by Terri Mork Speirs

Do you really buy all this stuff about how joy comes in suffering? On the surface it sounds like a Christian spin job. Bad is good. War is peace. The sky is green.

Speaking for myself, I’m buying it. Yes. Yes. YES. I believe it with all my heart and soul. Come with me and I’ll take you on a little trip around the universe. Let me tell you how the grace of God doubled over the evil that took hold of us.

It all started with Bob’s liver. Bob is my husband, and his liver quit working for about six months because of an allergic reaction, it seems, to a simple antibiotic. Meanwhile, the rest of us — two children, ages 7 and 10, and me — found that our own lives quit too, as a failing liver’s wild bile poisoned Bob from head to toe.

Exactly what happens when a liver decides to leave? Imagine your living room as a morgue and your husband as its only client. Bob lay in casket position; we were in purgatory.

You should have seen us try to get him to eat. Spoon feeding. Straws.

You should have seen us try to get him to doctor’s appointments. Wheelchairs. Blankets.

You should have seen the way the kids could hardly stand to look at him anymore. Egg-yolk eyes. Emaciated daddy.

There were no better days and worse days. Every day merely dropped a few degrees lower than the day before. It was a sweeping, slow, and steady descent into hell. Yet there was also an opposite force of intense holiness.

Grace and chaos.
Bob and me.
From our care page Web site, December 30, 2006
Early this morning I could tell that Bob was having a bad dream. I tried to wake him. He was stuck in that state where he could hear me but he couldn’t move or speak. I could tell he was trying to say something to me, but his mouth was paralyzed. Scared me to death. I almost called 911. "Can you hear me! Who am I! What’s my name!"

It’s not about having what you want. It’s about wanting what you’ve got. That’s what happened to Bob and me during the liver expedition. We decided that we wanted what we had: each other. Our marriage was fine; we were well into our 13^th year, and honestly, you just get into a mode where all you are consumed with is the logistics of the kids and the dog days of life. Plus, we were in the midst of Bob’s pastoral call process since he had just graduated from seminary. Okay, I admit, that stress was taking a toll. But when you believe that your husband is slowly dying, you realize that nothing else matters but that he lives. Period. Bob’s poisoned body seemed to purify our marriage. Not only that, but it cleansed our way of thinking about everyone.

Comfort and grief.
The care page.
January 15, 2007
Did you know that you partied with us tonight? I read your names off to my 7- year-old Aidan for his bedtime reading. Not exactly that I wanted to, but because he insisted. I read each and every name off to him. All 180 or so of you….It was like the party that Aidan’s been wanting to have. Like you were all there with us, tucking in. You were the Body of Christ enveloping my baby boy with love and I thank you so much.

On a full–moon night, three months into the lost liver, Bob went to the hospital for the fifth and final time. This time to the Mayo Clinic transplant unit, so very nicely outfitted with computers for the family. That’s where I started the care page Web site. It was just words that I spurted out to let everyone know what was going on and for my own release. That Web site became the centerpiece of our survival, as we were otherwise so isolated in our own terror and despair.

A choir of angels is who they were, everyone who logged onto that care page site. Every day I read the names aloud to Bob, which would often prompt us to weep together. Our son, Aidan, became curious about the list and so I printed it out for him. You can never know how crises play out in the hearts of children, but I can say that he slept with those stapled papers in his bed for about a month. He invented complicated games using all the names, some that he knew, many that he did not. No matter. They were angels.

Gratitude and panic.
Family.
December 26, 2006
Take deep breaths. Isn’t that what you do to avoid panic attacks? To get oxygen to your brain when you simply must remain clear–thinking. Like when your kids are in the back seat of the car and you’re driving your husband to the emergency room at 11:30 p.m. An hour and half on the road in the rain. The best thing to do if you feel panic coming on is to pull off at the next exit, open the window, and take deep breaths.

You never want to hold vigil over a dying person. But if you must, then there is absolutely nothing else you would choose to do. As Bob lay in his virtual coma, I sat beside him. For hours. Weeks. Months.

I did nothing else except interact with doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. Yet the household stayed together because of my mother–in–law, also known as Mom Speirs. You might think that she would be frail at age 80. No. While I held vigil in stunned silence, Mom Speirs held vigil while cooking, cleaning, and caretaking. It was an exceptional time for mother and son.

The wandering liver was hard on our families. They all wanted so badly to help, yet my thinking capacity was focused on the demands of Bob’s organic bile binder that refused to work.

I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to relate to our respective brothers and sisters, to my own parents. I barely talked with Mom Speirs, who lived with us. It took me about three months to remember that my brother Tom is a Mayo Clinic paramedic. One night I almost ignored his phone call, too. Thank God I answered, because that was the night Tom came to get Bob. That was the night we drove Bob to the Mayo Clinic emergency room. That was the night I came to know how magnificent it is to have a brother. To have family.

Holiness and hell.
Spirit.
January 12, 2007
Depression is a nasty evil, with all the dark thoughts it can plant into your mind. It’s like those "friends" in the book of Job who kept telling Job all the things he had done wrong and how he had brought on his afflictions by his own doing. At 3:00 o’clock this morning we ordered Satan to get out of here.

This is the part where we go around the universe, because our apartment seemed to be open space for spirits, bad and good. And I beg you to understand that I am not prone to such notions. It just happened. When I realized that the doctors didn’t know what to do, I started to consider the spiritual aspect of the liver mystery. It felt as though a demon had walked in our front door and settled right into Bob’s core. I didn’t know exactly what to do with that except to keep the neighbor kids out.

Many nights I called aloud on the authority of Jesus Christ. Just after the liver had resolved, about 30 or so friends came into our home with a "spiritual housekeeping" service. Our daughter, Amanda, imagined that people were coming with vacuum cleaners. In a way, yes. They ordered the evil to be gone with hymns and prayers and bread and wine.

As I puttered around the kitchen late one night, Bob’s father came to me. I’d never met him because he had gone to glory some 30 years earlier. He simply wanted to offer reassurance that everything was going to be all right. Another night, I woke up in utter anguish over my cousin who had died in eighth grade from a brain tumor. Waves of grief washed over me. It had been almost 14 years, and all of a sudden, I felt a bond to her I had never felt before.

Joy and suffering.
Community.
December 08, 2006
Ministry of dirty clothes. This morning my good friend and extremely talented colleague, Joanne, picked up our laundry. She will return it washed and pressed very soon. This is the fifth week she’s done that. When Joanne first suggested that she handle our dirty clothes, I flat out said no way! At the time I was still trying to keep some sort of dignity.

How can I tell you about the community who rallied around us? And it was not due to my sterling personality, because I put signs up on our door to stay away. I did not answer the phone. I had the look of death on my face that said "don’t talk to me." I ignored my children. All I could think of was getting Bob through his lack–o’–liver torture du jour —itching from the inside, starvation, nightmares, retching, despair.

And yet it was all about abundance. Food. Letters. Prayer shawls. Gifts from strangers. Bake sales. Second–grade poems. A Christmas tree. A spectacular benefit dinner. Fervent intercession by dear neighbors who come from different countries with their blessed different senses of personal boundaries during illness. I wish I had every page in this magazine to tell you about the actions that people took on our behalf. People from every church that we had ever attended. Some churches that didn’t know us at all. My family. Bob’s family. The Luther Seminary community. My colleagues at Lutheran World Relief. Bob’s youth groups. Amanda and Aidan’s elementary school.

Why? We don’t know. It is beyond our understanding why people responded to Bob’s diva liver in this way. Like the grace of God, it just came to us in spite of us.

Terri Mork Speirs lives in St. Paul, Minn., with her husband, his liver, and their two children. She works with Lutheran World Relief. And she writes about our planet, transplant, and transformation on her blog, www.rollingontheliver.blogspot.com.