Burying the lede

Let me not bury the lede.
My oncologist emailed me today in advance of next week's appointment to tell me that he received the results of the genetic testing and the test identified the EGFR T790M mutation, which means I can start a new drug on Monday that will likely give me another year, or more, of life. 
Bury the lede.  That is when a story fails to emphasize the most important part of the story or account.  In journalism, the lede refers to the introductory section of the news story that is intended to entice the reader to read the full story. The spelling lede is an alteration of lead, which makes sense, because shouldn't the main information in a story be found in the first, or lead paragraph.  Some newspaper folks spell it lede, which distinguishes it from lead, which also happens to refer to a thin strip of metal separating lines of type on a Linotype machine which really hasn't been used since the 1970s.  Lede is insider spelling, or romantic spelling.

I have buried it though.
A few days ago, I stood naked in my shower, cold, trembling, covered in dirt.
Let me explain.
A dear friend pilgrimaged to El Santuario de Chimayo recently and she brought back a red box which contained a plastic bag full of dirt. I didn't know what El Santuario de Chimayo was--see earlier references to cultural Judaism, midwestern roots and all.  Maybe you knew it is a Roman Catholic church in Chimayo, New Mexico, which is a contemporary pilgrimage site.  It is a shrine, a National Historic Landmark, and some 300,000 visitors come each year to seek blessings, to fulfill vows, and to take a small amount of holy dirt, in hopes of a miraculous cure for themselves or for someone who could not make the trip themselves.
The box has been sitting on my desk for several weeks, maybe even longer.

I grew up thinking prayers were for other people.  I thought because I was Jewish and we did not go to temple, that I was not allowed to pray, that prayers were the express province of people who believed in Jesus Christ, whatever I thought that sentence meant, and that you had to know the words.  I just knew the words to the pledge of allegiance and was so relieved about the separation of church and state, because I lived in fear of being caught out not knowing the words.  Every once in awhile I would say something out loud, or loudly in my head, that resembled a prayer and may have even included the word God in it: those prayers usually had to do with thwarted desire or fear. 

I gradually learned to think of prayer a little differently.  I learned to talk to God, and to confide in God those fears and desires.  But I often felt like Gerard Manley Hopkins--so many dead letters sent, alas, away.  I felt foolish.  Who was I to think that God, if such a being existed, would care about the specific troubles of me? I was a liberal Jewish skeptic--the Holocaust proved God didn't care, or proved there was no God, and what was the difference--it hurts my heart a little to think about the aloof, educated. alone posture I struck.

As I got older, my relationship to prayer opened up.  I stopped worrying about the right words.  I started talking towards God with less anxiety, with less concern about how. But it wasn't until cancer that I started listening as a kind of prayer, and that has been revelatory.  I started listening for God outside, mostly.  On the many walks out to the bog, I found God in the woods, at the edge of the pond, in the cranberries nestled in the brush, the silent heron.  I really did.  I heard God in the silence after I prayed, as if he was listening.  It wasn't so much that I thought God was going to reach down and intervene in the course of my cancer. It was that I began to feel that God was with me and the outcome was with him.  Not that my prayers were being answered.  Not exactly that they were being heard.  That they were being prayed.

I have to admit this last round of cancer drama shook me.
It's a very complicated way to live, knowing you are praying for another year, not another ten.  Yesterday when Kyle was out with the boys, Elijah asked her to promise him I wouldn't die.  Last night when I tucked him in, Elijah held on to me and said "Mommy, please stay with me, never go away, Mommy."
I went into my bedroom weeping, ragged and bereft, imagining the day, which will come, when I will hold my children for the last time, when Kyle will go to the boys and tell them I have died, when they ask for me for the first time and the answer is I am not there.  That's going to happen.  Others have survived more.  We will, too.  But last night I went to bed full of grief and sorrow.

But I'm burying the lede.
Two days ago I took out the bag of dirt and looked at it.  It looked, well, dirty.  It said I should rub the dirt on the places that need healing, which specifically is my sternum and tailbone.  I passed the bag over those places and I followed the instructions and they told me just what to say, just what words to use.  I used the words and I wept and I begged for more time, I begged that I would have the mutation that would give me a little more time with my precious children, more time in this precious life. But I knew I wasn't doing this prayer right.

I knew what my friend would say, because I knew in my heart that I needed to take that dirt out and put it literally on my body if I wanted to really pray this particular prayer, but I still asked.
When they said put the dirt on the places that needed to be healed, did they mean really put the dirt on those places? Open up that bag and take that dusty dirt from New Mexico and put it on my body?
Yes, my devout Catholic friend, that's what they meant.

So that night, while Kyle was still in the city, when the boys fell asleep, I took off my clothes and said the words again--words that are strange for me, words I would have scoffed at as a young woman, words I would have thought were tribal or tricks or poetry, but not words with power.
And I felt alone. I was cold. I didn't feel close to God.  I felt scared because I felt no answer and I thought, I'm trying to speak a language which is not mine.  But I said the words, and I stood in the shower and let the dirt cover my body and I didn't know if God or Jesus or the universe was with me, but it sure didn't feel like it. I was alone.
I watched the dirt cover the floor of the shower and I made sure the water washed it all clean again before stepping out.
And today the oncologist emailed and told me I have the mutation.
And then, my friends, tonight is Rosh Hashanah, literally the beginning of the year, the Jewish New Year.
The biblical name for this day, this day I have been given a new lease on life, is Yom Teruah, the day of shouting or blasting.
The beginning of the year is also the traditional anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve, the birth of humanity in God's world.  We dip apples in honey, to evoke a sweet new year, on this day and blow the shofar.
Observant Jews blow the shofar the entire month preceding Rosh Hashanah, to awaken listeners with a blast, from their slumbers, to alert them to the coming judgment.
Rosh Hashanah is also known as the day of Yom Hadin, or Judgment Day.  Today three books are opened, the book of life, for the righteous among nations, the book of death, for the most evil who receive the seal of death, and the third book for the ones living in doubts with non-evil sins.

It is impossible not to be moved by these mysterious forces of prayer, not to wonder if my name was inscribed in the book of life, or at least, in the third book.  I know, because I have been told, that others' voices joined mine over these last days and nights. Even if there was no God, the idea of people coming together in the poetic structure of prayer is an answer, is prayer answered.
But there is more. It is not religion. Or it is all religion.
It is God.  And it is us, my dear Adams and my dear Eves, moving out of the garden and into the world, fallen each one of us, but voices lifted to ask, for time, for life, for a new year.  That's the lede.