More than a decade ago my mother got sick on the way to a cancer appointment. I pulled into a convenience store and she hurried inside. I sat in the car while she threw up over and over. I remember feeling completely helpless. Every part of me wanted to go in there and somehow take it from her, to carry the sickness myself if I could. Instead, I just sat there waiting for my mom to come back out knowing there was absolutely nothing her son could do to make her body stop hurting.
I couldn’t reach into her body and take the sickness out. Chemotherapy would not become gentler because her son wanted it to. All I had to offer was a ride, a seat beside her, a way home and my presence when the next hard day came. Love can feel terribly helpless when someone you love is hurting.
Now the cancer is back. My mother is in her seventies. This time surgeons have taken a kidney and both adrenal glands. She is fighting again, more than ten years older than she was the first time and I am older too. When I call, she usually sounds positive. She is grounded in Christ. Pain really concerns me this time. So does depression and what long stretches of sickness might do to her spirit.
Strangely, I spend very little time worrying about where she will go if cancer takes her life. My thoughts keep drifting toward my dad because they have been married nearly sixty years. Almost an entire adult life has unfolded with the same person beside him. There are memories between them that belong to nobody else in quite the same way. A story from fifty years ago needs little explanation because she was there and a glance across a room can carry a meaning built over decades. They have grown old inside the same marriage.
I find myself wondering what his mornings would feel like if her chair were empty. What happens when the person who has known your life from the inside for nearly sixty years is suddenly gone?
That question hurts me more than I expected. Cancer does strange things to time. It pulls old memories forward and makes future possibilities feel painfully close. I find myself thinking about Jacob sleeping in a barren place called Bethel. He was running from home, exhaustion finally stopped him. There was no bed, no pillow, no comfortable room. He put his head on a stone and slept under the open sky.
His body never left that patch of ground, yet God allowed him to see into heaven. Jacob saw a staircase and the angels of God ascending and descending. God spoke to him there. When he woke, he said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”
Jacob discovered something we easily forget…heaven is not something that will be. Heaven is something that is. We often picture it as a place somewhere past the stars, far beyond our reach, almost unimaginably distant. Scripture gives us glimpses of another reality. Isaiah stood in the temple and saw the Lord. Stephen faced men who were about to stone him and saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God. John suffered on Patmos and saw the risen Christ in glory. Each man stood on ordinary ground while God opened his eyes to the unseen world.
The dwelling place of God was closer than he had imagined and I think about that when I think about my mother. Cancer can make death feel like a journey into terrible distance. A hospital bed can look like the edge of everything familiar. There may come a moment when family members can hold a hand, whisper a prayer, say “I love you,” and then go no farther.
For the Christian, the person we love does not disappear into emptiness because Christ is there. The same Jesus who came from heaven returned there after His resurrection. He lives and reigns, interceding for His people. Before He went to the cross, He told His disciples that He was going to prepare a place for them. He called it His Father’s house.
That language means more to me now. I once read an illustration about a little boy who accidentally ran into the wrong house. Someone asked why he came back out so quickly. Was something wrong with the furniture, the walls or the place itself? The boy said there was nothing wrong with the house. His mother was not there.
The presence of the Father makes heaven heaven. The Savior waits there. The people whose sins have been forgiven through His blood belong there. Their citizenship is there and their names are written there.
You see, our greatest problem is deeper than cancer. Disease can destroy the body, yet sin has separated every one of us from the God who made us. We cannot cure that wound ourselves. Good intentions leave guilt untouched, religion cannot wash a conscience clean and even a long life eventually reaches the grave.
God did what we could never do. Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, came into our world and took flesh. He lived the righteous life we have failed to live. At the cross, He willingly bore the judgment sinners deserve. He died beneath the weight of our guilt, was buried and on the third day He rose from the grave.
The gospel is God opening His arms to guilty people through His Son. Forgiveness is offered to the sinner who comes to Christ in repentance and faith. Eternal life is given freely rather than earned. The Savior receives sinners who come weary, frightened, ashamed…even dying. Whoever belongs to Him can face the grave with a hope stronger than the body’s last breath.
Jesus prayed in John 17:24, “Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory.” Be with Me where I am. Those words are almost unbearably tender when someone you love has cancer.
The Christian hope reaches beyond the moment of death. Scripture does not end with redeemed souls forever separated from the world God created. Revelation points us toward resurrection, a new heaven and a new earth. John sees the holy city coming down out of heaven from God and a voice announces that the dwelling place of God is with His people.
The separation between the visible and unseen will be gone. Creation will be made new.
Then comes the promise every cancer family longs to hear: God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain.”
Cancer belongs to a world that is passing away. So do the scans, waiting rooms, nausea, surgeries, funeral homes and terrible sentences doctors sometimes have to speak. None of them belong to the world Christ is bringing.
I still hate the thought of my mother suffering. That convenience-store parking lot remains fixed in my memory. More than a decade has passed and the helplessness has changed shape without disappearing. Her son cannot give her another body. Nearly sixty years of marriage cannot be guaranteed another ten. If her earthly life ends, grief will enter our family regardless of how much I wish I could keep it outside.
There are things a son cannot fix. That helplessness would crush me if death were the edge of everything. It is not.
If the day comes when my mother’s breathing grows quiet, I may have to let go of her hand. My father may have to walk into a house that feels different from every house he has known for most of his adult life. Our family may cry until there are no words left for the loss.
The risen Savior will remain with her and He can carry His people through the place where the rest of us must stop. My hope rests there, in the risen Jesus Christ rather than in medicine doing everything I want it to do or in trying to make death sound beautiful.
He has gone ahead and prepared a place. When a believer leaves the hands of those who love them here, they fall safely into hands that were pierced for them. There are places love cannot follow yet, but Christ can.
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