11 hours ago
Holy Water Couldn't Save My Husband. MAHA Wouldn't Have Either.
On a sunny spring morning in 2006, while my husband, Mike, was showering, I secretly sprinkled his bath towel with holy water I had gotten from a friend who had used holy water from the same source on her husband. Her husband went on to survive his cancer, so I happily accepted the plastic container filled with water from a sacred site in Europe. It couldn't hurt, right? Watching Mike dry himself off, I tapped into my childhood Catholicism and faith in a benevolent God as I pictured the magic water covering him with a protective layer. I never told Mike I did this. And I still feel guilty that I did. Neither of us went to church; we were agnostics. He would have been very annoyed. He didn't believe in magic.
But we were six months into multiple brain surgeries and complications stemming from what was described to us as a benign tumor that had nonetheless taken over his midbrain. Thanks to hours on the internet, I had tried to Nancy Drew my way to the cause of his tumor, which devolved into my dabbling in conspiracy theories, and now I was out of options.
That was the last morning Mike would ever shower in our home. It was the last time he would see our 1-year-old boy wake up in his crib. When Mike received his craniopharyngioma diagnosis in October 2005, he was given a 95 percent survival rate at five years out, but he was dead nine months later. He spent many of those months hospitalized, undergoing radiation therapy, blind, with no short-term memory and unable to care for himself, enduring over a dozen brain surgeries and other procedures.
I watched the disappearance of light from his eyes as this once brilliantly funny man looked up at me from his hospital bed each morning, kind but emotionally flat, unsure if I was arriving for the first time that day or if I was just returning from the bathroom. I have a picture in a small album that shows Mike in the hospital holding our son, looking down at him quizzically but unaffected, as though the baby were a strange rock or a loaf of bread.
The doctors surely tired of my asking, 'When will he be back to normal?' and 'When will this be over?' There is nothing quite like feeling you have no agency to affect your circumstances. Up until then, my efficacy had always paid off. I got all A's, was editor of my public high school newspaper and landed a free ride to an Ivy League school for my Ph.D. Lots of agency.
But I could not outorganize, outresearch, outcharm or outwork a tumor. So I turned to magic. It wasn't just the holy water. I started keeping a little heart-shaped healing stone in my pocket for luck and brought him fresh berries from home each day. I read about the anti-inflammatory properties of berries online, so I fed them to Mike and pictured the berries shrinking the golf-ball-size tumor in the middle of his head. I started praying again for the first time since middle school. You find yourself bargaining in those moments. 'I'll never ask for anything again if you just get Mike better.' Well, he didn't. So I guess I can keep asking God for things.
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