Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is beautiful in so many ways. That melancholy tune kept running through my head following this past chemo session.

The last round of chemo hit me hard. I returned home on Tuesday, went to bed and stayed there until Saturday. On Sunday, I moved to the sofa and parked myself there.  I had a lot of pain, some bleeding, and a phenomenal amount of head fuzziness. I couldn’t think, read (even emails), watch TV, or knit. I could barely speak and I certainly couldn’t carry on a conversation. I hadn’t eaten since Monday, surviving on ice chips and small sips of water. My body had pains I never thought it could have.

I wondered if my body was at the beginning of a final downhill slide. My weight was lower than ever and I looked skeletal.

I had been absent from the family for so long that the kids were losing their grounding. My husband does a great job of being father and mother during my chemo weeks, but it is all-consuming. He needed the weekend to get some work done and maybe even exercise, but that wasn’t going to happen.

Plus, I haven’t had those huge messages from God and the angels that I used to have. I still believed they were out there, but I didn’t feel connected. When I looked at my life, I couldn’t find a sliver of anything I wanted, and I wondered in many ways what death would be like. My thoughts and emotions were dark.

As I lay in bed late one night, the lyrics to Hallelujah again ran an endless loop through my head. I decide to listen to the Leonard Cohen version one more time and as I did, suddenly noticed these words, which lifted me:

And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Yes. Because even through all this crap: Hallelujah.

I started to look for the blessings. I had to really look, but I was, indeed, getting a little better each day. Not as fast as I would like, but definitely improvement. It was a start.

This cancer path makes everything feel like it is just wrong: This isn’t the life I was supposed to be living. It felt broken and crappy but I had to admit, I am still grateful for it.

Even though all this felt so very wrong, if I were to stand before the Lord at that very minute, I like to think that I would still say, Hallelujah.

Love and light,

Marie

(Those lyrics are around 6:10 on the video.)