The Real World
Came Calling
I Saw...
By Chris Hannas
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| Tim Boxeth remembers best the sunny summer day he and his family spent with his mom just before she died. |
The sun rose at 6:02 a.m.,
poised to give July 23 the hazy, hot and humid hues that dog the days
of Virginia summers.
That is the day Tim Boxeth remembers the best. It
was a month after his mom, Carla, was diagnosed.
That month had been a time for the family to grow closer, refocusing
their lives
on what truly mattered to them — faith, fellowship and family.
Carla had returned home from the hospital after surgery, and despite a temperature
that would top 90 degrees, the Boxeths gathered outside to enjoy the day together.
There, Carla sat in a wheelchair, talking to Tim, his two sisters and his dad
after a trying period in which all five had their comfortable lives upended.
They didn’t know they were spending time together as a family for the last
time. Carla passed away two days later.
Tim came home in May 1998, having just completed his freshman year at the University
of Oklahoma. He was studying meteorology, and, like every other college student,
his evolving self.
For the summer, his only plan was to work at a Sears Hardware store near his
house. It was there that the haze of that summer started to set in.
Tim was told that he had to leave work immediately by Clay Willis, a co-worker
and fellow member of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Herndon, Va. Willis took
Tim home, where his parents were waiting with news that nobody can be prepared
for.
His mom had brain cancer.
“I wasn’t sure exactly what to think,” Tim said. “My first
instinct was that it was not something serious. I thought: ‘It’s cancer.
People beat cancer all the time.’”
Tim quickly realized how serious his mother’s condition was when the family
learned that she would need surgery.
“It was all happening so fast,” he said. “I never thought that
she would die. Life was just going to go on, and she would get better.”
When Tim woke up on July 24, his dad told him they needed to take Carla to the
hospital. She had suffered a painful headache all night. The doctor said that
the tumor was bigger than it was before surgery, a possibility the family had
known about since the beginning.
“He explained it was only a matter of time,” Tim said.
What followed was a lot of prayer, sitting in the hospital and visits from family
and friends. They were there to see the woman Tim described as “a free spirit,
loving, fun, one of a kind Supermom” for the last time.
At 6:04 a.m. the sun passed above the horizon to grace July 25 with its first
light. Three hours earlier, Carla had died.
The sudden death of a family member can have a profound effect on one’s
faith, often causing him to question the things he believes and trusts in the
most. For Tim, there was never any question. He said that some of his friends
who knew his mom well questioned their faith, but for him the experience only
made his belief stronger.
“I don’t know how anyone could get through something like that without
believing in God or that there is a heaven,” Tim said. “My faith became
stronger. I began to seek God a whole lot more and there was a huge turn in my
Christian life. It totally broke me down and made me realize that I needed to
rely on God.”
It is in losing a person that we often realize the depth to which they affect
our lives. In the months following Carla’s death, Tim’s best friend
and the church were most instrumental in helping to fill some of the void and
to begin the process of healing.
“The church was pretty awesome,” he said. “People made us meals
for like two months afterward. You get so used to having someone doing those
small things, and then they’re gone.”
In the fall, Tim went back to Oklahoma. He didn’t want to make any abrupt
changes to his life as he began to refocus and learn how to live in a world in
which nobody expects to be.
At school he had a lot of time to think. Over the course of four months, he reconsidered
his priorities and decided that he needed to be closer to his friends and the
people he loved. One night he decided to make a change, and told his friends
in Oklahoma that he would be leaving.
He needed to be in a community in which friendship and faith were pillars of
every day, not afterthoughts behind class and studying.
“I was not in any fellowship at OU,” Tim said. “My life was not
going in the right direction, and I needed to reevaluate what I was doing.”
He returned to Virginia, where he enrolled at Northern Virginia Community College.
After 2 1/2 years, he moved on to James Madison University, where he would graduate
with a degree in Recreation Management.
Last summer, Tim completed an adventure recreation internship with the parks
department in Tacoma, Wash. He has since moved to Whistler, British Columbia,
where he is working at an Australian pie shop to “pay the bills so I can
ski.”
Tim said that he is looking to move, and that the most important factor in deciding
where he will end up is the presence of a strong church community like the one
that played such a large role in his life six years ago.
“It is so important,” he said. “That’s something that is
really starting to sink in now. For the last five months I haven’t had a
church home, and haven’t really felt at home out here.”
In a model of life made clear to him by the way his mother lived, Tim understands
the importance of faith.
“She set a good example on how to live,” he said. “I know what
she did made her happy, and that the way she lived and the things she believed
in made her feel at peace. I thought that was a good way to live life. The most
important thing to me now is fellowship and friends. Being with people who can
back up your faith, you need it.”
Without his faith, Tim said he has no idea how he would have gotten through the
death of his mother. The strength of his relationship with God and the ability
to pray with his family were irreplaceable.
Giving advice on dealing with death, Tim said for a non-Christian, “I would
share the gospel with them, because they are going to have a hard time without
believing in eternal life to accept death.”
Through his experience, he said that for anyone coping with the loss of a loved
one, just having someone there can be the most helpful.
“They need someone to give them comfort, to be their friend,” he said. “It’s
something they’re eventually going to have to deal with on their own. Their
going to need friends. They will need to cry, and they will need someone or something
to help get their mind off things once in a while.”
Most of all, Tim said that believing that things will turn out alright and they
will get through it is most important.
“I would tell them to stay strong,” he said. “That horrible feeling
in your stomach goes away, and your faith, your family and your friends will
help pull you through.”
Copyright © 2007 Chris Hannas