{"id":53104,"date":"2025-09-09T14:38:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T14:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/53104\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T14:38:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T14:38:10","slug":"i-thought-i-could-outlove-cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/53104\/","title":{"rendered":"I Thought I Could Outlove Cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d heard of people who got overwhelmed by the job of caretaking<\/a> a sick loved one, but those people were obviously weak losers who didn\u2019t know how to love people as hard or as powerfully as I knew how to love people. Others might crack or have needs of their own\u2014 but not me. Never me! I had no need for rests and breaks, no need for outside assistance. I had the whole situation handled. I had love; I didn\u2019t need any help!<\/p>\n

Still, help did arrive in one unexpected way: Spirituality came back into both Rayya‘<\/strong>s and my lives during the early days of her chemotherapy. I\u2019d had a random encounter in the hospital one day with a woman whose husband was also dying of pancreatic and liver cancer. When I told this woman that my partner was suffering from the same disease as her husband, she said to me: \u201cDo you pray every day? You need to start praying. You won\u2019t be able to survive this experience without prayer.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was something about how simply she spoke that made her seem like a divine messenger. I felt the truth of her words in my heart, and I believed them completely.<\/p>\n

So I started praying every morning as soon as I woke up, and soon Rayya joined me. Our prayers were simple but calming: We would take turns talking aloud to God while we held hands under the covers. We didn\u2019t know any formal prayers, so we just asked God for guidance, turning over our fears and pain to a power greater than ourselves. What I remember most about that ritual was that we each often prayed for the well-being of the other. <\/a>I never once heard Rayya pray to God to extend her life, but I did hear her say, many times: \u201cDear God, please let Liz know how grateful I am for her presence here, and that I could not do any of this without her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as I would often say: \u201cDear God, please give Rayya the strength and courage she needs to get through this day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those morning prayers are among my most cherished memories of my time with Rayya. More than anything else I experienced at her side over the years as her friend and lover, speaking to God together knitted our hearts into one and brought us into a shared sacred space. And it did something remarkable to my spirit, \u00ad too\u2014 fortifying my strength and clarifying the day ahead. Prayer also seemed to calm Rayya\u2019s terror and sorrows, and many times it eased her physical symptoms as well. I\u2019d never before had a partner with whom I could share such holy encounters, and it was beautiful. <\/p>\n

And there were beautiful moments, \u00ad too\u2014 even during the worst episodes of suffering and disruption. Over time, for instance, I discovered that the best way to get Rayya to fall back to sleep after bouts of pain was to tell her stories. One night, in exhaustion, holding her shaking body in my arms, I found myself saying, \u201cOnce upon a time, in the greatest city the world has ever known, in a little box of light they called their own, there lived a \u00ad brown-eyed peoples and a \u00ad blue-eyed \u00ad peoples…\u201d <\/p>\n

I felt her body go still, and then she asked, in a tired voice, \u201cAre we the \u00ad brown\u2011 eyed peoples and the \u00ad blue\u2011 eyed peoples?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s us, my baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happened to them?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cOh my goodness, Rayya, you aren\u2019t even going to believe what happened to the brown-eyed peoples and the \u00ad blue\u2011 eyed peoples today! I wish I could tell you the whole story, but it is so astonishing, it strains credulity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

if our tale had ended right there, this would be a book about the greatest love story the world has ever known<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She laughed, and I kept going from there. I commenced to relay the activities of our entire day in excruciatingly granular detail, telling it as though I were narrating an epic on the level of The Odyssey or The Thousand and One \u00ad Nights\u2014 even though we had done nothing of any interest that day, because Rayya was so sick she had barely left the bedroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the \u00ad brown\u2011 eyed peoples got out of bed this morning, you cannot imagine what she did. She sat up and put a slipper on her left foot. But it wasn\u2019t just any slipper. It was the blue fuzzy \u00ad slipper\u2014 that very one that she had purchased the previous year at the airport in Detroit! But do you think it was just the one slipper that she put on? Oh no, nothing quite so simple as that. She also put on the other slipper, if you can imagine such a thing! Having succeeded at that remarkable task, the \u00ad brown\u2011 eyed peoples now made the courageous decision to find her bathrobe, which had been hidden from mankind for more years than the oldest members of the village could recall. But then the \u00ad blue\u2011 eyed peoples remembered, \u2018Hark, I believe I saw that bathrobe in the hidden hamper only last night.\u2019 And what do you think happened next?\u201d<\/p>\n

I went on like this, relaying every single microdetail of our day, until Rayya fell asleep in my arms. Eventually I had to extract myself from holding her so that I could slide over to the other side of the bed and get some rest myself. More than an hour of blissful sleep passed, but then I felt the lightest tap on my shoulder, and a tiny voice said, \u201cAnd then? And then what happened?\u201d<\/p>\n

Without even opening my eyes, I rolled over and took her in my arms again, picking up the narrative where I had left off: \u201c. . . and then the \u00ad brown\u2011 eyed peoples made an announcement to the entire kingdom, saying, \u2018Ladies and gentlemen! I would like to watch an episode of Scandal whilst drinking ginger ale.\u2019 And so they took the long journey together to the couch, where pillows were procured and blankets were produced as though by some act of \u00ad magic . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

This became our ritual, night after night. Sometimes Rayya would wake me four or five times saying, \u201cAnd then? And then what happened?\u201d before I could finally get her to surrender to sleep for a few uninterrupted hours.<\/p>\n

I believe that Rayya loved \u201cthe peoples stories,\u201d as she called them, because they were proof to her that she \u00ad mattered\u2014 that even her most insignificant actions were being witnessed and cherished by someone who loved her. Most of all, the stories proved that \u201cthe \u00ad brown\u2011 eyed peoples\u201d was still alive, and that her tale had not yet ended, even as her cosmos became smaller by the day.<\/p>\n

And so I became something like the caregiver version of Scheherazade, spinning endless stories in the dark of night. Except maybe it wasn\u2019t me who I feared would die if I ever stopped telling these tales; it was Rayya.<\/p>\n

I took great pride during those first few months of Rayya\u2019s disease in how good I was at being her caregiver. I never made a mistake, never over\u2011stepped, never faltered in my tender ministrations. This concentrated sense of purpose took me far away from any thoughts about the past or the future, took me out of self and landed me in a \u00ad never\u2011ending present moment, where I experienced a certain battlefield calm I had never before encountered within my own consciousness. At times I felt that I was not even human anymore; I was just an action of competent, patient, useful love. I was nobody and nothing, but I was also everything to the person I loved beyond measure. I had become the very essence of tireless service in the name of \u00ad love\u2014 which was, to be honest, all I had ever wanted to be.<\/p>\n

\u201cAngel,\u201d Rayya often called me during that \u00ad time\u2014 and I truly felt like an angel. And if our tale had ended right there, this would be a book about the greatest love story the world has ever known, and about how I became the perfect and selfless caregiver to somebody precious during her hour of need.<\/p>\n

But our tale did not end right there, and this is not that book, and I am not that \u00ad angel\u2014 and neither was she.<\/p>\n

So here comes the rest of it.<\/p>\n

All the Way to the River, by Elizabeth Gilbert<\/p>\n

\"<i>All<\/a><\/p>\n

From ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER: Love, Loss, and Liberation by Elizabeth Gilbert, published by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Elizabeth Gilbert.<\/p>\n

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