through it, at this point it’s almost like reading an interesting script. Sometimes I wonder, Who was that girl? Well, at least the script had a happy ending.”

Indeed, it does. Cory draws an analogy between parenting and crisis counseling: “When my son comes up to me crying and upset, I pick him up, hold him in my arms, give him hugs, and kiss his scraped knee or hurt finger. Any parent knows how many times you have to do that while raising a child. I doubt if he’ll remember each time I pick him up like that, but he’ll probably remember the fact that I did it. That’s what he’ll hold on to. That’s what will get him through the difficult times — a whole pattern of loving attention.”

Then Cory made my day — no, my decade. “That’s what you did for me when I was down. You let me know things would work out. That made the difference when I was wavering between watching (quite literally) for the light of day to arrive or throwing everything aside to wait for the end to come. I will always remember how faithfully you were there, an extension of God’s arms. That’s what I have to thank you for.”

And that’s why we’re called into crisis.