23 ~ Time Out for some
Reflections from Valerie
Karis was five years old when I was born, so I have had the privilege of looking up to her beautiful example since the first time my eyes began looking. In my eyes as a child, Karis was the epitome of being cool. In my first five years of life, she taught me the practice and the love of two activities, which fill me with joy to this day: swimming and dancing. As we grew, Karis often played the role of peacemaker at home, because she was impossible to fight with. She was kind, good-natured, creative, full of energy, artistic, and wise. She was always also very loving and sociable, surrounding herself with good friends, and showing genuine interest in each of their lives.
I have always been close to my mother as well, seeing her as a model and guide in many aspects of my life. Her presence and her smile told me that all was well. When my mother and Karis were home, and the family was complete, my life was filled with great comfort and joy and colorfulness. I loved setting the dinner table for six, because it meant everyone was there. During my mother and Karis’s frequent absences, I hoped and prayed, and even wrote about, their return. When my first-grade teacher asked us to write about our greatest wish, I wrote, “I wish that Mom and Karis would come home for Christmas. We will play and laugh a lot together.”
Throughout my childhood, as naturally happens with many of us youngest children, I became the family clown. I loved to laugh and sing and play, and I loved to make my family laugh. I knew that things weren’t always easy, and I was aware of Karis’s health struggles and my parents’ full schedule related to their ministries. I did not know how to live with the weight of the worries and uncertainties and seriousness that pervaded my home’s atmosphere at times. So I stepped back from these things and tried to lighten the mood.
As I think about growing up, here are a few of my memories:
One evening, when I was in sixth grade, I was up late working on a visual aid for an oral book report. The report was about Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, and I was making a cardboard model of her house. My mother and Karis were at Hospital São Paulo, my sister Rachel was out, and my father had just arrived home, with American visitors, the Bersches. (My brother Dan was in the US at college.) A phone call came, and my dad went into action almost before hanging up. “Karis is turning purple and is not breathing. Line infection, probably. I’m going to the hospital. Stay here with the Bersches, Val.”
So I stayed, and continued to work on my Hiding Place project. This is the first major crisis I remember being conscious of, in which Karis came so close to dying. I worried that I might not have been careful enough with sterilizing Karis’s bag of fluids or TPN and thus submitted her to the danger of this infection. Then I remembered that Karis had been in the hospital for several days, so I hadn’t been involved in her care recently enough to be the culprit. (From the time I was small, I loved to help with her care.)
It was a strange few hours, staying home alone with my project and our visitors, unsure if I was supposed to be preparing for a speech or for my sister’s funeral. I was fairly sure this was not a question often faced by my classmates. But I was filled with an inexplicable peace during that evening, just as God has graced me at several other critical moments in my life. As I wrestled with ridiculous amounts of tape and stubborn cardboard, I prayed and sang the song “I cast all my cares upon You. I lay all of my burdens down at your feet. And anytime I don’t know what to do, I will cast all my cares upon You.”
Karis lived, by God’s grace, and I was given a new understanding of His power and peace.
As a high school sophomore, on the first day of the Promifé missions trip, in January of 2004, I was very glad to find myself back in this Kingdom context with which I had fallen in love over the previous three years. I was keenly aware, however, of the worries crowding my mind as I looked forward into the year that was beginning. I would be turning 16 while at Promifé. Shortly after I returned, my father was scheduled to leave for Portugal, and my mother would go to South Bend to live near Karis and wait for her transplant call. Although I was accustomed to my parents’ sporadic absences, it was more intimidating to imagine that I would be living the better part of the coming semester separated from all family members. (Little did I know that this would be extended to the rest of my high school years.)
I had spent a couple of hours on the bus earlier that day discussing the meaning of strength with a dear friend from church. One verse mentioned in that discussion stuck with me for many months: “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.” (Psalm 27:14). This idea of strength was so different from what I was used to. I tended to take much more of an active approach, and this verse presents a passive element: wait.
In our initial Promifé gathering that day, we sang some worship songs, and one phrase took on a new and deeper meaning for me, as the Lord ministered His promises to me. “Great is the Lord and most worthy to be praised.” Great is the Lord - greater than all of this, encompassing all time and space and thoughts and feelings. He seemed to come close at that moment and whisper in my ear: “I will be your mother and your father, your sister and your brother, your friend and your lover, during all of the months that you live here without your family. You will not be alone.”
For sure, the years that followed were not easy, but God surrounded me with His people and His words, in songs and promises, like manna, quail, fire and cloud.
My mother lived in the United States for the better part of the next three years. She asked if I would like to move there with her, but I could not imagine leaving Brazil earlier than necessary. So, I visited her and Karis for two-week periods during Easter and summer vacation. On one hand, these visits were fun and joyful, including precious family times and activities with special friends my mother and Karis had found in Pittsburgh. After two or three days, however, I easily became tormented and miserable. I felt so out of place among Americans, and I missed home. I wanted to talk to my friends and participate in the ministries I was involved in, and I felt empty and alone in Pittsburgh. I was very glad to be reunited with my beloved mother and sister, but I was also restless.
One day, after attending a David Bailey concert at church, Karis challenged me to take advantage of the time and place I had at present. She reminded me that until we get to heaven, we will live with “saudades,” (an ache inside that comes from missing people we love), but that God provides people to love and things to enjoy at each unique time and place throughout life. That reminder helped me to refocus my thoughts and attitudes, making the visits to the United States much more rich and fruitful.
My favorite memory with Karis that year happened the month before her first transplant. It was the fourth of July, and we had gone to watch fireworks and meet up with Rachel in downtown Pittsburgh. On our way back to the car after the show, we noticed a solitary drummer sitting on a street corner, playing an animated rhythm. Karis and I stopped and, leaving our flip flops to our mother’s care, began jumping and dancing in a sequence we had become familiar with years earlier. From there, we proceeded to dance freely, in an improvised expression of energy and joy and freedom. Some passersby asked about our dance, and others joined in. In what seemed like no time, an hour passed, and our mother reminded us that Karis was expected at a friend’s party. So we walked on, laughing and out of breath.
Being in Pittsburgh, so far from all that was familiar and beloved, sometimes felt like a punishment, but I learned to adjust my perspective and to praise God in that strange new place.
It was November, 2004. I was in the middle of a soccer practice at school when my dad showed up at the end of the field. Surprised to see him there, I ran over to him. “We’ve got to go, Val,” he communicated when I got close enough. Where? Why? “We’re going to Pittsburgh tonight. Karis took a sudden turn for the worse, she’s in the ICU on a lot of machines, and we’re not sure if she’ll survive the night.” Aha. Turning to yell a short goodbye to my coach and team, I ran to grab books from my locker. We did not know how long this trip would be, and I had to be prepared to keep studying long-distance. And I would miss the drama performance we were preparing for. And…
Somehow, my suitcase got packed, and we made it to the airport and onto the plane. Amazingly, three seats were free behind us, and my dad headed back there to stretch out, after a time of prayer with me. I do not think I slept that night.
When we arrived at the hospital the next day and walked into the ICU, the sight of Karis was so foreign, it was like a jolt, a shock. She was very, very skinny, and jaundiced, and shaking with the strength of the oscillator which was working full force in an attempt to pump enough oxygen into her body for her to survive. This was the first time I had seen her since July, when we had danced together on the street for an hour. Now, her lungs had been almost completely overtaken by Legionnaire’s Disease, an extremely aggressive pneumonia. Her “chicken legs” (as she had referred to them) did not look like they would have supported her weight, even if she were not paralyzed and sedated in the strange and scary state which would characterize the next two months: induced coma.
The following months were a surreal mixture of life and death, of togetherness and separation. Our family celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year together, all of us but Karis, eating good food in the Browns’ home, praising the Lord in the Church of the Ascension, and playing games in the hospital waiting rooms. The five of us enjoyed many moments together, but we were separated from Karis by a chasm that none of our prayers, conversations, readings, or songs, none of our back-rubbing or handholding, could cross. She was held captive by machines and the medicines dripping into her veins through a massive network of plastic tubing.
Despite the difficulty of seeing Karis so debilitated, the weeks spent in the ICU with her confirmed my love for pediatric nursing. I learned a lot during those hospital days and found the great joy of spending time with small children who were suffering, and seeing them smile and laugh despite their pain and frustration.
In May of 2005, after about four months of recuperation from her two pneumonias, the loss of her transplanted intestine, and two months of coma, Karis came home to Brazil for a month. Rachel came, too, to spend her summer vacation working for Dad. And Dan came for a few days, to complete the family. We had many happy moments those days, but excruciating pain and debilitating weakness were Karis’s constant companions. Beyond that, she was gathering all her emotional forces in an attempt to stay afloat, as she was plunged into a deep depression.
Observing the state of life to which Karis had been reduced broke something much greater and deeper in me than that which had suffered with her in the ICU four and five months earlier. Without recognizing it specifically, my concept of supposedly unshakable ideas began to waver considerably. By the time Karis and Mom’s visit was up, the ideas had crumbled into a pile of confused rubble.
On May 10th, before I even imagined what was to come, I described something of the time I was headed into:
The Enemy
How he would laugh
If he watched these goings-on going on
From outside
How he would smile at their silliness
When fantasies are dreams
And dreams are hopes
And hopes are dead
In a world where
Dreams are the raw material of lives
That time does not allow the freedom to live
How he would chuckle
To think that we believed
That time and space were relentless captors
To see all the pounds of potential in a human mind pointed nowhere,
Headed back toward dust.
How great would be his glee
At the frantic searches for the key
At the desperate quests for a way
To be free from the chains
That chafe and weigh them down
And to surpass the futility of following a thousand vicious cycles
Of living under a sun
That will see nothing new
Ah, yes, he would grin wholly unscrupulous
When pride caught the humble off-guard
When envy caught the proud red-handed
When depression made their spirits fade away
And when their intellectualism banned all hints of faith
How he would howl
As he watched them fall
And he watched them die
As he watched them refuse the only gift ever offered them for free
And as they failed to grasp the key to their freedom,
Becoming forever trapped inside time.
Something near delight would touch his face
If he observed all this from outside
And were not also chained
And were not the first to be condemned
The only one offered no true hope
If only his steps could reach beyond the dominion
Of He who holds the key…
How he would laugh.
Within a week, the family that had been complete for a few days was completely gone (Dan, Karis, and Mom back to the US and Rachel and Dad to a conference in Colombia), and I stepped into the scariest weeks of my life. Extremely and inexplicably insecure, I felt my reason leaving me, and I felt abandoned, lost, and alone. From the dark place into which I had fallen, I had no way of escaping or seeing any ray of light, and no one could understand or reach into that place to shine on me. I found a few brief moments of relief and sanity during those days by looking back at prayers I had written and singing songs that the Lord had given me in previous months and years. Those memories of God’s presence brought me some comfort. It was like reaching out in the darkness and feeling something solid, which I could not see, but which was familiar.
On June 16th, as we drove home after leaving Mom and Karis at the airport, I sang a prayer that expressed my desire over the following weeks:
Lord of Lights, open my eyes
Let me see all the riches surrounding me
Lord of truth, open my mouth
Let my lips sing your praises
Lord of love, open my heart
Let it be forever thankful
For who you are to me, Lord of Lights!
I could not really pray or dance or sing before or after that song, during much of June and July. I could not even think straight. I had panic attacks, and I fled from most extended conversations, fearing that my friends might discover my insanity and push me even farther away. I lived each day mostly without feeling anything but cold and fear, and without understanding anything. This was a much more monumental and prolonged crisis than I had previously faced, and it encompassed my emotions, my spirit, and my mind. Since my body remained intact, I managed to feign some semblance of normalcy to the outside world.
At the Promifé mission trip in July, I began to understand what had gone wrong inside me, and my spirit, my mind, and my heart began to be restored. I realized that I had lost my certainty that “three things remain: faith, hope, and love” (I Corinthians 13). During a prayer time on that trip, I decided to trust that God would guard my heart and my soul, independently of what happened in my life or the life of my family. I decided to give credit to the idea of having faith in a God of love who promises new life and hope. This idea appeared completely absurd and unreal to me, after seeing Karis stripped of all she had. I could not see God’s love demonstrated to my sister, who was so close to my heart, so I doubted the credibility of His words.
That doubt had brought about the crumbling of my entire world. But my decision to believe despite the evidence was my first step back in the direction of sanity.
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