Skip to main content

The View From The Other Side


Back in 2001 I had a burst appendix which required a week in hospital and some recuperation time. The experience was a far better learning for pastoral care than anything I was ever given in my theological college. I learned, for example that a 40 minute hospital chapel service was way too long, and that 20 or even 10 would have suited me far better. The best pastoral visit I received, also for example, was from my colleague David Crooke. David arrived at my bedside in his clerical blacks. He didn't ask me to talk - at that stage I was more or less incapable of it anyway - and he didn't give me any pre-packaged words of advice. He expressed his sympathy, held my hand, said a prayer and left, all within 5 minutes. Perfect. He didn't need to fix me. He didn't need to appear useful. He didn't have any of his own issues about illness or death to work through by ministering to me. He respected where I was and he was present, which was enough. And his lack of drama about the whole deal was deeply reassuring - his manner told me that this illness was a normal part of life, and was not the final say about who I was and what I was going to do with myself.

It's deja-vu now. Sometime in the next few weeks I will be admitted to hospital and they will perform a piece of surgery of about equal seriousness to that for fixing a burst appendix. As with my former procedure, there is some risk, and the possibility of serious, even fatal consequences, but I'm an optimist: I fully expect to fully recover. I know there will be a period of recuperation, following which I will function pretty much as normal. There is a high probability of some long lasting side effects but there's only two of us who need to be concerned - or even, for that matter to know - about them.

For now, it's waiting, hoping I can get it all over and done with as soon as possible. I am being supported right now by my family, my friends and my parish, and again the view from the other side is a huge learning curve for me, whose calling is the care of others. The phone calls, visits, txt messages, cards and emails have been streaming in, and all are welcome and treasured. People have expressed their shock, and sympathy and best wishes for recovery, but the most helpful have been the people who don't make too big a drama of it all.

Many people get cancer and I am just one of them. Many people recover and I intend to be one of them.
Labels:

Comments

brenda said…
Kelvin I would venture to say that if more men of God were like you, there'd be more followers of God and of men like you.
Kia Kaha
12 May 2008 at 09:31
Anonymous said…
Hi Kelvin,
Since your B@tCH blog, we have been reading your posts. As you know we occasionally visit St. Johns when B@tCH is not on and always appreciate your talks, especially the stories. We intend to keep doing so, so hang in there and know that a wider group of people are also praying for you.

Frances and Sandy
12 May 2008 at 11:40
liturgy said…
With our thoughts and prayers.

Helen & Bosco
www.liturgy.co.nz
12 May 2008 at 16:33
Helen said…
Hi Kelvin

I added a link to this blog of yours from my own, I hope that's okay. Thanks for your words of wisdom here :)

Thinking of you all and praying for the best outcome for you

Love, Helen
12 May 2008 at 17:55
Anonymous said…
Kelvin, I am saddened by the results of your tests and can only add my thoughts and prayers from my part of the world to the many others that have been sent your way. I agree with you, our mortality does indeed focus our thoughts and those of the ones closest to us. I understand and have had close family go through this same scenario in recent years. I would like to add that I have been reading your blog and your sermons of late and found them to be very thought provoking and extremely well written; you have an amazing and inspiring insight. I wish you well and send positive thought and strength your way. Warm regards.. Susan
13 May 2008 at 19:31
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more