My Narrow Way

How the cross has become my one constant companion in this journey of life...

I sit here typing this letter while sitting on my couch. Levi and Lourdes are playing Risk, the older girls are finishing school (the other three boys go to a small Christian school in town). And I’m writing while doing cancer treatment.

Yes, I was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer last August. I decided to forgo “conventional” treatment due to many factors (our past experiences with both our late spouses, the doors that have been opened for me by my doctor, gut intuitions) and I’ve been doing my treatments either at home or close to home. I’ll talk more about that here another time but if you’re interested in hearing about how I was diagnosed (without needle biopsy) and how I’m treating it, head over to my IG page…

But the point isn’t to talk about my cancer today.

I want to take you into my narrow way. To continue telling you the story of why I’m here, why I am who I am. I know I tell lots of stories, but this is the Christian life - stories written by God, woven together with our cooperation (or not), for the promulgation of His Kingdom and for the benefit of others. And that, my dear friend, is why I write. For you.

For the beauty of the narrow way is why I hold dear what I’ve walked. For my sufferings are my currency.

They are my ticket to the inner world of Jesus Christ. They are the means by which I can relate to people, to be able to say “I’m here. I know what you’re going through.”

I know what it’s like to suffer alone. To have those not be able to understand or, worse, walk away. I don’t want you to feel that way. I want to show you that while the cross is the only way, it is actually THE way to a life of happiness and peace. I want you to be able to embrace your own crosses with love, to accept the Providence of God as something good, to unite yourself to His will so that you can become holy…and happy.

I know I left off with my story from college. How I desired a life so very different from my grandma’s. How I had an encounter with God and longed to be a saint. If you’re unfamiliar with that letter, you can find it here. So now let’s pick it up from there. I won’t share everything, for some things remain private to ponder, but I’ll do the best I can.

When I was in college I lived with trust and abandonment. My motto of sorts was “follow God’s plan, make good decisions, don’t try to control it, and everything will work out.” And for the most part, it did! I had amazing friends and a vibrant faith community. I was recovering from an eating disorder I had through high school and discovering who I was as a Catholic woman. I met the most wonderful man and got married. Life lay before us in a sea of hope. Glass half full…no matter what we’d walk through it would all be good.

We ventured into married life as everyone does - building a home, building a business, building a family. Things rolled as they do those early years with a lot of struggles, a lot of learning, and not a lot of sleep or money! But we found our way. I trusted Mike with the course of our family. He trusted me with our home. Little did we know that forces greater than ourselves would seep into our lives, both internally and externally, and attempt to destroy everything we’d built in life, in faith, in our health, in our ways of dealing with things, basically in every area of our lives.

Those forces took hold about 8 years into our marriage and the storms of life mounted their attack in ways I could never imagine, in ways I’m still recovering from today, in ways I reluctantly and yet wholeheartedly embrace, in ways I’ll never fully be able to understand.

In between pregnancies (especially before my 3rd and 4th babies) I became ill. Pain to the point of not being able to function, stand, eat. Pain that took every ounce of energy, pain that I pushed through in order to take care of my family. Pain that I tried to numb in unhealthy ways. I was eventually diagnosed with a condition that the only remedy for was a hysterectomy. Whether prudently or in haste, we decided with this course of action, when Lourdes was just 14 months old. I knew nothing of alternative medicine at that point. I believed everything I was told. I trusted people who said they could help me.

And so it went.

After my surgery we ended up moving. We bought what we thought was our dream home - close to 3 acres, a place we could raise our family until they flew the nest. But it came with its own stressors unforeseen. You see, at the same time my late husband’s dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Mike was then thrust into the world of taking over his father’s brokerage business a bit earlier than planned, helping to care for an ailing father, helping a wife recover from life-altering surgery, providing for four small children, taking care of our new home, and unbeknownst to him, growing a brain tumor that would eventually claim his life.

Needless to say, we started to drown. And every time we found our heads above water, the torrents would overcome and we’d be pushed under again.

Months after my surgery I started having more health issues, then subsequently was misdiagnosed and mistakenly put on medication that almost caused me to have a heart attack. I was suffering so greatly mentally, physically, emotionally. That lasted about a year and a half. Close to two years in our new home we realized we needed to downsize and so we started exploring options to sell. We stayed in our neighborhood and moved down the street, thinking a change of scenery would be better.

For a bit, it was. But the storms became hurricanes and the narrow way would become all but treacherous.

You see, I started seeing things in Mike I was worried about. The way his eyes looked, choices he was making. It wasn’t him. It was downright scary. And a woman who becomes scared is not a healthy woman. I tried to control and to fix and because I never knew the cancer that was in his brain I simply made it worse. My fear grew and grew. My symptoms grew along with it.

That winter, the winter of 2018, I was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease. It was both a relief and a great source of anger. A relief for I now had clear answers as to all my mysterious physical ailments. Anger because I learned that my hysterectomy could possibly have been avoided had I had all the answers before.

I started treating my Lyme. It was a full-time job in and of itself and, with homeschooling and normal life, my plate was overflowing. Mike had also come to the conclusion that the brokerage firm he was at no longer supported him in his work and therefore he was looking at moving his team and book of business to another firm - a move that would take months to prepare for under the cover of darkness, a couple years to complete, but would ultimately provide more stability for our family.

All of this eventually took a toll. We found ourselves in marriage counseling, but things weren’t getting better. During an argument one time I looked at Mike and yelled, “you need an MRI!” Little did I know…

Because things seemed so unstable, and because I’m a fixer, my only solution was to move again. I had this ominous feeling that where we were at (physical location and mental capacities) was un-survivable. I felt something coming both in our family and in the world. More fear. More confusion. It can’t be cancer though, I thought. Little did I know, lol.

“Let’s really downsize and put everything in storage and start over,” I said.

Starting Over. Part 2. Yes, that’s just what we needed, I thought.

And so, during the summer of 2019, Mike was busy preparing his business to move, I finally started to feel better while recovering from Lyme, I listed our home and arranged a rental on the water (a lovely place for healing for all of us), and out of the blue we were chosen to adopt a baby. A baby girl due at the end of October.

Things were looking up! After years of so much suffering, of clawing our way out of the pit to find ourselves deeper than before, we saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Things started to improve in our marriage, we found a way of stability again, of hope.

We sold our home and moved into our rental the weekend of Labor Day, 2019. Just three weeks prior Mike moved his business. I had ended my course of Lyme treatment and was declared in remission. The baby was coming.

And then, 5 days later, Mike had a seizure.

Brain tumor, the size of a softball. Left frontal lobe. Stage 3 oligodendroglioma.

Brain surgery number 1, a success! But two days later he almost died from a brain hemorrhage, was rushed into emergency surgery where they removed parts of his brain known to be vital to human functioning, I was prepared by the doctor he would most likely be braindead, and after he miraculously did awake the next day, he didn’t know my name. In fact, he called me a banana.

The narrow way became almost unforgeable. Our sufferings would only become greater.

I had to call the expectant mother and tell her we couldn’t adopt her baby. I had to console children in their grief of seeing dad so different. I had to begin navigating my way through HR and company policy and wonder how we would ever have an income again. All while going from wife to caregiver overnight, all while facing my own grief and false accusations occurring behind the scenes, wondering who I could even trust. Mike had to adjust to not knowing basic words, not being able to walk or dress himself, to a life of total and humbling dependence.

As treatment continued, he continued to spiral downwards. Everything they threw at him, from surgery and proton radiation to chemotherapy, drugs and medications, all seemed to have an opposite effect of what they wanted, causing more side effects than good. Shingles in his eyes, hydrocephalus in his brain. One ER stay after another until they found a latent brain infection that required more surgery.

And then there was Covid. A total global shutdown during our own family catastrophe. I remember sobbing in front of a church, knowing Jesus was inside and I couldn’t get to Him. I was banned from the hospital. By the grace of God and help from social media, after the hospital failed to protect Mike one night from shaving his head (it’s a long, somewhat humorous and yet horrific story), I found my way to a state senator. A couple phone calls later and I was allowed to stay.

That brain surgery became two as his brain hemorrhaged again. He stayed there 10 days, 10 days without kids seeing their dad, without me seeing my kids, and he went home with half a skull.

While in the hospital I got word we had to move out of our rental. Initially it was said we could stay indefinitely. The owners then changed their minds. And so I was tasked with caring for Mike on pic-line antibiotics, negotiating the finalities of his business exit, ensuring we had disability income, and now finding a home and moving within 6 weeks.

I know it sounds like a lot. And it was. I had abundant help and support, and yet the thing that carried me through, the thing that made it all possible was grace. I’m not joking, the grace flowed like honey…opening doors, making straight paths, providing when I saw no way through. It helped that we had just found our way to Traditional Catholicism from the Novus Ordo. As the storms swirled around, the anchors of tradition held us firm.

We found a home and moved mid-June, 2020. During the move, Mike was struck with a horrible antibiotic reaction and his skin basically fell off. After he recovered, he found himself in the doctor’s office for a routine lumbar puncture. I had a bad feeling about it…he said he wanted to go “home.” I knew he didn’t mean our house.

After draining fluid from his brain, Mike had a mini-stroke a number of hours later. He was then put on hospice and given two weeks to live.

I remember thinking, as I was told he would die, “I just walked to Mt. Everest…now I have to climb it??”

Those two weeks then became six as he held on through Lourdes’s 6th birthday, my 37th birthday, our 14th anniversary. Those six weeks became the holiest thing I’ve been through. They became a gift, as I walked Mike into eternity with the Sacraments as our guide. Those six weeks stripped me of everything I was, especially as I found myself at the center of more false accusations. Those 6 weeks changed everything I knew about life, they laid me upon the cross with Jesus, they crucified me and they buried me, never to be the same again.

As Mike lay, in his final hour, I sat next to him and gave him his rosary and a crucifix and I played Stabat Mater on my phone. Our way of the cross together was coming to a close, mine on my own was just beginning. Mike was being ushered to meet his Creator. He died at 6:06am on August 20th, 2020 and was buried on the feast day of his favorite saint, St. Augustine on August 28th.

Grieving followed. For myself, our children. The larger crosses slowly replaced by the regular day-to-day ones. (I actually think the everyday crosses are sometimes harder. Or at least they come with less adrenaline to get through them! Sick kids, money problems, the relentless and unceasing difficulties of normal life…so please don’t think I think I’m any better for having suffered these big things…)

There is so much more to unpack. The nuances of just one of these life events we’ve walked is enough to write for days, and someday I hope to. But the nature of this letter is the cross. That cross that comes in so many forms and yet has one purpose alone:

To make us like Jesus.

And in order to be made like Jesus we have to walk what he walked: abandonment, having no place to lay his head, being stripped and laid bare, experiencing the evils of this world, struggling with the day-to-day. We are not only made like Him but we are then able to relate to Him. He can come to us and say, “I know what you’re feeling, I’ve walked that too…” and we can go to Him and say, “I know what you’re feeling, I’ve walked that too…” And relationship is born and familiarity is established and we can look into our Lover’s eyes with an intimate knowing that we just both know.

One night, just a week after Mike died and while praying my evening rosary with the kids (by candlelight…my favorite), a word struck me. A word from God, one word. A word that would then mark not only my immediate days to come but would stand to be the form and shape of what would unfold next.

Resurrection.

As that word, and the grace with it, penetrated my heart I knew God was just getting started. I knew that the cross, our crosses were not the end. Yes, they would be our accompanying guide throughout life, they would still be the means of salvation, ones I would embrace with more joy and acceptance as time went on. But I also knew that there was more to the story, that Easter occurred not only in the past and occurs not only in heaven, but it also can happen in the here and now.

And so, as we finished the Rosary, I turned to my kids and I said, “kids, there will be resurrection.” And the seed of hope was planted, the embers of faith were renewed once again, and we were led deeper into the castle as God revealed His own personal light at the end of our narrow way.

Love, Kristine Nicole.

PS: Over the next couple weeks I’ll finish the basics of our story. In light of the conclusion of Lent, the entering of the Triduum and the holy days of Easter, it’s great timing. And then there will be a lot for us to unpack…themes like “Why does God allow suffering?” and “How do we abandon ourselves to Him in it?” and “How do we live the day-to-day as both humans and Christians?” and more. I want to thank you for holding our story with kindness and letting me share it. It’s who I am, especially as I wrestle with why things happen the way they do. Thank you for journeying with me through my narrow way. I hope to walk with you through yours.