The Story of the Ring

About six or seven years ago, I got a stainless steel ring with the anonymous poem on it "What Cancer Cannot Do."  When I was in the eighth grade and diagnosed with Hodgkin's, I embodied what the poem says.  I embodied that poem so much that my parents even took me to a local psychiatrist because I was acting "normal."  I will be the first to say it, because people who know me are laughing at the statement "normal" because I am anything but normal.   Besides, normal is like beauty, in the eye of the beholder.  If you have not read the poem, the rest of this narrative will be irrelevant to you.

Now that you have read it...picture it on a ring.  

Then one day, a co-worker that I was not particularly close to was diagnosed with breast cancer. While Hodgkin's is admittedly a very different walk than Breast Cancer, we were now part of a family. A family that had one thing in common, Cancer.  It didn't matter what kind of cancer, it mattered that someone got it.  Someone who got what it meant to smell the chemotherapy drugs when they were brought into the room.  Someone who got what it meant to feel the chemotherapy drugs slamming into your veins like daggers of ice.  Someone who got what it meant to be standing in the shower, washing your hair, and you have hair threaded through your fingers.  Someone who got what it meant to have to go into a form of house arrest because your blood counts are so low that you can not encounter the rest of the world because you simply cannot fight off any infection it might give you.  Jane fought the fight and won.  She returned the ring to my mailbox in a Ziploc bag about two years ago.

Not long after getting the ring back, I also returned to church.  Attending the church that my mother attended and that my youngest child was baptized in.  I re-joined that church and on the day that I reaffirmed my faith in God, I stood at the alter with a couple.  The woman wore a scarf around her head and my cancerdar went off.   Cancer patients can sense when there are others in the same position.  There are the obvious signs, specifically being bald, but there are other vibes that you get. For a couple weeks, I carried the ring to and from church with me to give to Rose but she wasn't there.   Then one day she was and I passed the ring to her with the same instructions, keep it until you no longer feel the need to wear it or carry it.  About 10 months later, with her hair growing back, Rose placed the ring in my hand and thanked me.  

The school year had about a month left in it.   I had become close to a young man that had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's around the start of his 8th grade year.   He had been battling the cancer for close to two years.  Trevor and I talked periodically about just life, but we also made jokes or statements that only those of us in the "C" Club could understand.   His smile was infectious.  His spirit amazing.  I asked one day if he had ever heard of the "What Cancer Cannot Do..." poem and he had not.  I made a point of getting it printed off and laminated that day for him before he left to go to a treatment.  The next time I saw him, I gave him the ring.  My instructions were the same to him that they had been to Jane and Rose, keep it until you feel you no longer need it. I did not see much of Trevor during the second semester of the 2013-2014 school year. On Memorial Day 2014, Trevor travelled to St. Jude's Research Hospital in Memphis.  He had been accepted to a trial study and it was the hope of everyone that this would be successful when other treatments had not. When they got to St. Jude's, Trevor was in their ICU unit.  The decision was made to return, by ambulance, to St. Louis Children's Hospital.  On June 3, 2014... Trevor went to his greater reward, he went home to God.  On June 7, 2014, I arrived at the funeral home for visitation prior to the funeral.  Wearing a purple dress, I walked up to the open casket.  Trevor was wearing a dark purple dress shirt.  I knew in my heart that he was at peace with being where he was.  His hands were placed on his stomach with the left on top of the right.  The first thing I noticed was his class ring on his right hand and then through the tears, I noticed on his index finger on his left hand was the ring that I had given him.  My knees buckled and I braced myself on the edge of the casket.  It was at that moment that I realized just how much of an impact that ring, that I had had on this young man.  More importantly, I realized the impact that young man had had on me.  

I met his sister, Darby, for the first time at the reception following the service and told her the story of the ring.  She said that she had never known where the ring came from but that he wore it on a chain around his neck all the time.  Then she looked at me with a sense of panic and asked, "Was Trevor supposed to give the ring back to you?"  Her quick witted cousin, Jill, quickly responded, "Well, it is a little late now because it is in the ground with Trevor."  I looked at Darby, smiling, and told her that I was going to get a shovel and go dig it up...we all three laughed and I assured her that if it was that important to Trevor that he be buried with the ring, then that is what was supposed to happen.

Today, there are now four rings each worn by women that loved that young man with all their hearts but for different reasons.  

The Moral of the Story:  We do not know who we will impact or even how we will impact them.  More importantly, we do not know who will impact us and how they will impact us.