Crutch

Crutch

Cling, clang, clang, cling, clang. Growing up it was often my job to set the table for the five of us. First the forks, then the spoons; we shared a butter knife. Five places, five sounds. Cling, clang, clang, cling, clang rang out over our dark brown antique kitchen table that my mother, father, older sister, and younger brother shared every night.

When I was thirteen my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The news ended my childhood. Two years later, after all of the surgery, after all of the chemotherapy, after all of the radiation, after all of the weight loss and hair loss, she called me downstairs to tell me that the cancer had spread to her brain and that she was dying. As a fifteen-year-old momma’s boy, I threw myself to the worn living room carpet and said, “Then I don’t want to live either.” The words came out even before the tears that soon followed. Certainly God would change his mind now.

Mom exhaled a small laugh and with her bony hand, lightly patted the spot on the couch next to her. She wiped a few of my tears away like she did when I was a child, but I didn’t stop crying. “I want you to remember something,” she said. “Even though you’re going to lose me, you don’t ever get to use that as a crutch.” Her voice was firm but comforting.

I didn’t know what she meant. I had a two-week experience with crutches at the end of my seventh-grade year when my left leg experienced severe growing pains, but this was different.

“A crutch,” she went on, “is an excuse to stop trying. To stop taking care of yourself. To stop living. A lot of times when something goes wrong in a person’s life, especially a kid, they stop caring about everything else and use the tragedy as an excuse to fail. You won’t do that.”

I reflected back on my track meet earlier that week when I almost gave up halfway through a race, finishing in last place before going under the bleachers and crying, but this wasn’t the same thing. Or was it? I knew my coach would sympathize and understand my poor performance if I explained. Everyone knew what I was going through, so my failure was excused. It was so easy to lean on my sadness. Could she blame me?

Mom reiterated, “You never get to use my death as an excuse for yourself or your efforts for anything in life.”

As soon as she passed away, it made sense even more. The opportunities to fail were everywhere, and everyone would have understood. Everyone except her.

If only other kids who endured a loss or a hardship could have heard her message. How different would the universal stages of death be for them? The anger, the guilt, the time before acceptance — which never seems to become permanent anyway. How many people take the easy way out of life’s low points and the crosses they have to bare, or the inevitable pains that grab them by the soul, because God clearly doesn’t care anyway, so what’s the point?

Obviously her message stuck with me. I share it with each of the high school classes I teach when we’re going through some sort of emotional friction as a group. I try to imagine what conflicts my students are encountering, and how her talk with me can help them through it. I think back to my teenage years after Mom died, when we had to get used to sitting down at the kitchen table where there was now an empty seat. We had to learn to find the joys in life again and continue on with our daily tasks as a family of four.

Cling, clang, clang, cling.