I Can’t Imagine the World Without You in It

A daughter reflects on cancer, suffering, and faith.

By Sarah Clark

Hear my prayer, Lord, hear

my prayer. As though you were deaf, myriads

of mortals have kept up their shrill

cry, explaining your silence by

Their unfitness.

– R.S. Thomas, “Emerging”

When my mother was dying, everyone prayed that she would live. My father did this especially, relentlessly, but all of his missionary and pastor friends did it too. The Bible study ladies. The old evangelical churchmates. Everyone. “Let her be healed,” they would say, with their eyes closed. Or “Oh God, we believe that you are the Great Healer. Put your hands on our sister Buffy and work a miracle. We believe that if it’s Your will, she will be cancer free. In Christ’s precious name, amen.”

Buffy was my mom’s name. For a long time she never went by anything else. Even when we were on the mission field in Bolivia, where no one could say it properly, she went by “Señora Baffi” instead of going by her given name, Elizabeth. I wish I could have asked her why. There were always lots of stories in my house growing up that were supposed to explain why something was the way it was, but they never really did. The story for Mom’s name was that when she was born in 1948, her older sister Lucy was only two years old. Lucy couldn’t say her fricatives yet, so she called her little sister Elizabuff, which was shortened to Buff, and that’s what Mom’s family called her until she went to college, where it became Buffy. That does explain where the nickname came from, but it doesn’t tell me how she felt about it—whether or not she liked being called that, or why she insisted on it even when going by Elizabeth would have meant she didn’t have to explain her name every time she met someone new. It didn’t even occur to me to ask her why until it was too late.

Because the prayers were ineffective, or perhaps it was not God’s will that Mom would be cancer free. They kept praying for that miracle right up until the very end, past the point where if he had made her wait that long for it, it would have just been cruel. They told her she had to keep fighting, because God could still heal her, no matter how bad it got. They never stopped to pray for her comfort or her peace. It had to be healing. After she had decided to go on hospice care, the Bible study ladies threw her a “superhero party” and got her a Superwoman cape and little gold cloth cuffs to put on her wrists like Wonder Woman. She put it all on and smiled and posed for a picture, and I sent them away as soon as I could.

I didn’t want to be left out in the rain when the reckoning came.

Often I try

to analyse the quality

Of its silences. Is there where God hides

From my searching?

– R.S. Thomas, “In Church”

I was brought up in church from the time I was born. My parents had me baptized as an infant in their Presbyterian church in Fairview, North Carolina. I don’t remember that church, but I know my parents helped found it and that it split sometime pretty soon after I was born. My parents didn’t want to choose a side, so they just left and started going to the church down the road from their farm, Riceville Presbyterian Church on Riceville Road. Riceville is where I remember going to church as a kid. That’s where I remember asking Jesus into my heart. And I do remember the experience, quite distinctly, even though I was very young at the time, maybe three or four. I was in the basement of the church hall where all the classrooms were, in the dark, all by myself. My Sunday School room had all the animals from Noah’s Ark painted on the walls, two by two. And I know why I did it, too. I didn’t want to be left out in the rain when the reckoning came.

Three or four years later, I prayed the “Sinner’s Prayer” again. It was in April, right before my birthday, and I remember that because after I turned eight, someone asked me when I got saved, and I could say, cuando tenia siete años, “when I was seven years old.” I had to do it again because something was wrong. Things were supposed to change somehow after you prayed the prayer and the Holy Spirit came to live within you. You were supposed to feel something when you did it—but only if you really meant it in your heart.

My father never really admitted to himself that she was dying.

From then on he was delusional,

the cancer making him

stupid, insistently so, and lost.

I wanted him to die.

And I wished his wife

would say A shame

instead of God’s will.

– Stephen Dunn, “A Coldness”

My father never really admitted to himself that she was dying, even though he was disturbingly matter-of-fact about some things. He had her do-not-resuscitate order taped to the wall above the desk in the family room, which was where Mom spent the last year of her life. She couldn’t walk for almost two years, and we learned later it was because she had a hairline fracture in her hip. The doctors never caught it, never could figure out why her leg hurt her so much she couldn’t walk, so they put her in a wheelchair and told her to sleep in a recliner and there she stayed.

My father also developed some tics, things that he would tell us every time we came to visit as if we had never heard them before. I could never figure out if he forgot he had told us, or if they were just on his mind so much that he had to say them out loud to someone. He would often take us into the living room, which nobody much used, and point to the wooden box that was sitting on a side table and ask, “Do you know what that is?” And after the first time, the answer was always, “Yes, I know,” but he would still have to tell us anyway. “That’s where your mom’s ashes will go after she dies. Your uncle Larry made it for her. See that darker piece of wood in the lid? That’s Brazil wood. Isn’t that nice that he did that, since we lived in Brazil?” And I would just try not to listen.

But he also had some kind of cognitive dissonance, or maybe you could call it faith in that miracle he kept asking for (if it was God’s will), because in every other way he acted like she was going to live forever, like all of this was an inconvenience that would be over soon and didn’t need to be taken too seriously. He’d drive her around in the wheelchair like it was a go kart, forcing it up over the lip of the carpets and banging her swollen, aching legs into doors and chairs and tables. She continued to be the one to cook for them both, except when I was there, standing next to the wheelchair while she chopped and stirred. They also had to sit down at the dinner table every night and eat dinner together, even when Mom could only force down a couple of bites. Dad would have a glass of wine and give her a sip in one of the little crystal cordial glasses she inherited from her grandmother. Then they would read a chapter of the Bible and each of them would pray out loud, just like we did as a family every night until I left for college.

One night after Mom was on hospice, lying in the hospital bed in the family room that had taken four of us to get her into (and we still hurt her doing it), Dad heard in her incoherent mutterings that she wanted to get up and come to the table and eat. Nothing could be more natural to him, and he immediately set about making it happen. When I came into the room, he was trying to pull her up out of bed by both her arms as she cried out in pain. I made him stop.

I wanted to love God. I just didn’t.

we are a fleet now

our prows zeroing in

praying in the wind

to spin like haywire compasses

toward whichever direction

will have us

– Kazim Ali, “Sleep Door”

Not only did I convert to Christianity twice, I was also baptized twice. My parents had me baptized as an infant, but on the mission field there’s always a lot of talk about “believer’s baptism” and making a public declaration of your faith. It’s right there in Bible, after all: “If you believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord, and you confess with your mouth that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with the heart that you believe and are justified, but it is with the mouth that you confess and are saved.” I had that verse, and a lot of others, rattling around in my head by that point—Dad had decided that my brother and I had to learn a verse each week before we could get our allowances.

We were back in North Carolina after three years in San Ignacio de Velasco, Bolivia, spending a year there before we moved to Chapada dos Guimarães, Brazil, and the youth group at Riceville decided to do a catechism class that would get us all ready to make that public confession. I signed right up and started memorizing answers. I was good at memorizing things for a reward by that point. When the day came, we all went to the Baptist church down the road, because it was December and they had a heated baptismal pool, and I took my turn going under the water in a white robe.

It still didn’t make any difference. Church was never anything but boring, and I doodled on the offering cards or in the margins of my Bible during the sermons long past the age when I should have been listening. I tried to listen. I tried over and over again to start a routine of quiet time and prayer in the mornings, but I couldn’t keep it up. Reading the Bible always made me feel like I should be feeling something, learning something, connecting with God somehow, and all I got out of it was nothing. Silence. Nobody home. No answering thrill of the heart on my end, either. I slogged my way through a chapter at a time so I could get back to reading something else. But I never had the courage to seriously doubt, so every so often I’d go back and try again to feel it.

I wanted to love God. I just didn’t.

I don’t exactly know what she wanted to tell me, because I failed her.

Have you died? Then speak.

You must see the living

are too small as they are,

lonesome for more

and in varieties of pain

only you can bring into right view.

– Katie Ford, “Speak to Us”

When the end was getting close, Mom decided that she needed to tell me some things. I don’t know why she waited until then, except that it was hard and only knowing she didn’t have much time left to do it was enough to make her try. At that point she was just beginning to be confused sometimes, to be unable to fully follow conversations and occasionally say things that weren’t actually words. I think that terrified her.

The problem is, I don’t exactly know what she wanted to tell me, because I failed her. She asked me to read something she had written, a part of the unfinished memoir that my brother was helping her put together. This section was about when we moved to Bolivia, when I was seven and she was forty-seven, and then moved from the city of Santa Cruz to the tiny town with one paved road and no grocery store where we would live for the next three years. I only got as far as this sentence: “When I saw those red, dusty streets, I felt despair.”

Another story in our house that was supposed to explain things was the story of how my parents decided to become missionaries in Bolivia. Dad was the one who took the idea seriously when it was suggested by the mission recruitment team, and when Mom realized he was actually considering it, she asked him, “Isn’t God blessing us here?” They had the organic vegetable farm in the mountains of North Carolina that was finally becoming established enough to support them without Dad having to work another job. They had the century-old farmhouse that they had restored together, raising the roof to put in an enormous picture window on the second floor. They had, after over a decade of childless marriage, two children about to enter elementary school, and Mom had a job she loved at the Asheville Public Library.

But the rest of the story is just that Mom went away on a silent retreat, and when she got back she agreed that she would go to Bolivia after all. The implication was always that she was convinced somewhere in that silence that this was the will of God for her, and for all of us. It had to be the will of God to be worth leaving everything we had ever known behind. If she wasn’t convinced it was the will of God, why had she let my father put us all through all that loneliness and pain? I was angry at her. I stopped reading, and we never talked about it. Soon after that, she couldn’t really talk at all.

Some time after that, though, she wrote me a letter. Dad gave it to me after she died, as she had asked him to. I guess she wanted it to be her last words to me. She wrote it on the stationery that I had given her after she admired it in a shop in Covent Garden the time we were in London together, before she got sick. “I don’t know how much sense I’m going to make,” is how it started. Still self-conscious, even to the last. It’s a short letter. But she told me that she loved me, and she was proud of me. Then she wrote this: “I can’t imagine the world without you in it.”

I didn’t think my faith would be worth anything when I needed it.

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer

utters itself. So, a woman will lift

her head from the sieve of her hands and stare

at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

– Carol Ann Duffy, “Prayer”

It was Mom dying that convinced me for the first time that I really did believe in God, that I wasn’t just putting it on. When C.S. Lewis’s wife died, he wrote in A Grief Observed, “I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t.” For me it was the other way around. I would never have admitted this—not to myself, and not to anyone else—but I didn’t think my faith would be worth anything when I needed it. Until I needed it, I thought it wasn’t real.

It wasn’t anything spectacular. It was just that I knew that she was going to be okay, and that it was okay for her to want to die and get all this pain and humiliation over with. It was okay with me that she wanted to stop treatment and go on hospice care. It was okay for her to not want to suffer any more just so she could be in this world a little while longer.

Unexpectedly, I found that I could tell her that when she asked me, and that I wasn’t lying, wasn’t trying to make her or me or anyone else feel better. I was thoroughly, deeply convinced that it was true. She was going to be okay, and I was going to see her again someday. That was what I was supposed to believe, of course, but it was still a surprise to me to find that I actually did. I felt sure of it, and I felt at peace. I remember standing in the kitchen at home and telling my husband, “It turns out I do believe this stuff.” It turns out I am a Christian after all.

I know I never did anything to earn that faith. I didn’t do anything differently, didn’t pray any more or better, didn’t become a particularly virtuous person. I fought with my husband and got angry at my father and neglected my work so many times in the three years after Mom was first diagnosed. But looking back now, I can see all the little means of grace that oh-so-slowly let me loose the stranglehold I had on belief and gave me in return the gift of faith.

Maybe God’s will for me was to simply accept the means of grace that I was offered.

I was steeped in their lore,

I entreated his love,

I prayed him each hour;

I was sterile

and barren

and songless.

I came back:

he opened my door.

– H.D., “His Presence”

Like I said, I never had the courage (or the desire) to turn away from the beliefs I was taught as a child. I never stopped going to church, even when my parents weren’t there to make me anymore. I got some relief from the guilt of my lukewarmness after I went away to college and joined the staff of a campus journal that was based on integrating faith and reason. “Christians think!” we declared, and it was easier for me to think for God than to try to feel him.

Later, my husband and I joined an Anglican church, and there was more relief to be found in reciting beautiful old prayers instead of trying to manufacture prayers “from the heart” and feeling a little like a fraud. There were even some stirrings of what might have been religious feelings then, because I really do love the words and rhythms of the liturgy. Almighty and everlasting God, in whom we live and move and have our being. World without end. Amen. And there was the old priest who told us that when our attention wandered from the prayers, we could just come back to them, no guilt required, and join in again. Another priest who told me that when I couldn’t pray, just to take the eucharist as often as possible, and leave the rest to God. Maybe God’s will was for me to simply accept the means of grace that I was offered. I began to want to go to church.

There were other things, too, like reading Marilynne Robinson for the first time, starting with Gilead and those sentences like “it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.” I started reading poetry again, which I hadn’t really done since high school. Usually it was just when other people recommended their favorites, but that brought me to Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” and Jeanne Murray Walker’s “Staying Power,” and back to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and on. Not that I knew I was getting anywhere before Mom died. Now I suspect I was being led, step by step.

“Oh, we have only so many words to think with,” Walker says. I think I found God in all those perfect, inadequate words that poured into me and without my knowing it made me understand that faith was something to wonder at, not to do. I found him in the forgiving worship of the liturgy, in the pain of losing my mother when we still had so much to say to each other, in the joy of noticing a chickadee outside my window. When I stopped trying to find my way to God, he was there. He had always been there. And I loved him.

Sarah Clark lives in New Hampshire with her husband and daughter. She is a founding editor of Fare Forward and the current editor-in-chief, and she owns Scale House Print Shop, a letterpress printing studio. She is currently working toward her MAR at Yale Divinity School.