Kim: A Dying Child's Spiritual Legacy

By Fred G. Womack

This book is an autobiographical account of how a six-year-old girl was diagnosed with terminal cancer and how her father coped with the shock and trauma of it all. The illness, the death, and the fathomless depths of anguish that followed are not sidestepped in this volume, but are described as accurately as author Fred G. Womack was capable of

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Lacquer Press & Marketing Inc.
• Release date: Aug 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948288576

Fred G. Womack

Fred G. Womack is an ordained minister who pastored six local churches across a time frame of forty years. He holds a bachelor of science in education with a major in biological sciences, a master of divinity with a major in New Testament theology, and a doctor of ministry with concentration in the pastoral area. He is the author of Untaught and Unlearned Knowledge, an apologetic treatise on the substance and operations of faith, published by Writer's Club Press in 2002. He is married and has three living children and seven grandchildren.

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Chapter 1

Blindsided

. . . at an hour when you do not expect… (Luke 12:40).

It was a day of high spirits when I finished my Sunday morning sermon. Ordinarily the assembly evacuated the cramped makeshift worship area once we concluded the service. But on this day, the people remained as if fastened to their seats. Professionally speaking, it was the highest hour of my ministerial career. I felt like I was on top of the world. The moment had arrived, after a year of study and planning, when the recently formed congregation would view blueprints and pictorial drawings of a new worship building.

As the building committee was setting up visual presentations of the new facility, the children began filing in from Children’s Church and locating their parents. Smiles and other expressions of delight were noticeably present on every child’s face, except one—my six-year old daughter, Kim. Her cheeks were red and tears were streaming down from both eyes. In a muffled moan, hunched forward holding one hand on her back, she made her way to her mother sitting in the choir loft. This demeanor was uncharacteristic of my daughter and I was concerned. During the building committee’s presentation, I kept glancing at her as she sat in her mother’s lap. Soon I was relieved to see that motherly attention had soothed her countenance. After a time of questioning and discussion, the people embraced the plans for the new worship building and an atmosphere of joyful expectancy settled upon the group as the meeting adjourned.

Our hearts were filled with excitement as Ann and I drove home with our two beautiful daughters, Kim, six, and Kathy, four, sitting on the back seat chatting cheerfully and entertaining mom and dad as we went. The date was September 12, 1977, a significant point in time for everyone in our church. Never would we have dreamed that the first episode in a Spiritual adventure, far greater than that of a new church building, was simultaneously getting underway on this Sunday. The tears we had seen streaming down our elder daughter’s face moments earlier were symptomatic of something that would mark and chart the remainder of our lives.

During lunch, I examined Kim’s back where she said it had been hurting. While doing so I remarked to Ann that while we were in the country the day before on a picnic, Kim ran, jumped and turned summersaults with her sister without a single complaint. Adding information I had not known, Ann said that Kim had been constipated for about three days. Once we finished eating, we gave Kim a laxative and shortly the two children were busy at play, as on any other Sunday afternoon. With no further indications that anything was amiss, Kim could hardly wait to board the school bus for her first grade class the next day.

That afternoon, with my wife teaching at a different school many miles away and Kathy in daycare at the same location I met Kim as she got off the bus. Immediately I knew something was wrong. Her appearance did not look right. Her stomach was distended and she was flushed with fever. Upon entering the house, she went directly to the couch and lay down.

Daddy I don’t feel good, she groaned and added, I need to go to the bathroom, but I can’t. Straightaway, I arranged for her to be seen by our family pediatrician, Dr. Noel Womack. We were at the pediatrician’s office only minutes when he referred us to a surgeon, Dr. Raymond Martin, who was on staff at the Mississippi Baptist Medical Center in Jackson. Before darkness fell over the city, the little first grader was undergoing a number of tests in preparation for a major operation that would take place the following day.

Ann, four months pregnant with our third child, elected to spend the first night with Kim in the hospital, as I attempted to look after a few matters at home and work. I made several phone calls to my church leaders and close family members, requesting their prayers as I informed them of the sudden and uncertain developments with Kim. Although apprehension was building inside me all this time, I remained hopeful that things would go well the next day. I clung to a comment the surgeon had made after one of the tests. He noted that the X-rays showed something pushing against my daughter’s colon and intimated that if he could correct it, the constipation she had been having might be resolved.

The tense and suspenseful day of surgery arrived soon enough and then slowed down to a crawl. Ann and I took up positions around the bed of our little girl with the big brown eyes and bouncy brown hair. Once we briefed the little patient on the necessity of the doctor looking inside her tummy, she pulled the covers snugly up around her shoulders, laid back, and waited calmly and trustingly for her turn in the operating room. I was not as composed. I expended much energy while forcing myself to remain seated in my chair. Several hours passed. Finally, hospital staff wheel the gurney to the door. Ann’s father, the Rev. David Cranford, and uncle, the Rev. Hermon Milner, both pastors in the area, arrived just in time to say prayers for the patient. As a nurse pushed our firstborn down the hallway, I walked alongside the gurney until it disappeared behind the elevator doors that led to the surgery suite.

. . . trouble comes… (Job 4:5).

About an hour later, the surgeon appeared in the doorway. Dressed in his green sanitary clothes and cap, he held his surgical mask by a single string in one hand. For an instant, he seemed to hesitate there as if he preferred not to enter the room. Then he approached and his face said it all. It would not be good news. The long unbroken stretch of our family’s sheltered lives was now abruptly ending. While Dr. Martin appeared to be searching for the right words to say, my wife and I reflexively queried, perhaps attempting to steer him away from the harsh report that was sure to come. Was it a compaction? Ann pleaded. Before he could answer, I appealed, Was it a telescopic intestine? Ann’s older sister had died from that very ailment while in route to the hospital when only four.

Then in a grimace almost as frightening as were his words, he began shaking his head with a sigh, saying softly, No. No. No. It was none of those things. I’m afraid your little girl is in very bad shape. Ominously proceeding, he said, She has a large malignancy. And it is the worse I’ve ever seen in my twenty years of practice. Her whole abdomen is full of cancer. Of the 120 types of cancer that attack people’s lives, the doctor did not specify which one Kim had.

My mouth went dry, my throat tightened and my stomach contracted into a knot. Stunned to the point I could barely think, much less speak, I managed to roll out these words, longingly, Were you able to remove it all?

Continuing to shake his head, he explained, We were not able to remove any of it, except a small specimen for biopsy.

Stillness then washed over the room as everyone absorbed the shock of what we had just heard. Then the surgeon seemed to have saved the worst for last. He stressed that Kim’s disease was too far advanced for her to be released from the hospital. She was already having complications and they were only going to get worse.

My wife, choking back emotion, asked, Dr. Martin, does this mean that you are not going to give us any hope?

With his reply coming a bit slowly, I injected, What about drugs? At that time drug therapy was relatively new but I was aware that a few hospitals in the country were administering this type of treatment to cancer patients.

I wish that I could tell you that drug therapy would help, he returned. But I can’t. If we had caught it earlier, there may have been some benefit. But once cancer has progressed as far as it has inside your daughter, there is simply nothing that can be done.

In full revolt to this foreboding prognosis I continued to probe, There must be something we can do! What about radiation? The physician explained that the tumor was simply too large and too extensive for radiation to be effective. The room then grew conspicuously quiet—too quiet. No one had any further questions to ask.

The surgeon, disappointed with the outcome of the operation and regretful that he had to be the harbinger of such a formidable report, concluded, I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry. Words spoken, ever so softly by a man with a sympathetic heart, had just turned our world upside down! Indicating that he would be looking in on Kim later, he exited the room, leaving us reeling in fear and dread, a predicament too traumatic for tears.

Our little first grader who loved her teacher and her class so very much would not be going back to school. She would not even be leaving the hospital. I could not bear the thought of it—not taking her home again was just too painful to contemplate. But the doctor had made it very clear. At best, our child had only a few days to live, and they would not be pleasant days.

What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has

happened to me (Job 3:25).

Sometime later, nurses returned Kim to the room and placed her back into bed. A forearm pad was taped to her left hand and wrist, giving support to I.V. tubing running from a vein on the back of her hand to suspended bags on a pole. Another tube ran through a nostril and down the back of her throat into her stomach and was connected to a bag attached to the side of the bed. A urinary catheter ran from her groin to still another bag on the side of the bed. Carefully, one of the nurses showed us the large sutured incision bisecting Kim’s abdomen, and instructed us that the area should be protected at all times. We were also cautioned to keep the little patient still and allow her to have nothing by mouth except ice chips. As time passed, family members and others, who had begun to come by from the church, gave affectionate kisses to the forehead of our first born as the strength of the anesthetic wore off.

It was my night to stay in the hospital. Ann would be going home to be with Kathy. This arrangement had worked out perfectly for me, since I could not have stayed away anyway. One thing I needed to do though, before Ann left. I had to get alone and do some praying. I had already been praying. All the same, it was now a stark fact that I needed to pray more than ever.

When I was in distress, I sought the Lord… (Psalm 77:2).

I confided in my wife that I needed to be alone for a moment and went down stairs to the chapel. No one was inside. I was glad. At first, I walked around and attempted to gather my thoughts as to what should be my petitions. The word cancer was so overwhelming there seemed to be little that I could ask for in prayer. Dreadful memories of this merciless adversary were trouncing upon every positive thought I could muster.

While I attended seminary, my pastor’s seven-year-old daughter died of leukemia, even though the church prayed for her every day, as did the seminary students and faculty. Then there was the friend who studied with me in the library on the seminary campus. He got cancer and died in the same year that he was diagnosed. Many prayers were said for him, too. How could I forget the upper classman living next door to me in our college dormitory? He got cancer shortly after he graduated and died just as his career was taking off. I knew that many prayers had been made for him also. I could not think of a single person discovered with cancer to ever survive the disease. What could I possibly expect from my frantic prayers against such an invincible affliction?

Rationally I was ready to pray, but emotionally (spiritually and psychologically) I was a wreck. Panic, terror, and helplessness whirled inside my head. I tried sitting on one of the chapel’s small pews, and attempted to reach a state of mind compatible with prayer. But the longer I sat there, the more empty the place felt and the more alone I seemed to be. Finally, just as unsettled as when I entered, I got down on my knees and stayed there. It was evident that I would not be reaching a calm and confident frame of mind in which to pray. Fortunately, by this time, however, I did know what my prayer would be. Above all things, I didn’t want Kim to suffer and I desperately wanted to take her home and have a little more time with her before she died. So, from a kneeling posture, I began speaking my thoughts aloud to God:

"O God, for many years now I have believed you to be a powerful and compassionate God. If you are as great today as the Bible teaches you were in ancient times, then what I am about to ask will be a small thing for you to do. I confess that I deserve no favors from You. Nobler and purer parents than I have been caught unawares in similar circumstances and I know, from their own testimonies, that their prayers for their children were not granted. Nevertheless, even though I know this, I can do nothing other than plead for Your mercy.

As You know already, Lord, since You know everything before it is asked, I don’t think I could stand it, if Kim were to start hurting and we were unable to assuage her pain. (1) Please Lord! Don’t let her suffer from physical pain that the cancer could generate.

(2) And please don’t let her suffer from mental anguish that could arise from her gruesome condition.

Also Lord, (3) please permit me to take her home for a few days before the end comes. As if you need the information, when Kim was born in Louisville, Kentucky, I was in the seminary preparing myself to be your servant. During those first years, I devoted practically all of my time to my studies and working in the church. The child You gave me received only the left over hours of my time and the guilt I feel right now for this neglect is ripping me apart.

Since it seems to be Your will to take her out of this world, in that her cancer was not detected until it was too late, please consider granting my request for a tiny measure of additional time—a small thing from Your perspective but a huge thing from mine. Please allow me to take her home for just a few days and show her how much I love her before she passes. The doctor says she will not be able to leave the hospital, and I would not wish to remove her if she is in physical pain. All the same, I ask that You somehow, someway, make it possible for me to take her home for just a few days before it’s all over. I desire so much to show her how much she is loved and show You how deeply I treasure the irreplaceable gift you put in our home when you gave her to us. Amen."

As I rose to my feet, I felt better that I had prayed but felt no assurance for what I had prayed. The ominous cast of mind was still very much in place. Without a shred of assurance that God might respond affirmatively to my requests, I exited the chapel.

As I made my way back upstairs, I began to think of the hundreds of patients in this large hospital who had families praying for them. My imagination raced onward to the thousands of hospitals throughout the world holding millions of patients, whose families were surely praying for them. And it occurred to me that God’s circuits could easily be jammed under the right conditions. If all of us called on Him at once, my prayer could easily go unheard due to technical difficulties. So to be safe, I resolved to pray the same prayer all through the night, imagining that if there were a disconnect, it could just as easily take place on my end of the line as on God’s end.

Soon, I was back in the room where I would spend the most frightful night of my life.

Chapter 2

Dark Night of the Soul

O Lord, my God, I call for help by day; I cry out in

the night before thee… (Psalm 88:1).

As the night began, Kim was restless from the residual effects of anesthesia, not to mention the topsy-turvy changes that had come into her small world so quickly. She napped on and off throughout the night—sleeping for about five minutes, waking for about three, then dozing off again. When she was awake, she did not wish to talk, just make sure I was there. I wanted desperately to do something for her each time she awoke. Repeatedly, I offered her ice chips or to call the nurse. Frequently she took the ice chips, but consistently declined my calling the nurse saying she did not hurt or need anything. The nurse came in anyway, about every thirty minutes or so, looked at the eight-inch incision on her tummy, checked the I.V. and quietly slipped out.

As the night wore on, Kim said, Thanks, Dad, for staying with me. I masked all the dread and fear I was feeling for what she was facing and reassured her that there was no place on the planet I would rather be than precisely where I was. I noticed her fingers extending out from the I.V. pad. I recalled when her mother accidentally closed a door on those very fingers. She was three at the time. We were all so worried that a portion of the middle finger might have to be amputated. Oh, what mocking irony that minor incident appeared to be now. Every trouble, worry, and distress ever encountered, all put together in one bundle, would not compare even slightly with the horrendous situation that this child and her family were now up against.

Before this great trial commenced, I did not know what I thought about a lot of things. I was in the early stages of [working out my] salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:13c). Prayer, for instance, was an activity of great interest to me. I had always thought of prayer as being humankind’s most direct link to God. Yet, I did not feel that I had a sufficient grasp on this Spiritual dynamic, even though I prayed publicly in church and in the privacy of our home. Even so, no strong leanings had developed in my mind about how prayer worked or what could be expected from it. As the hours passed, I kept repeating silently the words I prayed in the chapel. Saying them only once did not seem adequate.

Then sometime late into the night, nihilistic thoughts began forcing their way into my mind, challenging everything I ever believed about God. All the disheartening ideologies I ever studied in school, ever read in a newspaper, ever heard uttered on television, or ever heard spoken by frustrated friends, took turns assaulting my hope in Divine help. For several years, I had been paddling up stream against these undesirable ways of looking at the world. Now, in view of my horrific circumstances, these unwelcomed ideologies were rising to flood stage, and seemed intent on carrying me downstream to a place I did not want to go. Attempts to barricade them from my mind were unsuccessful.

I’m not sure which disparaging theological issue assailed my soul first, but I think it was the one marginalizing the role of prayer. Having graduated from the seminary just three years earlier, I read books and heard lectures that said prayer was no panacea. A few brash professors announced unapologetically that prayer was overrated, intimating that those who prayed a lot may be naïve, if not lazy should they attempt to substitute prayer for the hard work of the ministry. No one ever preached a sermon worth listening to from prayer alone, was an oft-heard cliché. Several authors and lecturers said that the only changes ever to come about from prayer were inside the person doing the praying; the outside world went merrily along its way unaffected by supplication or entreaty. If this was really how it was, it would take away virtually all my incentives to pray. Come to think of it, (and it may be the result of the high anxiety level that I was feeling on this night), I could not recall a single prayer of mine that brought about changes in other people, situations, or anything in the outside world. As I painfully reflected further, a sizeable portion of the church seemed to be in agreement with this marginalized view of prayer, though not vocally. From what I had observed, most church people tended to project that God has no hands in the world except human hands. If this limited view was the whole truth and all of the truth about prayer, then Kim would receive no reprieve from Deity and my petitions will have risen no higher than the scalp on my head.

As I continued to pray, a panicky whim rushed into my mind: What will I do if God does not help my child? The thought was terrifying! Yet I could not stop myself from thinking it. If God did nothing, I reckoned that I would still believe in God, but it would not be the God that I would want to believe in. If the help I’d requested did not arrive, I would have to serve a deistic God—a remote life giver and lawgiver, toward whom one could feel little affection, but nonetheless whose creative power and authority could still command respect and obedience. It would seem that I could still preach about this God even though he would not interact with me or my church people on a day-by-day basis. I could still believe that God created the world and that after creation he withdrew his interactive presence, letting everything function from the energy and laws instilled within everything from the start.

Several who signed our country’s Declaration of Independence were deists. Mark Twain, could be included as well, for he once said, God doesn’t know that we are here, and would not care if he did. Notables, such as these, seemed to have made it through life without being too disaffected. Then heartening somewhat, deists did believe that in rare instances God does intervene with regard to big events as when global emergencies occur with large populations, like nations, people groups or species. In such upheavals, deists maintained that God would add to or take from, in accord with the overall good for all the living. Nevertheless, they did not believe, however, that the Supreme Sovereign ever intervened at the small scale of individual lives, unless an individual was related in some way to a major nexus in the world at which time God would work his wisdom and power through that individual for an abbreviated period of time.

If God was a deistic being, either partially or completely, I had to confess at the time, I do not know, God knows (2 Cor. 12:2b RSV). But assuming that God was deistic, then my hope was that Kim’s emergence could in some way become as big to God as it had become to me. So, much of my praying all through the night was that God would be less deistic and more theistic for Kim’s sake as well as for my sake. Thus, the more I prayed, the more I pleaded with God to be a theistic God, one who never deserts His creation even for a moment, and knows what is going on in every corner of every continent with every person at every instant in time. However, at this dark hour of my soul, I simply lacked the evidence (personal experience) to be confident in a theistic God. For as I mentioned before, under this enormous strain of fear, I could not recall a single instance in my personal history when God answered a prayer that resulted in changing the outside world in some noticeable way.

My soul yearns for you in the night, in the morning

my spirit longs for you… (Is. 26:9).

If the lackluster opinions on prayer and the deistic-theistic vacillations were not enough to dismay a father’s positive turn of mind, then the next currents of thought would succeed. These would be the atheistic currents of thought.

Atheism is not a modern phenomenon. It has influenced people’s thinking for thousands of years. In ancient Greece, as far back as 430 B.C., Leucippus and Democritus proudly flaunted their atheism. Even from the Bible, as early as 1,000 B.C., some people believed that, There is no God (Ps. 53:1). Although traces of atheism may be as old as civilization, the most wide spread and deeply entrenched movement of unbelief known to human history, got underway in Europe during the nineteenth century. This aversion to Deity and religion in general moved across the Atlantic and into North America in the early part of the twentieth century, reaching a saturation point by the mid-1960s. And alas! On this dreadful night of our family’s most shocking surgery, these godless ideologies all tumbled right into Kim’s room, unbidden and unwanted.

Never before had godless ideologies posed a serious threat to my belief system. My life experiences had been such that I could ignore the philosophical disparagements that atheism induced. But now, in the terrorizing darkness of this night, the threat of atheism was real and imposing. These godless philosophies still fresh in memory from college and seminary days, muscled their way into my mangled mental faculties. Like the fabled multi-headed hydra, these nonbelieving schools of thought taunted and vexed my soul all through the night.

For example, Friedrich Nietzsche, was required reading for many theological students at seminary. Almost a hundred years before Kim got sick, Nietzsche said, God is dead. This unbeliever was following some of the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach that were scattered across Germany when Nietzsche was just a child.

Feuerbach announced in the 1840s God had died as a viable concept in the minds of Europeans and that His death was the result of the enlightenment of the eighteenth century. God’s dying was regarded as a cultural event, by Feuerbach, one belonging naturally to advancements in science, philosophy, and anthropology. No one, as he saw it, depended on God anymore for a productive and fulfilling life. With science becoming more accessible, human beings could meet their needs without a deity. Feuerbach conceded that there was a time when an imaginary being needed to be mentally projected on to the heavens in order for society to function safely and productively. But going forward, that kind of thinking could not be taken seriously. The study of theology was already becoming absorbed in the study of anthropology.

Nietzsche, taking Feuerbach’s thesis, expanded upon it and gave it a much wider circulation, saying that the time had come in history for humankind to break free from the restraints of a suppressing God. For the first time in history, in Nietzsche’s view, humankind had the opportunity to be all he could be. With God out of the way, any person could become a super man in any category of culture. Free and unfettered by religion, and with nothing to rely on but oneself, people could become anything and do anything that intelligence, courage, and desire would permit. When Nietzsche died in 1900, millions of people throughout Europe had stopped regarding God as a necessary factor of daily life.

But on this dark night, for my child and me, God was a very necessary factor to our lives. If perchance I’d been deluded over the past decade and Nietzsche’s presupposition was correct, then it was curtains for Kim! And for me: as she goes, so I go! My child, my family, my church, all of us were without hope if God was not real!

. . . my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God (Ps. 84:2b).

Nietzsche had several likeminded contemporaries who left their marks on society, equal to, if not surpassing his. Thinking of their iconoclastic contribution to the world on that forlorn night added insult to injury but I was powerless to stop the storm of these disturbing and disconcerting ideologies.

Karl Marx, for instance, further blackened the night with his atheistic shadow. This German born historical figure preceded Nietzsche in death by only twelve years. He too was a humanistic philosopher who held in derision people’s hope in God. As a writer and publisher, Marx may be the most widely known atheist of recent history. His ideas were circulated all over Europe and into other parts of the world in his lifetime through newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, and finally in book form. He thought of religion as a hindrance to society, for it kept the poor deluded and content in their misery. In his view, the church was just a clever tool in the hands of the socially powerful, used to legitimize the suppression of the masses. Thirty years after his death, his ideology was implemented in Russia, thanks in large part to Vladimir Lenin. The first goal of the communist party, once it had taken over Russia, was to get rid of the church. The plan failed, however. An underground resistance of Christians materialized and was strong enough that the eradication effort had to be modified to what became only an official and ongoing persecution. A generation later, the church was banned in China as the ideology of Karl Marx continued to produce more and more atheists in nation after nation.

As the night wore on, I wondered: Does the church have more going for itself than just a reactionary social resistance to varying political winds across history? O God, I wanted to believe so desperately; and I desired to believe with all my heart. But at that moment, in the stillness of the large hospital, I had nothing within my grasp to fortify what I wanted to believe.

Another avowed atheist to deepen the darkness on this night was Sigmund Freud. It was mandatory that seminary students become familiar with this world-renowned figure, especially the students pursuing a minor in psychology of religion, which included me. By birth, an Austrian, Freud was known for his psychoanalysis. In his work as a counseling therapist, he regarded religion as a superstition of the past or an obsessive neurosis of the present. At best, religion was a relic, an unproductive crutch for the weak, which he was known to say with measured insult that some people used as an escape