The words from St. Paul to the Romans in today’s second reading, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us” (Romans 8:18) reminded me of something that happened to me in March.
I went to a conference, End of Life Issues, at St. Monica’s Catholic Church in Dallas. Bishop Seitz spoke the first night. One of the things he talked about was suffering. I am a pediatric oncology nurse practitioner and have had the privilege of caring for kids with cancer for the past 20 years. It is my faith that has sustained me all of these years and only by God’s grace am I able to do this work he has called me to do. I always struggle with how much suffering these children and their families have to endure. I have conversations with God about this all the time.
I dealt with suffering on a more personal level when my mom died of colon cancer on September 16, 2009. Ten days prior to her death we moved her from the couch to the hospital bed in my parents’ den. She never was out of the bed again. I was blessed to be off from work and to be there the whole time. My siblings and I, as well as our dad, never left her side. We would rotate having at least two of us at her side at all times. We would talk to her and hold her hand so she would know that she wasn’t alone. We had a very hard time controlling her pain and it was excruciating to watch, and to hear her cry out in pain. Touching her and especially moving her caused her to cry out. She was scared at times too. We would pray the rosary and that always seemed to calm her. As a nurse, I often wondered if there was more I could have done to alleviate her pain.
There were times I was so angry at God, demanding to know why she had to suffer so much. The Sunday before she died, when I was at Mass, I remember challenging God. I told him, “If you are all powerful, then stop her suffering, hasn’t she been through enough already?!” I remember later feeling like the chief priests and scribes at the Crucifixion saying, “Let the Messiah, the king of Israel, come down from the cross that we may see and believe” (Mark 15:32). My faith was weak when things got hard.
These things haunted me for a while after my mom died. The other thing that I wanted desperately to happen was for my mom to come to me either in a dream or just being able to feel her presence.
At the conference, Bishop Seitz quoted the following scripture, “For this momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18). As he read this scripture, I felt my mom’s presence. She was smiling and told me, “Kelly, it is true! All my suffering was just a drop, a tiny drop, compared to the glory that I am experiencing.”
This gift from God was two-fold, I finally felt my mother’s presence and I no longer feel anguish over the suffering she endured.
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