“Help Thou Our Unbelief”

by Megan DeWald Kline

“Pray for us,” my mom says whenever we speak. “God listens to you. He doesn’t listen to me anymore.”

This all started one Monday morning in June 2008 when I received a phone call from my dad. He asked—in his stern, concerned voice—if I was home, and I said I was. Then he told me that he had been laid off from the job he had held for the last eleven years. While eleven years may not sound like very long for a 61-year-old man to have worked for a company, it was the longest job my dad had ever held. And now he was, again, unemployed.

He was out of work for four and a half months before finding another job, a job that underutilized his skills and grated on his nerves, but he stuck with it, gratefully and quietly until another opportunity came along. When that opportunity arose a few months later, he took it, hoping for a little more pay and a little more use of his skills with a new company.

Those hopes disappeared within the first few months when, at 62, he was ordered to stop doing the job he was hired to do and, instead, man the phones for eight hours a day. He began to worry when his supervisors started monitoring his every activity. And then one day, I received another phone call from my dad. He told me that he had decided to start collecting Social Security benefits, and he, now 63, was going to begin working at a comic book store for minimum wage. I could hear the strain in his voice as he tried to sound cheerful and optimistic. I played along, even designing and sending him faux business cards with his updated contact information and a picture of the Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons.”

I spent this past Christmas with him and my mom, and after we had opened presents, eaten breakfast, and were settling down for our annual Christmas-afternoon naps, he asked me—in his stern, concerned voice—if we could talk. Then he told me that a blood test from a recent visit to his doctor had revealed some high PSA levels. These elevated levels of PSA (or, prostate-specific antigen, as I later learned) could indicate what he described as “some problems.” He said he was going in for a biopsy a week or so later. He said not to worry. I said I’d be there.

The morning of his biopsy, my mom decided to take a personal day and accompany us to the doctor’s office. We arrived early enough so that he would feel settled, and other than his palpable anxiety as he anticipated the procedure—and my mother’s anxiety that seemed to feed off of her husband’s—we calmly sat in a corner of the waiting room, waiting. A receptionist called his name, and I saw the muscles in his arms tense. He took a deep breath and walked to the reception desk, where the receptionist instructed him to enter through the clinic door. My mom and I exchanged worried glances, and I began an open-eyed, closed-mouth prayer.

Moments later, my dad flung the clinic door open and motioned for us to follow him. “Let’s go,” he said, angrily. “Come on.”

With the sudden audience of those seated in the waiting room, my mom and I collected our purses and books and followed my dad out the office door. “What happened?” my mom demanded.

“They said I owed a co-pay of $1000 and had to pay $500 of it up front.” My dad’s head and hands shook as he spoke. “Obviously, that’s not going to happen. So, let’s go home.”

My mom rushed to his side and grabbed the back of his t-shirt. “Stop it,” she snapped. “I’ll take the money out of my credit union. Or we’ll put it on a credit card.” My dad brushed her off and kept walking down the corridor toward the elevator. “Stop acting like a fool!” she yelled as he pressed the down button.

I glanced into the windows of the doctor’s office and saw that we still had stunned spectators. I sighed and ran after my dad. “Wait here,” I said to my mom as I jogged past. “Just—don’t say anything. We’ll be back.”

I caught the closing elevator door and slid inside. “Dad, you have to do this. Going home is not an option.”

He shook his head. “We don’t have the money, Megan. And I’m not about to tap into your mother’s savings.”

“Dad, listen to me. You have to do this test. We are not leaving this hospital until you’ve done it. I’m sorry—I understand what you’re saying, I understand that you do not think we have the money, but we will have to figure it out.”

He shook his head more emphatically and his hands and arms trembled at his side. “You don’t understand, Megan, because we don’t have the money. We don’t have $1000 just lying around these days. We’ve never had $1000 just lying around.”

The elevator arrived at the ground floor, and my dad walked purposefully through its open doors, toward a bench in the entryway. He sat down, the weight of it all causing his shoulders and head to slump. It was a desperate-and-thinking posture, and I stood in front of him in silence for a few minutes, watching him. “My dad left me a little money when he died,” he whispered to his knees, referring to the small life insurance policy that he and his sister split after their dad died of prostate cancer last summer. “Guess I’ll use that.” I sighed with relief, and he looked at my face. “But if they do find something, I’m going to have to just let it run its course. You know that, right?”

I shook my head at him and swallowed the lump in my throat. “Don’t say that, Dad. We’ll figure it out.”

He got up slowly from the bench and walked past me back to the elevator. I remained motionless for a few minutes, as the tears that had accumulated released themselves.

He got the results a week later but didn’t tell me right away. Eventually, I received another phone call. He told me that the biopsy had indicated cancer in his prostate. I told him I assumed so after he had diligently eluded me for days. He said he was making appointments with a surgeon and a radiologist to discuss treatment options. I told him that sounded wise. I asked him to let me know if there was anything I could do for him. I told him I would pray for him. We said goodbye and hung up.

A few weeks later, he called to tell me he had lost his job at the comic book store because he couldn’t keep a fast enough pace. He added that he opted for radiation over surgery because surgery would have required recuperation time. It’s time he feels he doesn’t have because he has to find another job.

Every morning now, he drives to the hospital, lies on a table, and receives ten minutes of radiation. In the afternoons, he sifts through Craigslist and classifieds and the fragments of his life, and he calls me every so often.

“Pray for us,” he says. “God listens to you. He doesn’t listen to me anymore.”

Megan DeWald Kline is a writer and resource associate for the Congregational Resource Guide. A 2009 graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, she currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she ministers at Blakemore Church of the Nazarene and occasionally teaches and preaches around town. You can contact her at mkline (@) alban (dot) org.

Photograph entitled “Despair” taken by Lloyd Morgan and used here under a Creative Commons License.