Where do we go from here?

I have clearly been silent here.

In fact, I was shocked to see that the last time I posted was on May 24, 2010.  So, for all of June and some few days in May and July, I just haven’t been present in the blogosphere.  Some time in the middle of June was the two year anniversary of the day I posted for the first time.  Since then I’ve posted some 559 posts.  Blogging, for me, is an outlet.  But mostly a creative outlet.  In general (but with some exceptions) I tend to keep it pretty professional.  Yes, the things I write and the pictures I post are reflective of my life.  But this website is primarily a forum for sharing images, and less a place for spewing my deepest thoughts and desires.

That is why, my friends, I went 40 days without posting.  Because sometimes life takes over, and what can be very therapeutic (blogging) is instead a complete drag.

In other words, when things get heavy for me, sometimes I’m just silent.  But fear not… I’m here.  I’m back.  Ready for action.  After 36 days away from New York, I’m back.  I did some spring cleaning today (since I missed out at the end of May), and I’m now sitting on my bed, with a terrier at my side, on top of a pile of freshly laundered sheets, pillow cases, and duvet covers, thinking.  Feeling relieved.  Feeling like I’m getting back to reality.  Feeling the heaviness start to lift.

I’ll keep things generally brief.  I’m terrible at that… but it’s worth a shot.

For those of you that regularly peruse the images on this blog, Nathan Pelz will be a familiar name.  Or at least a familiar face:

Back in May (oh my gosh– has it really been this long??) it was discovered that Nate had a baseball-sized tumor in his abdomen.  After visiting with an oncologist, Nate and his wife Holly made an appointment for an out-patient needle biopsy for Friday, May 28, 2010.  It was supposed to be quick, relatively painless.

With some freedom in my schedule during that time, I flew out to Phoenix to hang out with Holly and Nate, two of my dearest friends, as they awaited the results of the pathology report.  However, by the time I woke up at 6:00 AM the morning after Nate’s biopsy to head to Laguardia, I had a frantic text message from Holly that Nate had been kept at the hospital overnight and had been in extreme pain.  She was, understandably, terrified.

It would be a project beyond what I’m capable of completing right now to try and transcribe how the next 6 weeks played out.  Your best bet is to head over to the blog we created where you can read and see much of the details of the journey Holly and Nate have been through. I told Holly’s sister, Hillary, that I couldn’t write anything on here until now.  Whatever I would have written would have been charged with way too much melodrama– something I’m often prone to when writing about things that profoundly effect me.  So I’ll refrain from being too verbose with the exception of a few minor points…

When I was in Haiti in January I held a 7 year old boy with a gangrene severed foot while he was anesthetized (needle-to-bone) for amputation.  He weeped, clawed at my neck, cried out, and eventually wet himself in my arms.  In the hospital in Phoenix, I spent four nights up with Nate.  The type of pain he was feeling, I was told by one doctor, is some of the worst pain a human can experience.  I stayed up through the night watching Nate sweating, shaking, yelling.  And there was nothing I could do about it.  It reminded me of that boy in Haiti.

Even now, I have a hard time thinking or talking about those nights in Phoenix.  As much as this last month and a half has been a roller coaster , those were by far the worst parts for me– culminating on the fifth day.  It was then that Nate sat his brother and I down in the hospital room to tell us, with a trembling voice, that he had an aggressive tumor that was wrapped around his superior mesenteric artery, that it was inoperable, and that it was probably going to eventually kill him.  I’ll never ever forget that moment.  Only thirteen months after Nate and I shared the burden of carrying our twenty-six year-old friends’ casket, I was now watching Nate face his own mortality.  And as I sat in the hospital room with Nate, many of the same emotions from that friends’ funeral started flooding back.

But at the risk of continuing my reputation as a plot-spoiler, I can tell you that this story has a happy ending.  However, before things went from bad back to better, there was an interim of waiting.  And during that waiting I saw some pretty powerful things happen.

After being taken by air ambulance from Phoenix to Indiana University Hospital in Indianapolis, I drove Nate’s car, along with Jon’s brother and Holly’s good friend Allison, to Indiana.  On the morning we arrived, a group of people crowded into Nate’s hospital room to pray for him.

I remember he was looking frail and broken.  He was still battling severe pain, was confused by the many unanswered questions, and overwhelmed by the possibility of the worst.  Yet we gathered, a scattered and awkward community, and joined hands around him.  We were a complicated crew.  There was certainly some broken relationships– perhaps some poisoned relationships.  But we all had one thing in common– the desire for a miracle.  I looked around the room.  I knew all those people quite well.  I knew the brokenness. I also knew how all these people loved Nate.

And then Nate’s father, Dave, asked him if he had any thing he wanted to say.

Nate was exhausted.  But he managed to say a few words. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know that God wants to use this to heal broken relationships.”

I guess I don’t know how to feel about everything that happened.  I mean, primarily I’m just thankful that my friend, who I thought might be dead by now, is very much alive.  But when things like this happen I’m always knocking my head against the wall, trying to figure out in the midst of the aftermath– “How should I now live?”

And I know it’s not about me.  It’s not even about Nate.  But it feels right to look inward before I look outward.  So that’s what I’m doing.  Now that my feet are back on the ground, that’s my starting point.

In the mean time, please check out Nate and Holly’s complete story.  Read the comments.  See how a community of people rallied and prayed, and how things went from bad, to worse, to better, to worse, to best.  You can also check out local news coverage of their journey here.

Consider my silence here broken.