We lost our home, houses, an airplane, and, oh yes, my mother. Nearly our sanity. And every time I thought things couldn’t get worse they did. This is a hard story to tell, but I’m writing this for all those folks who’ve ever dangled over a cliff. Especially those whose fingernails are currently scrapping across that last jutting rock.
In Memory: Naomi Dinguess Cantees – June 2, 1928 through Eternity
All the Mother’s and Father’s Day tributes got me thinking about my Mother. Few people are as special as mom’s are to children, except perhaps the reverse.
I felt that way about Naomi Dinguess Cantees–my best friend and mother. Sadly, she left us at an early age, 55. She was smart, the valedictorian of her class, but what I remember most was her laugh. Loud and full. If you couldn’t laugh and have fun around Naomi, just get on down to the funeral home. Her love for life was contagious, and in her view, nothing was more important than the person in front of her. What I learned about respect and kindness, she taught me.
Once she explored Kentucky on a tour bus. (We’re from West Virginia so Kentucky is a stone toss across the river.) We teased her unmercifully, but she didn’t care. She was no less excited about touring the Bluegrass State than she was of sightseeing in Italy. Everything and everyone received fair treatment from Naomi. She was happy with what life had given her–my cantankerous brother and me, her small home, her loving family, and the designer-less clothes in her closet. Nary an ungrateful bone in her body.
Humor, smells, stories, and road trips–many wonderful things stand out when I think of mother. However, the juggernaut in my memory is the cancer. A three-year battle. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with–watching someone I love die slowly, painfully. Dear God, human beings aren’t cut out for this stuff.
When a person receives a death sentence their body peels away from their soul and you see them in a way you’ve never experienced before. Especially when pain is involved. She stayed with my husband Alan and me through much of her illness. What I witnessed kept me awake nights, but I was proud of my mother, of who she was. Her pain was excruciating, not entirely because of the cancer, but because of a surgery that cut off her tail bone. A surgery I and others encouraged. Afterwards, I heard her muffled cries into a pillow almost daily. And sometimes tears just materialized in her soft, pretty eyes.
She never complained. She never said, “I can’t take this, why me?, or I wish I’d die.” Never. Not the entire three years. She never even said she was afraid. In fact, when I complained that, “It’s just not fair.” She said, “Why is it not fair? Why not me?”
Are you serious? Who says things like that?
If you’ve ever prayed for someone you love to die, then you’ve seen horrible pain. I prayed that awful prayer. But, she didn’t die anytime soon. Towards the end, my brother and I tended her comatose body, never leaving her for even a minute as we changed shifts. And then one morning two nurses assured us they would stay with her while we had breakfast together for the first time in weeks. Thirty minutes later, she died. Without one of her children with her, she could die. Finally.
I was happy for her and so proud to be her daughter. Her legacy of love for God and for people had prevailed, even in the worst of circumstances. We were at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, a long way from home. Many hospital personnel had become Mother’s friends. When her tortured breathing finally stopped, nurses, doctors, and others gathered in her room, no one doubting that the brave, lifeless woman before them had slipped into heaven. And we all cried together.
What my mother was to courageous and inspirational, I was to tortured and discouraged. Mother went to heaven, I stayed in hell.
I’d only been married two years when mother became sick. Up until then I had been living what I thought was the good life–chicly-dressed, somewhat well read, West Virginia bred, and at that time, very well-to-do. I always enjoyed a good time, but after mother died I sometimes drank with friends until I was so drunk I couldn’t remember the previous evening the next day. It seemed a good thing, forgetting the memory of her pain. A pain I was complicit in.
If losing mother to cancer wasn’t horribly sufficient to unglue me, Alan and I were in the throes of fighting for our financial lives. A recession had slammed the U.S. around the same time as Mother’s diagnosis, the early 1980s. The majority of our money was tied up in a public energy company Alan helped found and in his own consulting firm. Just weeks after mother’s casket had settled into the surrounding earth, energy markets that had already nosedived finally weighted their anchors to us. Alan tried to shield me from our personal meltdown, but it was impossible. Our small fortune plummeted.
We sold two houses and an airplane, all at significant loss. I was hospitalized twice for what was thought to be heart problems, but turned out to be anxiety. Personal bankruptcy wasn’t an option for my husband. “I made the debt, I’ll pay it back,” he said. More than once I tried to change his mind. Never has anyone worked so hard to dig his way out. But the harder he clawed, the further we slid. One lawyer asked why he was fighting so hard. He told him it was because it was all that he had. But it was as useless as fighting Mother’s cancer and almost as painful to watch.
Finally we lost our residence, Alan’s dream home. Personally, I hated the thing. It was cavernous, the planked ceilings running fourteen to twenty-eight feet in height with wooden beams, and four stone fireplaces. How many times had I prayed to get out of that house? It was like living in a ski lodge with no room service and floor to ceiling glass windows, made for throwing stones. Still, it was a roof over our heads. And it was the place where I had come to the end of myself, standing at the top of a lengthy driveway in the middle of the night, shaking my fists at heaven.
It was where I would have the experience.
Some people would call it a born-again experience, others might say I just found the Lord. My Grandmother Dinguess would declare, “Finally! Raise them up in the ways of the Lord and they’ll always come back to you.” I can still hear her spout that oft-quoted scripture.
Rest assured, I was raised up to know God. Sunday morning and night, Wednesday prayer meeting, and sometimes on Saturday–that’s how we did church some weeks when I was a child. In those days, God was preached as the ‘eye for an eye’ Loathing Lord of the Old Testament, regardless of the denomination, and we trotted to them all–Methodist, Southern Baptist, Freewill Baptist, Church of God, Church of Christ, and the occasional Pentecostal tent revival. My grandmother was usually the one taking me, and she didn’t discriminate. Mom and dad sometimes took me to the Episcopal Church, where I was sprinkled and confirmed. So, my spiritual life was as well-rounded as it was confusing.
All that hell, fire, and brimstone, coming at me at such a young age, was drowned out by partying in my twenties and early thirties. Still, sometimes I’d watch Brother Jimmy Swaggart, as he was called, on television. Some labeled him the Protestant Pope. He was first cousins with Mickey Gilley and Jerry Lee Lewis and just as colorful. I loved watching him strut back and forth, swabbing his forehead, his voice rising and falling with the urgency of his message. After mother died, I’d cry and cry watching him. Finally I quit. That’s when I ended up at the top of the driveway.
Broke and broken, I wept and shook my fists at God in front of the house that would no longer shelter me, without a mother’s comfort. It was a week night and I was severely sober. I hit my knees and shouted an accusatory prayer. Sobbing. The same old outrage about mother–”How could you . . . ? Where were you . . . ? Why didn’t you . . .?” On and on . . . My mother had died and it was God’s fault. It had to be somebody’s.
And then it happened.
Something or Someone spoke to my soul, incredibly, above my sobbing outrage of whys–so strong, so real, so powerful. These are the words I heard: “It’s not your business.” I remember licking the salty tears from my lips, gasping, rubbing at my eyes with shaking hands, still on my knees, and feeling strangely okay.
Immediately.
“It’s not my business.” I remember saying it aloud, and knowing, knowing in my heart it was true. Jehovah God was telling me that something in His Very Big Universe had played out beyond my ability to reason, and I believed Him. Yes, she was my mother and the void she left was as big as the galaxy’s black hole. It wasn’t that she died at fifty five, although that would have been enough. It was that she was in such pain, muffling her cries with a pillow so I wouldn’t hear, never complaining, asking after others, always noticing a new dress, a pretty smile, or sad eyes. She touched so many lives with kindness and laughter.
“Oh, God,” I cried, “She didn’t die for nothing. There was a reason, a purpose.” I felt amazingly calm and empowered for the first time in . . . forever.
My mother’s life wasn’t over any more than Jesus’ was when he died on the cross. His death looked like history’s darkest hour: Mary, his mother, crying at the foot of the cross, His disciples scattering, disbelieving all the bad and good news Jesus had tried to convey. And yet, it wasn’t the last chapter in Jesus’ life; it was probably only chapter three out of a gazillion.
“Why not me?” my mother had asked. And yet the process of dying is scary. I think it was for mother. And I think it was for Jesus, too. They knew what they were facing. But, life’s end was bearable for they also knew where they were going.
Just like Jesus, my mother is still alive. She’s a spirit who lives in her dream house in heaven, where the sky forever surrounds her, probably traveling the galaxy, writing, something she always wanted to do. I think that’s a plausible scenario. I know I’ll see her again, and I know she completed her purpose, whatever that was. I never question it anymore.
In the years since Mother’s death and losing our home, I’ve had setbacks and I’ve had victories. I prayed to be more like mother and I am: I’m kinder, less judgmental, more empathetic. Even emotionally stronger. I also have more joy. Could it be the “have great joy through experiencing great pain” philosophy. The joy to hell scale, I call it. I don’t think so. More likely, joy came because I fell at the foot of the Cross.
The most remarkable thing I learned is that the spirit realm is real. We absolutely have a Savior and angels, but we also have an enemy, Satan. The Thief, as he is sometimes called, didn’t really care about stealing my stuff or even killing my mother, although he did a pretty good job. What he coveted, salivated over, schemed for, and perhaps killed for. . . was my faith. Had I forfeited my faith he would’ve stolen the thing that, other than Jesus, most connects me to the Father, the thing God most entrusted to me–my destiny.
“If you seek me you will find me, if you search for me with all your heart,” the Scripture says. I was seeking Him, through my pain, anger, confusion, depression, and faith deficit. And still, He was ever-present.
God’s revelation that night in the driveway transcended my human understanding. Mother’s death path He said was “none of my business.” In the natural world that sounds more like the Godfather than God the Father, but at that moment something unbelievable happened: my faith kicked in at about a hundred on a scale of one to ten. Somehow our Creator allowed me to grasp that He had a plan–not just for Naomi Cantees, but for all of us. Something amazing. Something I can’t imagine.
Our fifteen minutes on planet earth isn’t about us, really. It’s about our Savior, about what He did for us and what he wants us to do for each other.
Lose yourself and find your destiny, that’s what I discovered. That’s what Mother did. And that’s how you hold on in the worst of times. Entrust your life’s story to the world’s best-selling Author, your heavenly Father.
Next Month: The aftermath of financial chaos. The greatest miracle of my lifetime!
At Emory University Hospital. Always smiling. Top Photo: Mother, Alan and me in better times.
Mother, my brother Rick, and me.
My dear friend, thank you so much for this lovely blog. I’m in the middle of one of those “WHY??” times, and I needed this reminder. God is Sovereign, God is Holy, He is to be praised, and above all, it’s not my business to worry. He’s got it all covered. Everything you write is beautiful, but sometimes, you are so on the mark!! This is one of those times. This was beautiful. Thank you!
Ingrid, I’m so glad this was timely for you. Dear friend, I know God has you in the palm of his mighty right hand. Thank you for the wonderful compliment. Love you.
Dearest Karyn, I have read many a tribute, but none so touching and grateful as the way you introduced us to your mother. How pleased she and God must be that she and He live on through you. There is nothing so sweet as peace and joy when you have tasted the bitterness of life without them. Thanks for sharing where you have come from, what you have lived through and where you are today. It is truly inspirational writing.
Jane, thank you for such high praise. Yes, joy always comes in the morning. If only we could remember that! My desire is to one of these days hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” But I know I cannot work this out on earth, I can only trust and obey. Thank you for being an encouragement to me! ❤️
Karyn, your story really touched me as I have lost loved ones to cancer and I am fighting an un curable cancer myself. I am so happy that you were finally able to find the peace that you so desperately needed. I hope and pray that others that read this also find peace. I, like you, no longer ask why, because I know that it is God’s will and it is not for us to ask why, but like your mother why not.
I can’t wait to read the next chapter of your life.
Carol, your story is such an inspiration to others. The way you hold your head above the fray, ever trusting in the Lord, shines a light into my heart! Thank you for always encouraging me! ❤️
That is a beautiful story!
Thank you, Jane! ❤️
Beautifully written. Heartwarming to me. Thank you for this lovely post. Yes we often have to lose everything earthly to find our Heavenly selves. God bless.
Thank you, Barbara! I’m so glad you know Him!! May God always bless you!
God gave you this wonderful writing gift so that you could so eloquently share your journey and testament of faith in our Lord! Excited to see you at Tamarack!
Thank you for the kind word, Jane! I can’t wait to see you too, girlfriend. It’s been a long time!
Wow!!!!!!!!!!Great article for anyoNE who has lost a love one to cancer
Thank you for the lovely endorsement, Gene!
Such a wonderful testimony!!!! God foresees and we can always look behind and see what He has done….I knew your Mom and she was such a wonderful lady…I worked at First National Bank for 44 years and the Cantees family was always so special to me……..
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Patricia, thank you for the sweet words about my Mother and family. I’m happy you let me know you think this very special testimony to me meant something to you! And, yes, God’s handiwork is always there when we look back! He’s awesome, isn’t he?!!
I am at a lost for words, such a touching story of faith and strength in very tough times. I too wonder why almost daily and grieve endlessly at the death of our son, only 19 when he passed away in a car accident, no goodbye, no answers, just gone from this earthly home. I find that the places I wouldn’t let my mind wander to, in time wanders to all the questions a mother has for her child, who would he marry, would he have kids, what job would he have, and the most important one of all, what would he look like, all those things will drive you crazy if you let them. Its been 11 years this Feb. since he left us and we miss him daily but when I look back I realize I have made it this far, his memories sustain us day by day, and one sweet day we will reunite with him and for that I am grateful. I lost my Dad to lung cancer and watched him die weighing only 85 pounds at the time, and like you prayed that it would be over and the amazing thing I learned is that I never felt guilty for doing that, he was ready to go and God knew it also. I never believed it when people quoted that “God doesn’t give you more then you can handle” because he does but he is always with us every step of the way if we believe. God bless you Karyn, thanks for such a inspirational story, I look forward to the next. Valerie Burns
Val, my heart breaks reading this. I never thought about those questions, but when you pose them, they are so logical. Of course you would want to know all those things. Darling girl, I wish I could say something to make it better, but I can’t. I can only point you to Jesus. And I can’t imagine the “why” of it, but in that moment on my knees, I knew that God has a purpose for each one of us, in our life and in our death. Your son is with the Lord and one of these days you will see him again. The truth is, he wouldn’t come back to earth if he could. No one who ever has that experience ever wants to come back. So, you are assured he is as happy as he can possibly be. But the hole in your heart! I can’t tell you I understand what you went through because I don’t know. But, I do know God entrusted that wonderful young man to you, knowing he would not be with you throughout your lifetime. He knows our yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows, the Bible says. God knew you had amazing strength and courage. And one of these days we will know ALL things. God bless you always. You have been through a lot with your father and your son. Sending love and prayers…..
What a wonderful testimony! Thank you for sharing your story and inspiring all of us to always put our faith and trust in the Lord….because it’s none of our business!
You are welcome Dimetra and thank you! I love the way you put that! Aren’t we arrogant sometimes to think we know more than God? We are trying to figure things out that are not within our understanding. Such a simple human response. As we agree, “it’s none of our business!!”
Thank you.
You’re welcome, Karen.
Karen I enjoyed reading your post. It is a great testimony and inspirational to those struggling. You have a great gift writing and sharing God’s love. I remember you when you were a child and lived at Hardy. Connie Ruth is my cousin so lots of good times were spent with your family. I always thought your mother was beautiful and so much fun. I too am looking forward to seeing my parents again and the great reunion still to come. Keep writing and sharing His Love.
Linda, thank you! I remember your name, and, of course, Connie is family to me! Thank you for your kind words about Mother; it makes my heart soar. I’m so glad you contacted me. God bless you, dear girl! Yes, that great reunion will be so wonderful! I am just ready for Jesus to come! I hope you’ll come back to my blog!
Oh Karyn, how I love your writing! all of your stories are so inspirational, and to say one is more inspirational than another is difficult, but this one touched my heart like no other. Your readers cannot help but be reminded of their mothers as well, when reading about your angel mother. Bless you for sharing your life with us.
Can’t wait to see you! Love you! Maggie
Thank you, sweet Maggie! I keep rereading this story because it is inspirational to me, too!! I know that sounds somewhat arrogant, but you know that I believe the Holy Spirit has more to do with these stories than me! I am so glad you were touched and I pray God’s blessings and divine revelation over you. Thank you for always encouraging me and I look so forward to seeing you!! Love you…
Thank you for sharing your story & experience. I can relate to this on many levels. My husband battled 2 different cancers the past 4 years with the 2nd one being terminal, all while trying to keep his business afloat in a declining economy. He struggled & suffered in silence as he endured 3 of the most horrific chemo treatments ever given to a 30-40 yr old man (says the Doctors), much less one almost 73. I lost him 2 1/2 months ago, 2 days b4 he was to go to Columbus to start his 4th & even more horrific chemo in order to have a bone marrow transplant (if he made it through the chemo-as it was put to us). He didn’t make it to Columbus- his choice…God bless you!
Oh Marina, our stories are all too similar. I am so sorry for you and your poor husband. It sounds horrific. But, he is with his Heavenly Father and in a much better place than us. I pray God’s comfort and blessings over you. I pray He will give you a supernatural peace and joy in the midst of your pain. And I pray that you will find purpose from tragedy. Thank you for writing me and thank you for blessing me, Marina! God bless you, and please come back to my blog and let me know how you’re doing.
Karyn, you’ve touched my heart once again with your exquisite writing. But this time the raw emotion you allowed us to see along with the honest gut wrenching and painful reactions you had to the situation reveals an authenticity that we can all relate to and a courage we can all admire.
My dear friend, I knew you before your mother died and loved you then and by the grace of God we reunited again recently and I have gotten to know you all over again and I have even more love in my heart for you now. A more sisterly, Godly love. I have been in awe of the newly spiritually renovated soul that God has so meticulously and graciously constructed in you. You are a soul on fire for our caring and powerful Heavenly Father. It is right, that His decisions are not our business but I can say I do believe one of his purposes for this tragic situation has been revealed……and that is you’re faith. If it were not for that one night of pure antagonistic questioning of our Lord, you would not be touching so many lives today with His love and goodness…..even during the throws of the most excruciating pain you have ever felt. Pain, unfortunately is part of life but I have found comfort in knowing that when I am suffering He has actually chosen me to suffer as He has suffered. Surely, not to the extent He suffered but just a glimpse of His despair.
You inspire me girlfriend, keep it up!
❤️❤️❤️Sandy
Sandy, that is so beautiful, I am speechless! What you have articulated so perfectly is that what Satan meant for evil, God used for good! And, that through suffering we can open the doors of people’s hearts. I think that is so true. And, you are correct in stating that my faith was ignited after meeting God in the driveway that night. You know how special you are to me, like a younger sister, like the parallel to my own life, like someone I will stand in the gap for because your heart rivals angels. I can only say that when I read these beautiful words, I pray that you will soon be writing your inspirational column, as you are so inspiring to me and to others, for so many reasons. Thank you darling girl, for your eloquence and for just being you. I thank God that He sent me to your book and brought us back together, and clearly He did. Godspeed in your own trials and all you do, dear friend. Love you, Karyn