A Miracle for Mark

When my friend Mark is telling a story, his voice dives up and down into so many different registers, I wonder if he should have joined the opera as a tenor or been a puppeteer in a traveling circus instead of heading up a new technology division at Nestle. He uses his hands when he talks, and his gestures feel warmly familiar—you’d feel like you knew him if you met him. No, really. You would, because he is uncannily reminiscent of the British comedian John Oliver. Mark tells a great story about trying to get a table at a busy restaurant—I don’t remember if it takes place in New York or London—and he goads the hostess, exaggerating his John Oliverisms, winking his brown eyes a bit over the top, insinuating his importance, until she breaks.

“But are you really… who I think you are?”

“John Oliver? No. My name’s Mark… but I had you convinced didn’t I? No, I am not in fact John Oliver, I’m not a famous person at all, I’m just a guy that needs a table for my friends” (Here he leans in, smiling.) “Can you please help me out with that?”

She gave him the table. You would have too. Mark is someone who brings a sort of sly brilliance to a room, I can imagine, even a restaurant crowded with real life celebrities.

  Mark is also dying. We all are, of course, but Mark’s death has been brought into sharp focus. A few months ago, he was diagnosed with stage four glioblastoma. Actually, that’s redundant. I’ve learned recently that all glioblastoma is stage four. It’s the most aggressive type of cancer that exists, and it starts in the worst place possible—your brain.

Mark is a new friend; I have known him for just over a year. Andrew set up an introductory dinner with him, his wife and two kids, last fall when I moved to Switzerland. They had us over for a Sunday roast, a British tradition to which I have newly been introduced. On the drive over, Andrew kept saying, “I bet they’ll have chicken, but I really wish they were having lamb.” They had lamb.

Mark’s wife, who is so much more than Mark’s wife, is a sort of miniature Hercules in my eyes. I would offer her name, but I don’t want to over-expose a family that are new friends, and in delicate circumstances. So I will describe his family members as they relate to him.

With that said, Mark’s wife reminds me of a hummingbird, and she is likewise fine-boned, seeming to float when she actually is flapping her wings extremely quickly and with great effort. In the brief time I have known her, she has introduced me to everything I need in Switzerland from a gynecologist to a local creperie. She produced a haggis for my homesick Scottish fiancé for Burns night and took this drifting preacher’s daughter to the Christmas market. Though I tower over her, we wear the same shoe size, and she gives me her fuzzy slippers to wear in the house when we visit. This indication of a broad foundation is true to her character.

The way I have watched her behave since Mark’s cancer diagnosis is in my mind best illustrated by a scene in the movie Love, Actually. Bear with me.

You know when Emma Thompson has discovered a beautiful gold heart pendant in her husband’s coat pocket that she assumes he is giving her for Christmas, and then she recieves a Joni Mitchell CD instead?

And she realizes that the necklace is in fact for another woman?

And she listens to the Joni Mitchell CD in her bedroom, weeping alone, for just a few minutes, before she wipes her tears away and claps her hands, laughing and embracing her ridiculously costumed children for the Christmas play?

And her eyes are shining, but everyone thinks it’s the joy of Christmas instead of the devastation of the discovery that her husband probably loves another woman?

That is what I see Mark’s wife do every time I see them, and probably all of the times I don’t see them. She is constantly embracing her two young children, eyes shining, the break in her voice nearly imperceptible. But it wasn’t a gold heart pendant for another woman in Mark’s pocket. It was brain cancer. And the gift is never given away. It stays there snug, in his pocket for her to rediscover every day, wipe her tears away, and embrace her children with laughter.

  As they are pulled by the merciless inertia of mortality, I feel that they have somehow lifted us. Certainly, Andrew, anyway. He has become a sort of extension of their family; I am not sure what the opposite of a phantom limb is, but he has become it. Not part of the family, not even a lifelong friend, but present in a crucial human way. Andrew plays with their children naturally, while I stand nervously next to him and ask Mark’s wife how she’s holding up. Andrew calls Mark “Robo Cop” when he appears in a new electronic cap meant to zap his cancer cells, while I try to avert my eyes from it.

Andrew invited Mark over to drink a bottle of Barolo and watch Star Wars, and as the good guys were evading the stormtroopers onscreen, Mark turned to Andrew and asked how long he thought he had to live. Despite his title of “Dr.,” Andrew is not a medical doctor, nor is he a psychic. However, we’ve both done some research on the disease and know that only 25% of patients live a year after their diagnoses. Less than 5% make it five years. Mark’s lifeline has, most likely, been cut ruthlessly short.

I am trying to “be there” for Mark and his family in a way that surpasses the short months we’ve known each other. To really listen, to bring them food, to get better at playing with their kids and remember to text Mark’s wife. It is helping me realize how selfish I naturally am, how unattuned I must be to the smaller personal tragedies of my loved ones. I realize that sickness and death and fear can make us awkward and clumsy, and we must persevere through that, and even in a time when we are not supposed to hug our friends, we must embrace them beyond our own limitations and those of the pandemic.  

We have begun a little tradition that every Sunday, after we go to church in Lausanne, we go by Mark’s house to have tea or lunch and a visit. Every Sunday, I find myself praying for a miracle for Mark, the way I used to as a child. These days, I have lived long enough to know how to fashion prayers so that they don’t go unanswered and further damage my faith. Instead of asking for a “happily ever after” for Andrew and me, children and a wedding and for all of our dreams to come true, I ask for strength and wisdom for both of us to persevere through what’s to come, to have happiness, but not dictate its dimensions. Instead of asking for my grandmother to live another year, I ask for her to be embraced by peace and courage, whatever may be. I am tired of being disappointed by God when I ask for things too concrete.

But I have retreated into immaturity when I pray for Mark. I ask for a miracle. I ask for him to defy the odds and live. I ask for his next brain scan to be wiped of any trace of the cancer, a disappearance as miraculous as the appearance of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.

When I say this childish prayer, I think of the poem “A Miracle for Breakfast” by Elizabeth Bishop, in which the poor crowds below a rich man’s balcony await a drop of coffee, a crumb of bread: It was so cold that we hoped the coffee would be very hot, she writes, seeing that the sun was not going to warm us / and that each crumb would be a loaf, buttered by a miracle. She goes onto to write about the bounty of her privileged life, with her feet up, drinking gallons of coffee. She writes that the miracle was working on the wrong balcony.

Bishop illustrates that those that have plenty rarely appreciate it, while those with nothing find a simple pleasure—a drop of coffee, a bit of butter—to be a blessing, a miracle even.

Mark may look more like the rich man from the outside, with a beautiful young family in a lovely home, with a golden view of Swiss vineyards and a turreted chateau. But he suffers from a poverty of time.  A month is like the hot drop of coffee. A year would be a miracle.

When I look at my life laid out and all of its ordinary heartbreaks, its petty inconveniences, I see myself with my feet up, my strong legs stretched and my belly full, drinking in the gallons. Perhaps its time to return to grown-up prayer: God give me the vision to see the bounty of what I already have; may I have gratitude for my days and weeks; allow me to give thanks for each train ride, each domestic disagreement, each tedious hour of remote work, each walk by the freezing lake, each spotty Facetime with my mother and father. May I see that the frustrations of my routine life are extraordinary. That being here, breathing in the winter air, holding a warm hand: It’s a miracle.