Epiphanies
By Argye Hillis
[Dr. Argye Hillis is a woman for all seasons. The wife of Dr. William Hillis, a world-class scientist with an M.D. degree from Johns Hopkins who has until recently been Vice President for Student Affairs at Baylor University, she holds a Ph.D. degree from Johns Hopkins and recently retired as Professor of Clinical Surgery at Texas A & M College of Medicine. She is the Mother of two sons and a daughter who are themselves achievers of renown in their chosen professions. (One son has just won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship grant.) Dr. Argye Hillis is an active churchwoman and a widely traveled world citizen with a wide variety of wonderful gifts and fascinating interests.]
There have been two epiphanies in my life, when I really felt like God was speaking clearly to me. I didn`t physically hear or see anything, but both times the content of the message was surprisingly clear. The first time it happened was at Girls Auxiliary camp in 1945. The minister was giving a strong emotional plea for people to dedicate their lives to be full-time Christian workers. I had always planned on being a missionary, anyway, so I really expected a call. I felt NOTHING.
"Beg him," the speaker called to us. "Say Lord, please call me to be a missionary! Call me to be a music minister. Whatever it is, I`m ready!"
So I did. I prayed to be called. I promised to answer, no matter how hard the path looked (I tried to push the idea of all those pretty costumes out of my mind). Then, to my surprise, it came. Not to be a missionary (so much for the travel and the pretty costumes) Not to be a great writer (getting harder). But to be–AN ORDINARY WOMAN. For me, that meant a wife and mother, no fame, no glamour. Now that was hard. Surely, I thought, God didn`t really mean it. I struggled. He pled. I struggled. He kept pleading. I rationalized. The plea continued. I waited. Finally, at the last minute, I stumbled, crying, down the aisle into the speaker`s arms.
He pulled back and looked me in the face. "Yes! You`ve decided to do his will! And what has he called you to do?"
"To be an ordinary woman!" I sobbed.
"OK. Well, God bless you," he said lamely.
When we were all lined up in front, mostly tear-dried, he introduced us.
He came to me about third.
"And here is little Argye Briggs. She`s not exactly sure what God wants of her…," he faltered.
Oh, yes, I am sure! I screamed in my mind. An ordinary woman! Not famous! Not exotic! Just a plain woman.
"But whatever it is, she wants to follow his will," the preacher finished apologetically.
I didn`t have the nerve to correct him in public, but nothing had ever been clearer to me. As it has turned out the call to be an ordinary Christian woman in these times has turned out to be an extraordinarily exciting challenge, demanding every bit of intelligence, resourcefulness, and, yes courage that I could muster. I wouldn`t change it if I could.
The second epiphany was much later when my mother contracted a terrible illness.. They thought at the time that it was infectious encephalitis. In any case, it left her severely handicapped-unable to walk, talk, or carry out any of the normal activities of daily living. She was what I now know is called "locked in." Locked in is what happens when a person has no means of communication. Her cerebellum-the center of coordination–had been destroyed. When this happens, there is no way to speak, no way to signal. Try to signal and your hands fly wildly like startled birds. Try to speak and a scream comes out.
Because Mother was rapidly dying in the hospital, my husband and I took her to live with us. Surely we could care for her better than the hospital was doing. I stood beside her wheelchair and looked in her eyes, trying to see if there was any meaning there. Suffering, yes. But I couldn`t be sure of meaning. If she is not there and I act like she is, I`ve just wasted my breath. But if by some miracle she is there and I act like she is not, what a tragedy!
So I decided to work on the assumption that she was there. I copied out poetry in huge letters on newsprint and pasted it on her ceiling, where she stared at night. I dressed her every morning before the children even, brushed her hair, and lifted her into the wheel chair to work with her. I was torn between the needs of my mother and of my children–especially Beth. Danny was five and in kindergarten at the neighborhood church. David had just turned three and puttered around entertaining himself. Beth was 18 months old. We moved her crib into the boys` room to make room for Mother. Every day Beth stood patiently beside the wheelchair, watching, her big blue eyes solemn. Thinking.
At the beginning of Mother`s illness, I`d prayed simply for her to live, but that was wrong.
Sometimes now I prayed for her just to die, but that was wrong, too. Finally, I learned just to pray for God`s merciful presence. Sometimes, as I sat with mother I read Toynbee`s Study of History. Sometimes I talked or read to her. Sometimes I lifted her into the car and we drove with the children, but she usually found this too tiring.
Within a few weeks I was completely exhausted. Dad sent from Oklahoma and hired a sitter for the nights. The first night that the sitter was there I put Mother to bed and introduced the sitter to the situation. Then I enjoyed an uninterrupted few minutes reading to the children and tucking them in. All quiet in the children`s room I went back to my room and lay across the bedspread. Through two shut doors I could hear Mother screaming every time she drifted off.
WHY? The agonized question rose from the depths of my being. Surely, this is not the way life was supposed to be! This is definitely not abundant living. As I lay there on my back about to drift off, I remembered the first movie I ever saw. The movie was a color extravaganza with Shirley Temple and I must have been six or seven. The Bluebird of Happiness. In it two children visit the Land of the Unborn Children, where sailing away on a beautiful fullmasted sailboat to be born into real life is each child`s dream. Is life really such a privilege, I wondered?
Then I had something like a vision. I didn`t literally see or hear anything, but I kind of dreamed that I had not yet been born and that the Lord was asking me whether I wanted to be a part of real life. I saw stretched before me, like a giant mural, all of human history as Toynbee had so dramatically described it.
Did I want to be a primitive man, grubbing laboriously for food unaware of the heavens swirling above? The crusades? No–a terrible time! One by one, we discussed various possible lives for me to consider. Then it was as though there was a zoom camera that focused down on my little yellow house in San Antonio. And the Lord said, "I need someone here. I have these three wonderful, gifted children to be raised. Moreover, I need someone with the resourcefulness to reach this woman trapped in a body that doesn`t respond."
Oh, I gasped. That`s the place for me! I know I could do it! What a challenge, what an opportunity! How creative! What an epiphany!
I chose it. No answer as to why. No promise about outcome. But I chose how I would respond.
Still with no evidence one way or the other, I continued to assume Mother was in there and needed my companionship and love. Finally, one bright morning as I worked around the house, pulling her chair along with me, I was chatting about my reading and casually asked rhetorically,
"I don`t even know if Toynbee is dead or alive, do you?"
uh HUH
I spun around and looked at her.
You said "yes," didn`t you?
Uh HUH!
Can–you–say-"no"?
HUH uh!
Do you know about Toynbee? Is he still alive?
uh HUH!
Are you sure?
uh HUH!
At a university or something?
uh HUH!
Remembering the old game of 20 questions, I sat down with her and asked one yes-no question after another. It took half an hour, but she told me where Toynbee was and what he was doing. Them I sat down beside her and we both cried.
I knew.
And she knew that I knew.
My assumption that Mother was "in there" turned out to be truer than I had dreamed possible. Only her coordination had been destroyed; her courageous spirit, her brilliant brain, her love and creativity were all untouched. She lived another 35 years. She never liked to talk about the lost months much, but she told me enough to show that she was aware of and remembered every single event of her illness. Eventually she learned how to speak some other way. I can`t
explain it. Those who knew her or put in the effort could usually understand what she said. She never walked again or regained many of her previous activities, but courageously and oh-so-slowly she fought her way back to a productive and satisfying life.
Today Beth, the toddler who stood for hours beside Mother`s wheelchair, is a neurologist on the faculty of Johns Hopkins. She works especially with adults with brain damage from stroke or disease and has a priceless gift for looking beyond the worst physical handicaps and reaching the person inside. It was she who finally diagnosed my mother`s illness convincingly as paraneoplastic cerebellar degeneration, a condition that was unknown at the time of mother`s illness, and it is she who now cares for others with the disease.
