LEGACY OF A SON GONE TOO SOON by Laura Sobiech
Don’t squander the joy in the moment by worrying about a future that doesn’t exist yet. ach would have turned twenty years old this month. He was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare bone cancer, when he was fourteen years old and he died two years ago, when he was just eighteen. Sometimes I think about the man he would have become, what he could have brought to this hurting world if he’d had the years of life so many of us are granted. Yet, in his short life, he learned to live in a way that most of us take decades to figure out. In living his life with hope in the face of death, he taught us how to truly live. I remember one afternoon sitting with him on our living room couch, just days after he’d come home from his first chemotherapy treatment, the sun shining in on us that cold December day in 2009. The house was empty except for the two of us; his dad was at work and his three siblings were at school. Zach was homeschooled now that the chemotherapy had compromised his immune system — traditional school was just too dangerous. I’d been thinking about why God had asked us to do this “thing,” why He’d allowed Zach to get cancer, and I wondered what Zach thought about it.
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HOMELIFE MAY 2015
“So, what do you think God has in mind with this whole cancer thing?” I asked. He thought for a moment then responded, “I don’t know, but I think it’s for something big.” His starting point in this battle was to see things in the context of a bigger plan, a plan that he knew was there but that he couldn’t necessarily see or fully understand. He chose to see things beyond his life here on earth in the context of eternity. As his mother, I was relieved. I knew that if he understood he was part of something bigger, then he also understood that his life still had meaning and worth, even in the midst of tremendous suffering. As the cancer continued to grow, despite the most potent chemotherapies, the realization that we could actually lose Zach to the disease began to sink in. I had watched Zach suffer patiently for almost two years, and I was so incredibly proud of the way he chose to truly embrace each day, no matter what. After one particularly harsh treatment that would leave him extremely sick for days, we packed up Zach’s comforter, pillows, and guitar. Zach was so sick I’d asked him if he needed a wheelchair because he’d barely had enough energy