We Are Not Alone – Part 1

Lying on the couch, lethargic, weak, with a blanket over me, I watched TV. It was a typical Wednesday for me as an eleven-year-old. I weighed 65 pounds and was exhausted from throwing up half the night after my last round of chemotherapy. I didn’t know if I could even muster the energy to get off the couch to go the bathroom.

My mother was doing things around the house while my siblings were all in school. With no one talking with me about the reality of my life and illness, I felt like I was living on an island. The aloneness I felt was deafening. Images of many other kids in the oncology clinic--kids with no arms, legs, or hair, crying out--would come into my mind, and I’d push them away and try to focus on the people on TV.

Was I going to live through this cancer or die from it? That was the question I couldn’t get away from and it was the question that was not discussed. 

Suddenly, lying there on the couch, I felt this pang inside myself, I wanted to live. In that moment, I did not want to die.

I started to pray, “Please God, I want to live. Please God could I live to be twenty years old?” I thought that if I lived to be twenty, I would see the world. This would be enough for me.

I kept saying this prayer for days, maybe even weeks. Then one day while I was praying, peace suddenly flooded my body. It was a felt presence, a warmth, an unwavering peace. Then an aliveness came pulsing through. And then something even more strange happened: I felt a sense of something beyond come into me. It was like I had a companion with me. 

All my fear left my body. All my questioning stopped. A feeling, a knowing, came into my being: I was going to be okay. 

At what point I named this feeling God, I don’t remember. But I had a deep knowing that God was with me. I leaned on this feeling, and I no longer felt alone. 

I also felt on a deep visceral level what it meant to be alive, as if I were ninety years old and on my deathbed. Life felt very precious and magical suddenly, as I was seeing with new eyes the beauty all around me. 

I realize now that I probably didn’t react to this feeling the way most eleven-year-olds might. Then again, I clearly wasn’t having the same childhood most eleven-year-olds had. Most kids at that age aren’t exhausted and consumed by fear as they teeter on a tightrope between life and death. Having a direct, felt sense experience of God and inner peace was just one more unusual experience in a whole year full of unusual experiences for me. And since it made me feel better, I didn’t question it at the time. I just held on to it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood “awakening” during 2020, this year of uncertainty and upheaval. It seems like many people are now facing the same fears, confusion, and loneliness that I did as a kid being treated for cancer. It seems like a great opportunity for people to reach for something greater and to open to what may be there. 

Maybe you’ve felt a searching, a silence, a pulsing sense of “Ah, here I am.” A feeling that there is something greater. 

You may call this greater something, “God,” “universe,” “source,” “higher power,” “energy.” The word “God” resonates with me from childhood. God to me is expansive, inclusive. But, the longer I live, the more I see there are almost no words that capture this unnamable something. 

The saying “Peace it is not of this world” is so true. The deep peace I encountered first as a kid, and still tap in to as an adult (especially these days), has never come from the tangible, material world but from within. It may be harder to find right now, but I promise you, it’s there. In part 2 of this post, I’ll give you some ideas for finding and tapping in to this greater peace. 

Until then, remember, you are not alone.