Raising the Dead Page 8

  I was at home and settled him down. A cracked rib is often more uncomfortable than painful, as the fracture constricts breathing and every intake of air brings a feeling of pressure and shortness of breath. But Chad’s face was drawn with a pain that wasn’t letting up. We took him to the hospital for X-rays.

  The underlying pain, it turned out, came from a tumor. His leukemia had metastasized, producing the tumor, which likely meant that another line of stem cells had turned cancerous—a line that was escaping Gleevec’s control. I knew Chad was really in trouble now. As I’ve noted, once CML spreads to a second line of stem cells capable of producing tumors, a development that’s as rare as it is potentially lethal, a patient’s life expectancy greatly diminishes. I could analyze this objectively as a doctor, but as a father I was simply devastated. Chad had enjoyed two and a half relatively good years since his diagnosis. So much so that at one point I had become convinced that he was healed and had taken him off the Gleevec. His blood work kept coming back for so many weeks in a row with no trace of cancer that I convinced myself, if only for a time, that God had worked a definitive miracle and Chad was healed. But before he started to grow pale and his muscles slacken again, I thought better of this and put him back on the medication. He had been taking the medication and doing fine before the tumor appeared—or so we thought.

  Why was this happening to him? Chad couldn’t help but wonder. He asked, Why me? as anyone would. What had he done to deserve CML?

  Of course, he hadn’t done anything even remotely deserving of cancer. I searched for causes in the natural order, noting that leukemia had struck three other children in our neighborhood, potentially constituting what the Centers for Disease Control would call a “cluster.” We live close to the nearby airport and the jets put a lot of benzene in the air, a cancer-causing agent. Then, too, Palm Beach was undergoing a huge public works project, with old sewer and water lines being taken out and replaced by new ones. For decades the manicured yards and gardens of the Palm Beach mansions had been lavished with carcinogenic pesticides, in the days before there were any environmental controls. All the digging no doubt released a swarm of toxins into the air.

  Still, it was Chad that was sick. Not me, not Deborah, not Christian. Why Chad? Was it only chance? If so, what meaning did any of our lives have, if Chad’s life didn’t have a meaning that went beyond the luck of the draw? Either there’s a purpose for each of us that’s greater than what we can invent for ourselves or the existence of God is a hoax.

  When Chad asked, Why me? he presumed, as most of us do, that his suffering had come upon him as a punishment. We think God has done this to us. God has cursed us. God harbors a vindictive streak against us for reasons we can only suspect but never know.

  Chad was chosen, I have come to believe, as Job was chosen. Not for any misdeed he had committed but for his virtue and spiritual giftedness. He was not chosen by God to be a victim of leukemia. God doesn’t afflict anyone with such wickedness. He was chosen by Satan, because Satan wanted to destroy a child God had blessed—a child who might win victories for God’s kingdom. In the bargain, he wanted to destroy the faith of the child’s parents and his brother and anyone who had ever been affected by Chad’s life, tempting us to blame God for the manifest and hideous injustice of Chad’s illness. Curse God and die, Job’s wife advised (Job 2:9). That’s Satan’s wicked message—a spiritual contagion borne along with every distortion of God’s creation, all the illness and injustice and poverty and poisonous thinking and every other form of wickedness through which Satan, the prince of this world, binds and blights creation.

  Satan came against Job because he was exemplary. The devil claimed that Job worshiped God only because God had blessed him. Job would curse God the minute those blessings were removed.

  Satan expected that Chad would curse God, the Crandalls would curse God, the minute this precious young man was afflicted. Or somewhere along the way in the grinding, painful, exhausting, grueling, torturing, and terrorizing business of receiving treatment for cancer. That was the devil’s plan.

  I couldn’t have said any of this then. Nor could Chad. It’s part of Satan’s strategy to produce utter confusion and bewilderment and even the thought and feeling that one has been deserted by God.

  Chad’s Struggles and Spiritual Strengths

  But let me tell you about Chad. Our twins were raised on Bible stories. Deborah was constantly reading to them from a children’s Bible, and their favorite videos were animated versions of Noah’s ark, Joseph and his coat of many colors, and God calling to Samuel. They loved hearing the prophet Eli instructing Samuel that the next time the Lord spoke, he should reply, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening” (1 Sam. 3:9 NIV).

  Deborah was also heavily involved in Bible Study Fellowship, which takes people through a detailed exposition of the Scriptures so that they know the Bible’s substance thoroughly. When we were in Richmond, as the boys grew from infants to toddlers to preschoolers, they would go to Deborah’s Bible Study Fellowship meetings, where child care was provided, with the same lessons taught to the children that were being taught to the adults. When Christian and Chad started attending a secular preschool, they didn’t like it nearly as much as Bible Study Fellowship. In fact, when their preschool teacher decorated the classroom for Halloween with silhouettes of witches on broomsticks, leering jack-o’-lanterns, and spiders and their webs, Christian and Chad were horrified. Christian pulled at Deborah’s pants leg and said, “Tell the teacher. You have to give the day to God. Tell her, Mommy. You have to give the day to God!”

  The teacher answered Deborah’s questions about glorifying the darkness by saying, “Well, they know it’s not real, don’t they?”

  Images of evil spiritual forces may be innocently used as Halloween decorations, but that doesn’t mean such powers aren’t real. They are very real indeed, as our boys knew.

  Chad had a particularly lively imagination and he was drawn to imitate admirable characters. He wanted to live out the stories he came to love. So, when the story of David and Goliath captured his imagination, nothing would do but that he receive a slingshot for Christmas. He marched around the house shooting tiny wads of paper at imaginary Goliaths for weeks.

  Later, as I’ve mentioned, when he fell in love with the story of the great violinist Paganini, he devoted himself to the violin and quickly became the pride of his Suzuki class. By the time he reached adolescence, he played so well that I enjoyed listening to him practice.

  He inherited Deborah’s artistic talents in double measure and drew well even as a very small child. He drew lots of common cartoon images but with a twist that expressed his sense of humor, like putting glasses on Superman. Christian did not have the same ability and became jealous of the praise Chad won for his pictures once they reached grammar school. Chad helped solve this crisis by teaching Christian to draw a pirate, and Christian’s drawing ended up winning first prize in a school contest.

  There was an unaccountable and even mysterious side to Chad that I did not understand well as he grew up. He tended to be fearful in ways that appeared to be early signs of neurosis. He shunned any direct light, for instance, and would even skew his ball cap to one side to guard against the sun shining on his face. We took him to a psychiatrist about this, who found herself at a loss. Eventually, I asked a wise Christian woman what she thought. She asked me, in turn, whether he had been in an incubator as an infant. He had, since he was jaundiced when first born—a bilirubin baby, as they’re called. She told me she saw this all the time. She explained the situation to Chad: he had been frightened of the lights he had been put under when he was first born. Now he needn’t be frightened anymore. Then she prayed over him. After that, this peculiar fear vanished.

  Chad had other fears, though, fears that were not so easily cured and probably should not have been, because they were grounded in perceptions that were more real than we knew. He had terrible nightmares and he claimed to see evil presences—wolves a
nd demons. We thought he was only afraid of the dark and the unknown like any other child. But now that I’ve met other people who have a heightened sense of the spiritual world all around us, I’m not so sure. Just as I’m convinced that demons are real now, I’m convinced that there are people who get a glimpse of them now and again. I don’t mean to be spooky or kooky. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are realized in the way most of us look at life.

  I remember all too well that one morning before Chad’s diagnosis he awoke from a nightmare and came screaming into the family room, where he announced that he had leukemia. As good parents, Deborah and I told Chad that he shouldn’t even say that. He had just had a nightmare. We thought the news of another child close by dying of leukemia had caught up to Chad. We were so grateful that our son did not have leukemia. But, in fact, he did. Who knows where that dream came from?

  What we thought were Chad’s childish fears contrasted with his otherwise mature behavior. He was not only well-behaved but a boy who was liked by both his peers and adults, even during the difficult early teen years. Chad was such a favorite at the tennis club that adults often asked him to hit with them or fill out a threesome for a doubles match.

  Sensitive, artistic, well-behaved, a charmer with a heart for God: why wouldn’t Satan want to destroy him? Not just his life but everything he meant to those who knew him—the sign Chad was of God’s goodness.

  A Children’s Story—or Something Else?

  The devil went after Chad even earlier than we knew. What I’ve been slowly learning is that the father of lies can use many seemingly innocuous things—like the fertility statue I brought back from Togo. In Chad’s case, evil used a charming story, a staple of children’s literature, Peter Pan. Chad fell in love with the story and insisted on a Peter Pan outfit for Christmas, complete with the long green shirt, green tights, a pointed, green feathered cap, and the pipes that Peter played.

  Peter Pan evokes in most only a desire to remain young or the wish to believe in wonderfully imaginative creatures like fairies. But the story’s underlying basis has dark elements. J. M. Barrie, the author of the original play, Peter Pan, based the character in part on a little boy he knew and in part on the Greek god Pan.1 Pan is a god of music and of the forest. That sounds charming, but he’s also a god of fear (the basis of our word panic). He is depicted as half man, half goat, with horns, hairy legs, and cloven feet. He is the archetype for many Christian images of Satan.2

  J. M. Barrie’s relationship with the children on whom he based the characters in his play—the five sons of Arthur Llewellyn Davies—would raise alarms today, as he took a stomach-turning pleasure, to judge by his novel The Little White Bird, in giving a child a bath. Two of the five boys eventually committed suicide: the fourth boy, Michael, drowned in what was believed to be a suicide pact with his best friend. The model for Peter Pan himself, the second son, Peter Llewellyn Davies, threw himself under a train at the age of sixty-three, having been haunted by the specter of Peter Pan his entire life.3

  Deborah and I were completely unaware of all this until I began discussing Chad’s fears with an evangelist from Colombia, Randy McMillan. He asked me about Chad’s childhood, in detail, going through every stage of his development. When I told him about Chad’s fascination with Peter Pan, he said, “That’s it! You have to get everything out of this house that has anything to do with Peter Pan!”

  At first I reacted as I had with the Togo statue. Chad had had no interest in his old Peter Pan stuff for years. I thought Randy was making way too much out of a children’s story.

  But that night I went online and found out everything I could about the basis of Peter Pan. I stayed up until 3:00 a.m. I started weeping as I sat in front of the computer. I said, “Lord, I can’t believe this. I let this in the house. Forgive me.”

  I woke up the next morning and talked to Deborah. We ransacked the house to find everything that had to do with Peter Pan. I got all the Peter Pan books. I found the costume’s leotards. I found the hat, the flute. I took this paraphernalia into the backyard, put it in a metal bucket, poured gasoline on it, and burned it. I cried out as it burned, “You devil, you’re not allowed in my house. You’re not allowed to attack my son. If this fear came into my house through this garbage, it has to go today, in Jesus’ name.”

  I walked into the house and Chad said, “Dad, all my fears are gone. All my fear is gone!”

  Once again, as with the statue from Togo, the Lord was telling us, “This stuff is real. Most people won’t believe it, but you must!”

  How I wish I had understood at that point—and even earlier in Chad’s life—the spiritual battle in which life consists. This is not being kooky, albeit some can go overboard in attributing everything to the devil and demons. If I had realized the spiritual authority a Christian father has over his family, if I had understood then, as I do now, how powerful fasting and prayer can be in combating wickedness, including the evil of disease, I would have been much bolder in praying with Chad and commanding the fears oppressing him to leave, in Jesus’ name.

  Also, I would not have taken such a clinical approach to the situation, trying to see his fears in terms of childhood development and related psychiatric issues. I would have taken him in my arms! When he was afraid, I would have held him and assured him that God was standing with us against his oppressive fears. I would have accepted what was happening as real and tried to understand the spiritual vision he had been given. That would have helped him, I think, much more than telling him he was foolish and possibly crazy. I would just have loved on him!

  A Dream of Hell

  During Chad’s illness, I had a dream that was so vivid it might be called a vision—one that taught me to have greater respect for the supernatural. In the dream I was walking into a barn. The barn had three levels to it, and I pulled myself easily up into the second-story loft. When I tried to get into the level above that, I found myself struggling, and when I arrived I sensed an overwhelming evil presence. I grabbed a nearby bucket. When I did a door blew open with a raging fire behind it, and the fire reached out toward me and seemed to grab the bucket, threatening to pull me along with it into the fire. If I wasn’t in hell at that moment, I’m certain that I was being given a vision of hell, and a sense of hell’s desire to destroy me. I held on to the bucket for a while, resisting the pull of the fire with all my might, but finally I let the bucket go into the fire and was able to walk out of the barn.

  At that point, I woke up screaming. Where was Deborah? I started praying immediately, and I wanted her to pray with me. I have never been so terrified. “Deborah!” I called out. “Deborah! Pray!”

  The door to the bathroom opened. Deborah came out. “I have been praying,” she said. It turned out that while I was having a dream-vision of hell, Deborah had been on her knees in the darkened bathroom, interceding for Chad. She had been praying when the devil unleashed the power of fear against me. I think the message he wanted me to receive was this: “This is all too much for you; you are in danger of losing your mind. Put all of this religious fanaticism aside. Forget about it, or you may find yourself destroyed by what you are imagining or what’s more real than you want to know.”

  That dream was a sign of evil’s reality, and now I believe Chad’s “childish nightmares” were, too.

  Problems in Houston

  With the appearance of the tumor, Chad’s doctors in Florida doubled his dose of Gleevec. This had some effect at first, but then Chad’s white blood cell counts started climbing at an alarming rate. Gleevec—our silver bullet—wasn’t working anymore. I had continued to research the treatment of leukemia in children and found a physician at M. D. Anderson Children’s Cancer Hospital in Houston who was particularly knowledgeable and sounded welcoming on the phone, should Chad need hospitalization. With Chad’s counts climbing and Gleevec ineffective, Chad’s only hope was in new courses of therapy. In the fall of 2003, at the beginning of the school year, we flew as a family to Houst
on, where Chad began a massive course of chemotherapy.

  We hoped to stay in Houston together as a family. I rented an apartment in the Museum Tower, a complex close to the hospital. It was bright and cheerful, and I spent a lot of money furnishing it. I wanted to provide a semblance of home to Chad, as he would be in and out of the hospital during his chemotherapy treatments, and to Christian, as he would be homeschooled by Deborah. That was our initial plan.

  It quickly became apparent, however, that hanging around M. D. Anderson, with its hundreds of severely afflicted children, was no place for Christian. What’s more, Chad’s care consumed all Deborah’s time. We were kidding ourselves if we thought she was going to be able to homeschool Christian.

  We decided to enroll Christian in a boarding school, Saint Andrew’s, in Boca Raton, Florida. Christian had had enough of seeing his brother suffer and his parents obsessed with his care.

  Christian’s new digs at Saint Andrew’s were as commodious as boarding schools come, but Deborah and I couldn’t help feel—as I’m sure Christian did as well—that we were abandoning him. Christian was called upon to make many sacrifices for his brother, especially in terms of his parents’ attention. There was little we could do about this, and at the same time we knew that Christian, as a fourteen-year-old, couldn’t help feeling cheated.

  The devastating illness of a child has a major impact on a family and each member in it. It distorts the way each person relates to other family members, and that’s why many families don’t survive the death of a child intact—everyone suffers, grieves, and feels resentful, because there’s no real balancing of accounts, no justice in the meting out of love. Christian came through this period remarkably well, but as I remember dropping him off at school, saying good-bye, talking with him later as he adapted to his new surroundings, I think of how tough what the family went through was on him. So I pause for a moment in a personal aside to say that your mother and I loved you as best we could during those days, Christian. And you were soon to respond bravely to the even greater demands we would place upon you.