Though my flesh, it be destroyed

This was not the post I'd intended to write.

Stirred by distantly sardonic thoughts of new mornings each bringing with them unexpected "new delights", I sought out the famous poet who could best help me encapsulate that utter bleakness of spirit that accompanies every new and unexpected journey through this Scylla and Charybdis of cancer treatment: the ache of the left-hip bone marrow biopsy drowned out by the sharp reminders of the right-shoulder port surgery; the daily tightrope wavered between hunger and nausea, between a full stomach stuck roiling in bed and a productive empty one; the constant cupboard-baring hunt for drinks and snacks that might slip, unnoticed, past a mouth screaming with sores, a jaw locked down, a tongue rippling metallic aftertastes; the twice-a-day ritual of choking down a colorful array of foul-tasting pills beneficial in thought but nauseating in deed; the chilling, inescapable cold closing about me as my blood counts drop; and above all, the fatigue, the enervating fatigue leaving me flat out in bed, mind racing, unable to even focus on a book, distracted and entertained, at last, only by music.

This was the irony I sought to so deftly portray.

But it was not the irony that found me. Turns out the lines of "poetry" lurking about in my mind were instead lyrics, words to a song one rarely forgets, once heard.

Morning by morning, new mercies I see.

In the midst of a crushing devastation, the still-smoking destruction of his country, his people, even his own person, the lamenter still cries out, "It is because of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed...Great is Thy faithfulness!"

All I have needed, thy hand hath provided.

My relatives were tortured and died in concentration camps and gas chambers; were hidden in basements and with strange families; captured by enemy forces and starved in prison camps; pioneered in unforgiving new countries; were massacred and murdered and pogromed; and from the earliest, scraped by on dirt farms, surviving the relentless bad harvests, plagues, famines, droughts, floods, political and religious upheavals, the uncertainties and poverties and bleaknesses, always sacrificing, never knowing for how long their suffering might last or what good it might come to, always with the unyielding hope that just maybe, through all this sacrifice, the next generation might just make it, might just inch a rung higher on that elusive and slippery ladder of societal success.

Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow...

I have eight weeks to endure. Eight weeks, under the care of one of the country's best hospitals; eight weeks, with cutting-edge drugs and treatment regimens; eight weeks, paid for almost entirely by an unbelievably generous healthcare plan; eight short weeks, supported at every turn by the bedrock love and care of an army of friends, supervisors, co-workers, and family. Just eight weeks.

This, instead, was the irony that found me.

Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.