The Eulogy That Was Not Read
Theresa
and I met while we were in high school and started dating in 1987. And
to squash any salacious rumors, I was not a teacher at that time. It
was my senior year and Theresa’s junior year. We continued dating off
and on throughout college. You see, there was a period of time that I
was discerning a call to the celibate priesthood. Shockingly, Theresa
didn’t believe that my discernment was compatible with dating and we
went our separate ways for a couple of years.
In
my junior year of college we picked up where we left off, sans the
discernment and have been together since that time. After graduation,
we both left our hometown and moved to Omaha to start our “adult
life”.
I
want to pause for a minute and talk about the word trust. We use it
all the time and it has different meanings to each of us. For example,
there are co-workers of mine here tonight who I trust with my life and
they do the same in return. Or,
I could go through a long list of things that Ryan has had to trust in
his family members for over the years of his life. But the trust that I
want to talk about tonight is that trust that only exists between a
husband and wife, where each gives 100% of themselves and puts the
goals/needs of the marriage above their own goals/needs.
After
a long engagement, we were married in April 1995 and shortly that trust
between spouses was taken out for a test-drive. I was working for a
software consulting company and Theresa was working for ConAgra Foods.
One of my clients in Las Vegas wanted to hire me as their financial
controller/systems administrator. I called Theresa and told her what
they were offering and we flew out to Vegas to get the lay of the land.
We went out for breakfast on Sunday and talked about our options. She
said to me, if you think this will be beneficial for you and is career
enhancing, I trust your belief on this. And with that, we accepted the
offer and moved to Vegas.
After
three years in Las Vegas, Theresa started talking about kids and the
fact that Las Vegas was no place to raise kids. As good fortune would
have it, a guy that I worked with in 1993 at a ConAgra subsidiary had
moved up a few notches on the corporate ladder and called me out of the
blue saying he was looking for a Sr. Financial Analyst in the Frozen
Foods group. We talked about salary, benefits and relocation packages
and I called Theresa. She had started working for the accounting firm
Deloitte and was doing well in her career. We met for lunch, talked
about the opportunity that was available and once again she said, If you
believe this is career enhancing, I trust your perspective on it. With
that, I interviewed, accepted and moved back to Omaha.
For
the next 5 years, things were going great. I was steadily advancing up
the financial management group, being promoted to Director-Business
Management for two brand groups that generated almost 50% of ConAgra Frozen’s revenue. At the same time, Theresa had taken a
international ex-patriate tax position with Deloitte and eventually
moved on to one of Omaha’s best employers, First National Bank. She was
in the corporate finance group and enjoying her job and the people she
worked with. But, once again the trust issue was about to pop up again.
When
I chose accounting as a major is college, it wasn’t because I had a
burning desire to be a bean-counter. The two reasons for it were, 1)
accounting majors were being hired at really good starting salaries out
of college and 2) at that time the FBI loved accountants. For a long
time, I had wanted to be an agent. Shortly after graduating college, I
applied to both the Secret Service and the FBI. The Secret service
called first and I met with their agent in charge of the Omaha office.
He looked through my resume and background and told me I had everything
they were looking for, except police experience.
He suggested I move to New York, Chicago or LA and take a job with the
police department and come back to the Secret Service with about 5 years
of police work. I remember thinking, I don’t want to be a beat cop, I
want to be an agent. Needless to say, I didn’t do what he suggested and
when the FBI sent me an invitation to Phase I testing 9 months later, I
didn’t even bother showing up. After all, if the Secret Service said I
wasn’t ready, no way would the FBI take me. And so I focused on my
financial career.
On Tax Day 2003, I was working from home at 8PM and a TV show came on the. It was a documentary following a class of wanna-be
FBI agents from day 1 until graduation. Not quite half-way through the
program, Theresa sat down and watched the rest of it. When it was
over, she looked at me and said, I know that you always wanted to do
that. Maybe you should apply for the agent job. I tried to minimize it
saying it would be a gigantic pay cut, we would have to move from Omaha
to somewhere unknown, etc. She looked at me and said, I’ve trusted
your career decisions in the past and it has worked out. Why not apply
and see what happens. You can always say no. And as a parting shot she
said, besides, isn’t there an age limit? You probably are bumping up
against that. I applied online that night and 8 months later I was
leaving my high paying corporate job to train to be an agent.
In
2006, we were finally blessed with the birth of Ryan. We had been
trying for years and it just wasn’t happening. However, in May 2005,
Theresa woke me up at 5:45AM by turning on the lights and saying, wake
up wake up wake up daddy. While I’m more of a morning person than
Theresa, it took me a bit to grasp what she was saying. She showed me
the test and sure enough, it was positive. As we moved closer to Ryan’s
arrival, we both decided it was time to get serious about our spiritual
life again.
You
see, contrary to what you might think, I haven’t always been dressed in
a black cassock and chanting 8 tone byzantine music. When we married,
we did so with a minister of the gospel, who also happened to run the
homeless mission in Omaha. That’s a story for another time, maybe after
a drink or two! Some of you may have heard the expression C & E catholics…Christmas
& Easter Catholics. Well, Theresa and I were FNG
Catholics…Forgotten & Gone Catholics. We hadn’t darkened the door
of a church in 10 years. But, like any prodigal son we went to our
local parish in Green Valley and signed up. And with that, we wondered
what happened to the church we used to know? What we found in Green
Valley, Sahuarita, and many parishes in Tucson seemed was something not
really recognizable to us.
So,
Theresa did what any modern person does when they have a question. She
asked Google for comparisons of world religions. We laid out some
absolutes and started digging into this process. At the same time we
both were reading the early church fathers and surprisingly…we ended up
with either the Catholic or Orthodox church. With the recent visits to
various parishes in Tucson fresh in my mind, I told her I was going
check out the Orthodox church. After all, they said, “Come and See”.
Again, as good fortune would have it, when I searched for Tucson
Orthodox, I found this church who said they were Orthodox in Communion
with Rome. Now, this sounded like a win-win for me and Mom and I
decided to come and see, while Theresa stayed home with Ryan. After my
first Divine Liturgy, I came home and told Theresa, this is it you need
to come and see. The next week Theresa and I came and saw and she told
me, this feels like home.
Now, with our past as FNG catholics,
I knew we needed to resolve the irregular marriage. I talked to Father
about it and it was really a simple process to get it taken care of.
Then came the hard part of telling Theresa that we needed to get married
again. When I told her about it, she asked quite a few questions on
how’s and why’s but eventually settled with that old familiar response.
I know you’re reading
more about this than me, so I trust your position. And with that, she
said yes for the second time. And there is more to that storyline as
well, about the 3rd marriage that we had to do, but that’s for another day. Eventually, we switched our canonical church from the Roman church to the Byzantine Ruthenian church.
As you’ve
heard from these stories, in many of the big decisions of our life, it
was Theresa trusting in me to do the right thing. But the tide was
about to turn. In 2014, I received a call from the church to apply for
the Diaconate formation program. For any major order in the church, the
process is called formation because you are being formed by the
program. As part of that application, both Theresa and I needed to
write separate autobiographies on our faith journey. In her letter,
Theresa spoken openly about her painful years growing up, our wandering
in the desert of no faith life and how her spiritual life has blossomed
in the Eastern church. She ended her letter with this: “My spiritual
life has without a doubt been enhanced. Not only has my own faith grown
stronger, but our marriage has become stronger. It is more spiritually
centered and is surely becoming the Christian vocation God intended
marriage to be”. In God’s providence, my application was accepted and
my first year classes at our seminary in Pittsburgh where to begin in
June 2015.
And
then, our journey had an unexpected detour. In early May 2015, Theresa
came out after a shower and said I think I have a lump in my breast.
She had a doctors
appointment in two weeks and asked if I thought she should wait until
then or call. I told her to call if for no other reason than peace of
mind. She got it to see her doctor and he sent her for a mammogram.
They saw something on the scan and sent her the next day for a biopsy.
The long wait began for the results and they came three days before I
was set to leave for Pittsburgh. I remember the words coming out of the
doctors mouth. You have cancer, but it doesn’t appear to be breast
cancer. He went on to say the pathology is still preliminary but it
appears to be a small-blue-round-cell
sarcoma. He cautioned against researching that online and to wait for
the final diagnosis. We left the office and went to a local restaurant
for lunch. And as we were waiting for our food, Theresa went off to the
bathroom. The first thing I did was whip out my smartphone and read
about the small cell sarcoma. It was scary and it shook me up. Theresa
came back and looked at me and said, “I do not want you to cancel your
trip over this. I believe this is a part of the formation process and
an attempt to derail it before it even gets started.” I didn’t want to
go, but she told me to trust in the Lord. So, away I went for two weeks
while Theresa underwent surgery to remove the lump and undergo further
testing.
The
results from the second biopsy came back and they determined it to be
invasive ductal breast cancer, negative for all estrogen receptors.
Triple negative breast cancer. The doctor told us that they had good
margins and that she didn’t think that it had spread but that she would
need to undergo a sentinel node biopsy to determine that. The procedure
was completed and came back negative. The oncologist came highly
recommended and he prescribed 16 rounds of chemotherapy and 35 rounds of
radiation. With much trepidation, Theresa had her first round of
chemotherapy on the feast of the transfiguration. Through all the
sickness that the first 4 AC treatments caused, she never once wavered
in her trust in the Lord. After the AC treatments she began 12 cycles
of Taxol in late October 2015. However, after 4 or 5 cycles, something
wasn’t right. The tissue in her breast was getting harder and painful,
along with some reddening. The surgeon and oncologist consulted with
experts and came up with a theory that the hardening was fat necrosis,
not a recurrence. With trust in the doctors, she moved forward with the
Taxol until late January 2016. The surgeon suggested a biopsy of the skin as well as the tissue and the oncologist agreed. On the Feast of the Presentation, February 2, the biopsies
were completed and results came in a week later. The cancer had
recurred and likely spread. Several tests were ordered including a
PET-Scan which confirmed that the disease had metasticized to the liver, spine and sternum. More testing was done and a new treatment plan was developed. Full of faith and trust, Theresa said let’s move forward and get this done.
The
journey after that day got progressively harder for everyone involved.
There were two hospital stays in March, 3 days and 8 days and at every
turn there was more bad news. On Good Friday, Theresa was supposed to
be discharged from the hospital. She called me around noon and said
that there was a problem with her liver numbers and they were not
discharging her. The doctors were ordering an MRI of the abdomen to see
if there was a blockage of the bile duct. I drove up to the hospital
and she was already out for the test. We waited for the doctor to
arrive and he said there was a 4cm mass in the pancreas that was causing
the elevated numbers. He suggested a stent be placed in the duct to
force it open and that’s what she agreed to. After he left, the tears
came to her eyes and she said that she was scared. But, the next
thing she said was incredible. She looked at me and said I believe we
are both being formed by this. I asked her what she meant and she said,
“You’re walking this journey with me to help prepare you for service to
the church. And me, I’m being formed for life in the Kingdom.” I didn’t need to ask her what kingdom she was referring to, I knew she meant the Kingdom of Heaven, the Church Triumphant.
Good
Friday 2016 was a unique day in many ways. Clearly for my family, the
events I just spoke of were unique. But in the liturgical life of the
church, Good Friday was March 25, the Feast of The Annunciation as well
as Good Friday. On the same day, the Church remembered the
overshadowing of the Theotokos
who conceived Jesus that day, as well as the redemptive work of Christ
on the cross. This convergence of days will not happen again until
2157.
The rest of the journey has been well documented on the blog that I was writing. Theresa came home on March 29th
and her condition worsened every day. The last doctor appointment we
had was on April 14 and by that time, Theresa was unable to get words
out. The oncologist asked her if she wanted to continue treatment or
not and she shook her head no. She asked about a brain MRI and Theresa
said, “I just want to go home”. And with that, we left and went home. And
over the few remaining days, we had plenty of conversation, sadly most
of it being one-way due to her condition. On Sunday afternoon, I was
talking to her and told her that her faith and trust was strong and that
soon she would see Jesus and the Theotokos face to face. Tears came out of the corner of her eye and less than 24 hours later she fell asleep in the Lord.
Since
Monday, many emails, texts and phone calls have taken place and people
have offered up a tremendous amount of support. One message came from
Fr. John Petro, who taught me Byzantine Spirituality this year. Among
the words of condolences, he said the following:
“There
are some journeys in life, Patrick, that we must walk alone. And this
is one of them for you. Others may offer their support, their prayers
and their help in many wonderful ways, but at the end of the day, it is a
journey only you can walk. No one can enter that sacred place that
defined your relationship with Theresa. And, no one can ever take it
away from you either. Please treasure that sacred place as Theresa’s
lasting gift to you.”
Christ is Risen!
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