When my father died there were no testimonials at the funeral service. Aside from a few remarks of the priest, no one stood and spoke for my father. When I asked the priest about this later, he pointed out that there would be plenty of opportunity to talk about my dad at the wake and in the weeks to come, but the service was a time to think about God’s words. It is an argument that I understand, but it I think that’s God’s words could only be enhanced by the memories of a man that we knew and loved.

So today I stand up for JoAnn Gunter. I never met JoAnn, but came to know her through her amazing daughter Buffy Hamilton. With Buffy as our intermediary JoAnna and I cheered each other on through our trials with cancer. This weekend JoAnn died of pancreatic cancer.

Today I stand for Joanne Silverstein, my dearest friend and closest colleague who died of breast cancer. I stand for Jeffry Katzer, a mentor through my Ph.D. program who died of prostate cancer. I stand for Jill Abdo, mother to my son’s best friend who succumbed to colon cancer. I stand for Grandmother Anne Goodman who died of colon cancer, and my Grandmother Dottie who died of leukemia.

I stand as someone who has fought with cancer and as someone who will remember you. Someone who says your life was important. I stand to remind those who remain that life can be hard. I stand to remind everyone that cancer takes and takes and takes. I stand to remind everyone that no matter how much we are loved, or how much good we seek to do, we all can be taken too soon.

Yet I also stand to remind all of us to be brave. That while darkness has taken these beautiful people, it is because of the light they added to our lives that we remember them. To remind all of us that to mourn is natural, but so is celebration. Take time today to stand and celebrate those in your life who you have lost, who you will miss, those who made your life better. Stand today; stand still if just for a moment, and celebrate those people in your life who are gone, but remain a part of you.

The topic of todays sermon is “hope.”

The audience for said sermon is me.

You see I woke up this morning with good news. My white blood count had climbed from 0.1 to 0.3. This is the first concrete sign that my stem cell transplant is working. My sores should start to heal, my pains subside. Good news. My wife was ecstatic, my kids did a happy dance video. I, on other hand, got depressed.

You see my life for the past two years have been full of false starts and promising milestones. I am declared seizure free, and two weeks later I am in the hospital with dangerously low platelets. This, in turn, lead to a cancer diagnosis, so into chemotherapy I went -a chemo with a nearly 90% cure rate. As July rolled around we all celebrated the end of chemo, and a seemingly clean PET Scan. Three months later after another PET scan, another biopsy showing that the lymphoma had not gone.

And so I now sit here, in the bone marrow transplant wing of the hospital, at the end of 3 months of lethal chemotherapy and stem cell collection, after 16 days of the systematic destruction of my digestive system, and there is hope? How can I hope again? How can I convince myself one more time, that THIS time, THIS treatment, THIS procedure will be the one? When does optimism simply dissolve into deliberate ignorance?

Many have called me brave, or inspirational in my fight with cancer. There is nothing brave about battling cancer. The alternative to the battle takes the decision away. Chemo or death? Easy choice. Chance to live 5 to 40 more years…yes how brave of me to chose that.

Then I think about my new life, the one we celebrate the day the stem cell are injected into my chest, February 24^th. What will this life be? Should I return to my former ways? Grants, speeches, projects, advisees? Should I recommit to changing the world? This work involves more than me. It involves commitments of others, others that I have, over the past two years, let down…a missed meeting, a failed project, dropping of commitments. Can I change the world and avoid that? Is it time to become the tenured full professor who teaches his class, writes his book, and disappears into the ivory tower?

Haven’t I earned that? Don’t I deserved to be selfish and live every day just for itself, with my only effort to change the world through my wife and kids? Isn’t that enough.

Then I think “WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”

Who among us is promised a full day on this earth? Who among us is free from the threats of disease, or violence, or stress or poverty? How many people do I know that every day fight to pay the bills, who may go hungry? How many of the “lucky people” I walk by without cancer are fighting their own demons of drugs, or discrimination? Retreat to the Ivory Tower?!? Talk about a privilege problem. How many people would be happy with any job? How many people would long for a roof over their head? It must have been tough going through this medical procedure….with health care!

I had cancer and it might come back, and you may lose your job, and he may have a heart attack, and she may lose her child. We cannot live life cataloging potential disasters and saying “at least that didn’t happen to me” ignoring that it happened to others. That is not living, that is hiding, and the only greater sin is believing that you have no part to play in the alleviation of other people’s pain.

You see, that’s the thing about hope – it is not a guarantee or a promise. It is a prayer, and desire, and it lies at the core of making this world a better place. We fight inequity, poverty, corruption because we hope for a better day. We teach because we hope we can impart some idea that will blossom into a better world for all. We raise children in hopes of a better future. We marry because we hope we can live up to the promise of our spouses. We work either out of the hope that our efforts will improve the world, or at least the wages of our labor can provide a better world for us.

I have made a career of calling people to service. In the classroom, on the web, on stages around the world I have tried to equip an army of the hopeful to improve society. I never made a promise to that legion that our cause was guaranteed, or easy, or simple. But I did try and give hope. That hope continues with or without my cancer, or my very life. But while I have the ability to put towards to it, I will do so with hope.

Today my white blood count went from 0.1 to 0.3. The doctors and nurses are hopeful that my levels will continue to rise to the point I can go home next week. They can’t promise it, but they can hope for it. I hope they’re right, because I have a lot of work to do.

For the past three days I’ve lay in a bed as my blood flows from my chest into a machine that separates out my stem cells and then back into my chest. The stem cells are pumped throughout the day into a collection bag. This bag is literally my life as next week I will go into a hospital and voluntarily take a lethal dose of chemicals. Chemicals that will kill off any remaining cancer (hopefully). Chemicals so potent that they will wipe out my bone marrow. Chemicals so toxic they will also rip away at my entire digestive track leaving blisters and sores in their wake. Without that bag of stem cells to regrow my bone marrow I will die. No way to heal, no way to stop bleeding, no way to feed my body the oxygen it needs to live.

I was marveling at this sci-fi like procedure when I saw that bag of stem cells (i.e., my life) was put into a Ziploc bag and transported to a lab in an Igloo cooler. That’s right, the inventory of crucial pieces of equipment to keep me alive include the same equipment used to safe guard cheese sandwiches, and transport six-packs of beer to the beach.

Now I’ve been trying to write up some inspiring sermon-esque post on this transplant process. I’ve tried to figure out soaring rhetoric on faith, medicine, science, and such. After all, this is a big deal. An organ transplant…poisons…epic drama kind of stuff. But then I keep coming back to the Igloo cooler and the Ziploc bag. When you think about it, this whole thing is pretty absurd.

I mean I had to sign a consent form that said:

1. I can pull out of this procedure at any time, and
2. If I pull out of this procedure I will face “certain death.”

I actually signed a document that had the phrase certain death in it. I mean, seriously?! Who sits through a lethal dose of chemo and says “you know what? I’m good.”

“But sir, if you leave now you will face CERTAIN DEATH!”

“Yeah, I’m OK with that, I got Tylenol at home.”

And seriously, an Igloo cooler? Who will be the first lab tech to mistake that for their lunch. “Ah, man? Stem cells again?”

I mean when I get a PET scan they give me a shot from a syringe encased in friken titanium. When I get a chest X-Ray, they wheel an armature with a full color display into my room – an X-Ray that can only take black and white images mind you. I’ve had my brain scanned with magnetic beams, and my gut outlined with protons and gamma rays…but the fluid that will save me from CERTAIN DEATH? Igloo and Ziploc.

How insane is this? I’m sitting all day as my blood is processed by a set piece from the original Star Trek series watching the Olympics where the Curling team uses high tech granite pucks with embedded hand sensors. Meanwhile, my stem cells will be injected into an IV line over the course of about 15 minutes…that’s the transplant. No lasers. No high-tech imaging device. Just a doctor and the same medical instrument that Sherlock Holmes used to shoot up over a century ago. How do they prepare the stem cells for transplant? They thaw them out in a warm water bath. Water! I hope they at least play some dramatic music on a Zune (yes I went there Microsoft).

It gets more absurd still. A year after I have this transplant, I have to go back to the hospital to get my childhood vaccinations. In a year I will have to stare down the Jenny McCarthys of the world on the risks of diphtheria and MMR vaccination. After this miracle of science transplant my biggest fear is polio…POLIO!! The way this is going I’ll probably end up sitting in the well kid waiting room of my kid’s pediatrician working on a puzzle out of a 1973 issue of Highlights magazine.

So, is there some lesson in this; some larger take away? I suppose it would be this: when the extraordinary becomes the mundane, it is no less important. Those who deliver the essential, but expected, are doing something important. When my doctor delivers my stem cell in a routine infusion from an Igloo cooler, she will still be saving my life. When an optometrist fits you with optical technology (glasses) that has been around for centuries, you still can see. The world around is filled with the extraordinary that we have become so used to as to make it seem mundane…but it is spectacular.

I pray you don’t have to fight cancer to see the extraordinary. Sure, we see it in toys and gadgets every day. We have become enamored with iPhones and smart watches and marvel at how fast/small/stylish they are. But try and recognize how incredible the everyday is. Next time you wash your hands, remember that indoor plumbing has saved more lives than any miracle drug.

See the spectacular every day in the love of friends and family. When you wish your son would just be quiet, remember the wonder and thrill of his first word. Make the next peck on your wife’s cheek rekindle the passion of your first kiss. And laugh – every day – laugh. The world we live in is a wondrous mundane miracle. Rejoice in it.