Church of nature soothes pain of a trying week

Nature has always been my church. I apologize to those of you that regard such a statement as blasphemy, but in my case it’s true. Maybe it will help my cause if I tell you that I grew up participating in the Episcopal Church, going to church each and every Sunday, and was even an acolyte at the Church of the Cross here in Bluffton.

Throughout high school I attended Episcopal boarding schools — Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg, then finishing up at Porter-Gaud School in Charleston. During this time I learned a whole lot about the history of the Bible and religion in general. Furthermore, I have never regretted one second of this lengthy education, and if it taught me one thing, it would have to be this: Do something nice for some person each and every day, no matter how small that deed may be. I call these acts GPs, an acronym I made up that stands for “God Points.”

So why am I spilling the beans on such a controversial subject? In a nutshell, it’s because this has been one of the toughest weeks I have had in quite some time that tested my spiritual center day in and day out. It all started when, purely by accident, a student nurse at our local CVS Pharmacy noticed something in my wife Karen’s ear canal that had been missed by a doctor during a full-blown physical she had the week before.

Pleading with my dermatologist to see her right away, a biopsy was done and the news came back that it was a cancerous melanoma.

Cancer. That word sends shivers down my spine. I have lost both parents to this horrible disease as well as my brother Tim, whose illness began with a melanoma. After Karen’s diagnosis, I tried my best to downplay my fears as we waited to see a specialist at MUSC in Charleston.

Tossing and turning at night and never far from my thoughts day after day, to say the least I was stressed and it took everything I had to keep that stress from showing. With her appointment scheduled for this past Tuesday, little else could take my mind away from making sure she saw the best in the business.

But when my phone rang Easter afternoon with the news that my lifelong friend and fishing buddy Charlie Fraser had died of a heart attack, it was one more blow to my usual fun-loving self.

Only 57 years old, his birthday two days prior on Good Friday, it was as if once again God was testing my resolve. When you hear news like that, it is hard to find words that will comfort, and when you do try to, it usually ends up as uncomfortable silence with awkward beginnings and an equally non-productive ending.

All I can think about in these situations is just how much I would like to have the ability to sap these people’s illnesses from their bodies much like the Michael Clarke Duncan, the gifted black inmate in the movie “The Green Mile.” But as is always the case, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

I am no stranger to catastrophic events and it seems I have been chosen to endure these trying events for most of my life.

At age 14, my parents had gone to the Savannah Airport at night to pick up my sister, Alice, from college, and on the way home, ran into the rear end of a logging truck that had been left unattended in the middle of the highway. My folks were hospitalized for over two years and my sister was in a coma for four years before she passed away.

Then at the end of my senior year of high school, I passed up a trip to Charlotte with my favorite teacher, classmates and friends, and their Eastern Airlines plane crashed just outside Charlotte, killing everyone on board. I went to funeral after funeral for three straight weeks.

In 2005, my best friend, 56-year-old Warren Matthews, and I were offshore fishing when he gave me an odd look and died right then and there of a massive heart attack. That was followed my parents’ and brother’s deaths.

These are just a few of the things that have shaken my faith while at the same time made it imperative that I find faith somewhere in my own little universe.

It was around that time that I turned to two sources of comfort that keep me going even now: Nature, along with a personal commitment to performing random acts of kindness daily, no matter how small or how large.

As for Karen, it appears the melanoma was caught very early and surgery should take care of it. And Charlie? I’ll miss him terribly, but thankfully he went fast and something I will always wonder is the timing — a birthday on Good Friday and death on Easter Sunday? Wow, you go Charlie!

This story was originally published April 2, 2016 at 2:04 PM with the headline "Church of nature soothes pain of a trying week."