Woman Discovers Second Wind After Breaking Date With Mortality
When I followed up on Laurie, it was five years after our first interview. I found her divorced, working as the director of development for a continuing-care facility for seniors, and unexpectedly serene. She was now 44. She looked, from the grooves under her eyes, matured beyond her years, as if she had been to some underworld of the soul and back.
The revelation didn’t surface until I asked about her feelings toward death.
“I’ve already had my bout with mortality,” she replied. “I had breast cancer. Three years ago.” She theorized on how it had happened to her: There was the ending of her marriage, which meant losing her best friend, followed by the loss of a job she loved. It all happened at once and left her with a sense of isolation. “I guess it allowed my immune system to become so suppressed that something would happen,” she reflected.
Laurie took it as her challenge to heal. All through her radiation treatments she never missed a day of work. That was part of her healing: to make her job a mission beyond herself. She raises funds for the senior community. To take this dream job to the point where she could fully renew her idealism, she has reduced her lifestyle. In place of a mate or children, she has formed close bonds with the residents whose needs she serves, most of whom also live alone.
She has surrendered, too, to the power of prayer.
The day after her lumpectomy, she was sitting on the edge of her bed when a powerful tremor shuddered through her body. A surge of warmth and strength came after it, leaving her feeling a calm that was entirely new. She later learned that members of her religious group had concentrated their prayers on her at precisely the moment she felt the tremor. There are now a number of studies, some reported in medical journals, that show coronary-care patients who are prayed for by community prayer groups have far better recoveries than those who do not.
I reminded Laurie of the passionate consternation she had expressed, at age 38, about going through a “midlife crisis.” How did it look now that she had come out the other end of that passage?
She chuckled. “Today I would not term it a crisis. … The term crisis has a different meaning for me now. There are ways around it, or under it, but the best way is to move right through it. That’s the hardest way, but when you do that, you will come to a new level of being.”
As a result of facing her early midlife crisis honestly, Laurie was fortified when she had to confront a truly harrowing challenge, or what I call a “life accident,” one of those events that we can neither predict nor prevent.
Laurie never felt as if she were going to die during her bout with mortality. Nothing could upset her. Her focus became keen. Through meditation she found stillness.
“I’m far happier today than at any point in my life,” she told me. “Yes, I know I’m going to die. But the flip side of being in a job where death is an ever-present reality is that I’ve come to realize death is part of life. And that life will continue beyond me. Beyond all of us.”
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate