Overcoming

Stage four. As those dreaded words reverberated in my ears, I knew that my life was possibly going to change forever. I was entering finals season of my master’s program when my father got the diagnosis. Stage four Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was the name. The name of the beast that seemed to claw at my very core. Dad hadn’t been feeling well and was in and out of the hospital. He was burdened with violent pain and trembling hands. At first, the doctors couldn’t quite pinpoint the issue. I boarded a bus to Detroit from Chicago to visit my dad in the hospital. As I was in commute, a wave of relief enveloped my body as I was told the doctors identified it as mono. How he got it, unknown, but we were just happy to know that it was something that he could fight off. My dad was so happy to see me home, the family was together and we just knew that everything would be ok. In reality, all of our lives were about to take a turn for the worse.

Not long after being back in Chicago to continue with my courses, I got the call. It wasn’t mono, but cancer. I thought that was the bad news until I got another call, stage four. At that moment my thoughts began to swirl uncontrollably and took my body hostage, a prisoner of my own thoughts. Could he beat stage four, how would I concentrate on finals, how did we get from mono to cancer, when could I get home, and what if...what if...the thought crept in that I tried my hardest to push down.

Miraculously, I was able to dissociate just enough to get through writing my papers. Somehow being able to write them well even though they were now the least important thing in my life. My lease was ending and so sister came to Chicago to help me move my things into storage and drive back to Detroit. This was a major time of transition. I’d been accepted to a 6-month internship abroad program and was supposed to board a flight to Colombia just weeks after my father received his diagnosis. “I want you to go,” he told me. Even as his world was crashing down around him, he wanted to be sure that I was still able to see it. So I went. I arrived in Santiago de Cali, Colombia to have the life-changing experience my father wanted all while my family was experiencing their greatest hardship at the frontline of care back home. Chemo, doctors visits, prayer. I was there for none of it. Feeling disconnected from my life and yet trying to live it.

Each time I called home I told my mother and sister, if I need to leave early just tell me and I’ll come home. I worked out a contingency plan with the university and woke up each day knowing that I may get the call to come home. And then it came. “You need to come home.” my sister told me, “You need to come home”. And so I bought my plane ticket and was Colombia to Detroit bound.

Seeing my father for the first time in four months was jarring. He was there but had been physically altered from all of the treatments. Nothing was the same, not even his smile. Guilt overwhelmed me because seeing his cheekbones protrude more than they were supposed to made me realize how much time I lost out on in those four months. He was so depressed sitting in the hospital and I was able to find a room with a fish tank he could sit in just down the hall. Such a simple thing, but in my family fish are life. My father bred fish, constructed ponds from scratch, cared for those giant tanks in restaurants, and had a self-made custom made koi pond at every house we ever lived in. He’d had some of the koi longer than me. His face lit up when we entered the room and he thanked me for adding a glimmer of hope into his hospital experience. As I sat to his left in this big comfy recliner, he turned and looked at me and said, “You saved me.” As time went on, he was in and out of the hospital, and then he made the big decision to stop care and let God save him.

My life was always entrenched in the church. At the time when my father wanted prayer for miraculous healing the most, my beliefs had already changed from what we were taught. He didn’t finish his chemo and instead relied fully on faith. I remember like it was yesterday. He looked at me as I sat at the foot of his hospital bed and said “You know I’m going to be alright, right?” I couldn’t respond because without him accepting chemo any longer, how could I know? We didn’t have many conversations after that because his cognitive ability to have a conversation decreased with each passing day while his pain increased. Then it came, the final call. I jolted up from the bed when my mother said, “He’s gone.” I had just seen him the day before, holding his hand and sitting by his side, and just like that, he was gone. Within 6 months I finished my first year of grad school, my father was diagnosed with cancer, I went to Colombia and returned, and...and then that dreaded “what if” happened.

Losing my father is the hardest obstacle that has ever been thrown at me. I knew that I needed to get something that would both honor him and be a reflection of who I wanted to be. As a former church girl, tattoos have always been taboo, but as I came into my own I knew that’s exactly what I needed. Given my childhood growing up around koi in my inner-city Detroit home, I knew that’s what I had to get. My childhood home is not in the safest neighborhood, but our backyard was always an oasis, an escape from the reality that surrounded us. The lotus is a flower that rises out of a pond; no matter how dirty, it always rises beautifully as it faces the sun. In Chinese legend, the dragon koi represents overcoming obstacles. Once the dragon koi successfully swims up the yellow river it is able to transform into a real dragon. As I felt the pain of the needle on my back I simultaneously felt relief in knowing that through the pain of loss I too would one day overcome.

Getting this tattoo broke my still very Christian mother’s heart. She cried because the permanence of sin marks my body. What she saw as sin, I saw as an awakening. For the first time, I wasn’t hiding who I was becoming, I was embracing myself and got the tattoo to commemorate my story, my struggle, and not to please anyone else. She told me that my father would not have liked me getting a tattoo because he was against them and that she couldn’t understand how I was honoring him with something he would have hated. I explained to her that it was something I needed. I put a lot of thought into this tattoo that would be with me for a lifetime. You see, this was my first tattoo, but I got it knowing it would not be my last but rather a part of a larger story. I told her that it represents the obstacle but that once I overcome it, just as the dragon koi overcomes the yellow river, I will get a transformational scene on the opposite side of my back to show my koi turning into a dragon.

As I approach the two-year anniversary of losing my father, I am not yet ready to get my dragon. I am still learning to live with the pain and learning how to more openly talk about it. I wrote this as tears fell down my face. But with each tear came a release, an acknowledgement that it is ok to live and still remember the pain of loved ones lost. One day I will get my dragon, but for now, I will continue on the journey up my yellow river. Thank you Daddy. Thank you for continuing to love me. You were unable to see me get my master’s just one year after your diagnosis, but I carry you with me wherever I go, with my tattoo and in my heart.

In loving memory of Darald Chaney, 1962-2018