Mark Labberton:
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.
I’m Mark Labberton. Welcome to Conversing.
What a gift it is today to have Amy Low as our guest on Conversing. Amy, as you’ll discover, is a woman of many parts. She’s a professional with great leadership experience and capacity. She currently serves as the managing director for fellowships and nonprofit media at the Emerson Collective. She’s also a person who has lived a deep journey as a mother, as a spouse, as a divorcee, and as a cancer survivor. It’s all of those themes that come together in this quite beautiful and moving book that she’s written titled The Brave In-Between: Notes From the Last Room. Amy, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m eager for our conversation.
Amy Low:
Well, this is a joy. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, so thanks for having me.
Mark Labberton:
Your book, which is the primary thing that we’re going to be talking about, this amazing book that you’ve written is a book that like other biographies, autobiographies, touches on lots of different dimensions. But I’m particularly struck by the profundity of the book because it’s really about being in the last room, which is to say the room before your earthly life comes to its close, and there’s a sacredness about that, that I just want to pause and acknowledge that even though you’ve written this very public book and you’ve told intimate stories in public on other occasions, I just don’t want to ride roughshod over that or fail to just acknowledge that I consider a conversation with you about these things, a very profound and sacred thing. And therefore, even though you’re rehearsed in knowing the story and having lived it and written about it, it still holds the singularity of a moment, unlike other moments. So thank you for being willing to just step into this space and let frankly the rest of us step into this space with you.
Amy Low:
Yeah, well, I appreciate you acknowledging that. This last room is absolutely sacred ground. There’s no doubt about it. I will also just add, first of all, all of us will be there. Some of us will know it, some of us won’t. But to enter in to the last room and to be an accompaniment to someone who exists there requires extraordinary bravery and imagination and generosity. And I always say, “All are welcome.” You’re always welcome. So it’s actually a delightful that anyone wants to draw close to this because I think our natural instincts is to kind of step back, but stepping forward is an act of love, and it’s also the most human place of all. It just is.
Mark Labberton:
It is. So let’s step back. For those who haven’t yet read the book or who may simply want to know more about the book, I would love for you to just frame it. It’s a story that’s medical. It’s a story that’s psychological, emotional, spiritual, social. It’s public, it’s private, it’s full of celebration, but it’s also full of not only physical pain and struggle of disease, but also all kinds of emotional dynamics that you share very boldly and courageously in the telling of the story too. So let’s just assume someone doesn’t know about the book and you’re just setting it up for helping them to understand the premises and the story itself.
Amy Low:
Yeah. So when I was 48, I was feeling great. I had come through a really difficult and traumatic season. My marriage had collapsed. My husband of about 14 years, essentially left us. I have a son and a daughter. I had gone through some years what I call very much in the woods, but physically I was feeling fine. My son, daughter, and I were recovering and rebuilding our lives. And there was a day in the spring of 2019 where I just started feeling a little strange. I had sunny fevers. I was having a hard time getting through tennis matches, which I thought was weird, and I was just really tired. So I went to my doctor and we went chasing some theories, and shockingly, a couple of weeks later, I was told that I had stage four metastatic colon cancer, and it had, oddly, the reason I didn’t have any symptoms is that the original tumor was way up by my rib cage, so I wouldn’t have known it, but it had metastasized into a 15 centimetre tumor in my liver, which was a stunning thing to hear when I physically felt physically fine.
And so life changed very, very quickly. And initially I thought, “Well, I think I better get my affairs in order because the diagnosis was so dire.” And one of the things I learned in the first number of months is that while colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the US and the prognosis for anyone surviving more than five years is about 14%. So it is a terrible disease to get. My first few months were okay. I received a lot of chemo and I felt okay, and I had a very intense abdominal surgery at Stanford. The tumor had shrunk in my liver. So what I say now… So livers are wonderful because they grow back. And so my liver’s actually better now than it used to be. And instead of a colon, I have a semicolon because they took out just a teeny tiny little piece. And honestly, I got an upgrade. My gut’s perfectly fine. And for a while there I thought, “Oh, well, this is terrible.” But again, I seem okay. No one kind of knew I was sick.
And then we discovered what we call them mets, metastasis in my lung. And so the story for me really turned into the story of my lung. For the last four years, we’ve been dealing with these little mets in my lung, but even in almost not quite almost all that time, I still looked and felt kind of okay. I had terrible days, but most days seem kind of normal. And I began to wrestle with this duality of, okay, from all the statistical standpoint and from my medical’s team standpoint, I have a terrible prognosis. I don’t have long to live, and yet it’s so strange that I get up most days and go to work and kind of have a typical, interesting, wonderful day. And so I thought of myself metaphorically as living in what I call the last room. And that’s really the through line of the book, because barring some really outer rim miracle, that is just very true.
And it started to dawn on me that it’s an unusual place to inhabit if you’re like me. So I’ll just conclude the intro by saying, if you are very fortunate, I hope of course, first of all, we’re all going to be in the last room, but if you’re really fortunate, you enter the last room really tired, and there’s a very good chance your knee has hurt for seven years, you’re so exhausted, you might be 92 and you are ready, you know you’re there. Again, if you’re fortunate, you’re surrounded by good people, good care, good love, but you are a last room person and you know that. And I think there’s a level of acceptance that comes to that. Okay. So that’s one group of last room people.
Then there’s another group of last room people who feel wonderful. I mean, they could be Olympic athletes, it could be that great, but they have no idea that tomorrow they perhaps might be on their bike and they’re going to be clipped by a car and we’re going to lose them. And they never knew they were in the last room at all. And I’m in that funny third group of, I know I’m there, I feel pretty good, and yet I can’t undo this space that I’m in. And so I went looking for mentors who might have lived in this room the way that I occupy. If you let your imagination go, you’ll realise, “Oh, well, history is full of millions and millions of these people.” So I am certainly not unique, but I do think these are people who had a lot to teach me.
So I went to Paul and I’ve always loved Philippians. It’s always been my favorite of his letters. And I began to realise that this is a letter he wrote in a Roman prison, most likely, I think the last letter he wrote to an early church. And it’s just a deeply affectionate, very warm, his heart is just pulses through the entire letter and especially so in Philippians 4:8, when he just gives them his best advice about living with these virtues. And I wonder if he didn’t do that because he was a last room person. I think he knew that Caesar was growing close and his days were probably quite limited, and it was so important that he gave his dear friends and Philippi these admonitions. And I started holding those really close because initially when you read Philippians, it’s what is true, what is noble, what is right, pure, admirable, lovely, excellent, praiseworthy. At first you can think, “Well, these are kind of platitudes. I mean, who’s going to argue with the notion of what’s admirable? It’s lovely.” But they became more than that. They became lights for me.
And what was very often a very dark room and the stories of my life the last decade started to roll up to these virtues, and I thought there may be something here I could share, not just for last room people because I’ll just conclude here. I became more and more convinced if we lived those virtues of Philippians 4:8 in all the rooms of our lives, which is the invitation, well, first of all, that’s transformational. Second of all, I think fewer of us would end up in the last room who shouldn’t be there. And that’s a little bit of a big leap. I can talk about that if you want, but I think they’re as transcended as they are pragmatic.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
So that’s how I structured the book. But as you said, it’s cancer, but it’s a lot more, there’s a lot of storytelling I do about what happened in my marriage and then even ultimately what happened to me when I got a little bit lost in the puzzle of this last room space.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes. I do want to say, Amy, your writing is really remarkable.
Amy Low:
Oh, thanks.
Mark Labberton:
It’s remarkable in its honesty and the stories that you actually tell, but also, it’s beautiful without being decorative at all, it feels like you’re just telling this story, but you’re telling it in an artful and raw way all at the same time. That’s a pretty unusual combination, and I think it makes the book and the pain of the book and the pain of your story and the heartache at various places, all the more able to be seen for what those events and experiences really were. I wonder if you could give people a kind of narrative line from 2019 till now. You did that in a summary version, but just what are the big chapters that you try to cover in the book and how they each make their contribution just in a summary way, and then we’ll go into it in more detail.
Amy Low:
Well, the book is essentially structured in three acts. Act one is the betrayal of my marriage, the betrayal of my husband. He had a long-term affair that I discovered. Act two is the betrayal of my body, having no idea that… I’m the first person in my family to even get sick. No one else has cancer. I was too young to be screened at the time. So that was a complete shock. And then the third act is really a bit of the betrayal of myself, how I lost a lot of my own sensibility and my own values getting very tangled up in this chaotic space of the last room. Now, I will say, and thank you for the kind words about my book. I worked really hard to make, and this is very richly anchored in storytelling.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
I worked hard because some of this is really funny. Well, in the sense that it’s absurd and it’s ridiculous, and some parts are funny, but the one thing I caution folks if they’re like, “God, this seems like a really heavy book.” The response I’ve gotten more than anything is it’s not as heavy as you might think, and there’s just as much beauty as there is terrible. And I do find places where you have to exhale and laugh a little bit, but I’m dealing with tough material. I mean, there’s just no doubt about it, but I wanted very much for this to not be a lament. Laments are beautiful, laments matter, but there are elements of lament, but there’s also deep elements of levity and relatability, and that’s what I hope for the book.
Mark Labberton:
Well, I think grief, which I’ve had a lot of personal experience with, but I’ve also had a lot of pastoral experience with over the years, has put me in the context of being with people in the last room as a regular part of life for decades. There’s always multiple people that I am with in the last room, and that’s as true now as it has been at any other time of my life. And it brings forth for people a whole variety of different responses, of course, and every story is distinct, but what strikes me about your storytelling and about the actual story itself, not just the expression of the story, is the way that you have sought and are seeking to be so fully alive in the thing that is actually really happening.
Some people, you can feel them straining to try to create a distance between themselves and the actual things that are happening, whether it’s everything from the diagnosis to the treatments to whatever, or to the grief, the loss of relationships, or the ending of seasons of life. But in this case, it feels to me like you have vigorously, and your storytelling has even more to this, vigorously leaned into the raw reality. Has that always been part of your temperament or did that feel like it was even something more true in the course of this season?
Amy Low:
Well, I’ll say something here that strikes some people as a bit provocative, and I’m going to hedge a bit because what I’m about to say sounds universal, but it’s not. It is just true to me. I can say with confidence for me that divorce was far harder than cancer. So when I had to grapple with the gravity of my disease and the diagnosis and what I was going to face and all of that, I had come through a space of the woods that I can say was far more ominous, far harder, far more heartbreaking. Now, whether or not that gives you some deeper muscles to kind of come into the last room a bit clearer, I don’t really know, but I think maybe. Now the reason I’m going to hedge is because, well, look, first of all, every divorce is different. I appreciate for some people it’s a passageway to freedom. For other people, it’s a slow, slow, slow kind of incremental space of grief.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Amy Low:
Mine was shocking. It was sudden. It was traumatic.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
It had every hard edge that you can possibly imagine, mainly because I adored and loved, loved, loved, loved, loved my husband.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
So because of that, I can say, “Well, look, see, divorce is a lot harder than cancer.” Now I say that, that’s a tricky thing to say because a lot of people would say, well, that’s not true at all, because somebody else’s cancer might be very, very different. And their divorce was actually proved to be a healing. So I’ll just leave that there. But that chapter of my life, I think gave me eyes to face the very hardest thing of all.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
And cancer as it turned out, was the second-hardest thing of all. I will say there is something for people of faith, when you’re a last room person, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about heaven and knowing that this isn’t the last room of all what it is it’s actually a bridge to the best room of all. Now, this is tricky because we’re meant to be… We love life. We’re created to be alive.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
I don’t want to die. I adore living.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
But see, divorce didn’t quite offer that same bridge. Divorce was a space of, well, look, see, this is going to be about healing, it’s going to be about sorrow. And see, that’s a different construct.
Mark Labberton:
Much more ragged, yeah.
Amy Low:
That’s right. So there’s a space in the book that I feel probably the most strongly about in the chapter called What is Right, where I really come to reckoning about truly understanding what forgiveness is, and that’s one of the gifts of the last room is I really don’t think I would’ve gotten quite that far without this whole other element that I was facing physically.
Mark Labberton:
To some degree what I’m hearing is that the tremors and the raw experience of all of that and having to come to terms with that around your divorce meant that you were more battle-ready perhaps for the challenges then of needing to lean in and do all the same deep truth telling and soul-searching and deep work. But I think this interesting contrast from divorce into an unknown, if we want to think of it that way, from dying into a place of hope in the arms and love of God. Yeah, that makes sense, Amy. It’s a very significant point.
I do think that one of the profound parts of the book is that as you come to terms with what forgiveness meant in your divorce, then maybe one of the wildest and most unexpected parts of the book is the way that your former husband comes back into the story and the ways that you had to work that out. I just want to say during that section of the book, I just found myself with my jaw on the floor just thinking this is an unbelievable thing that she’s describing and give people that are listening to this some window into that.
Amy Low:
Yeah. Well, one of the peculiarities of my situation is that my former husband, we lived in Seattle, and as everything fell apart and we tried mightily to save the marriage, but the wounds were just far too hard. I was fortunate to receive a really wonderful career opportunity here in the Bay Area. I live here in Silicon Valley, and the agreement was he said, “Okay, take the job whether we can recover the marriage or not, I’ll be there.” Because he was consulting at the time, “We’ll co-parent and I’ll sell the house in Seattle and we’ll figure out another chapter of our lives.” And I said, “Okay.” Because I thought, “Well, look, I can’t take this job and do this entirely by myself,” because my kids at the time were 10 and 8. And lo and behold, I got my kids here, got them settled in school, started this new role, and about three, four months later, he let me know, “Yeah, I don’t still think I’m going to live there. I think I’d rather live in LA.”
And I thought, “LA is like 300 miles away. How can I do this by myself? This is so terrible.” So I won’t belabour the logistics, but it was another profound loss. And yet in that seven years, let me think, no, no, six years I guess, he was oddly enough, a very present and wonderful dad. He was around my kids a lot. They flew down to see him a lot, and whenever I travelled for work, he would be with them. But as a practical matter, I didn’t see him. So for several years, I would land at the airport at 2:00 and he would have been flying out at 12:00. And so we weren’t the typical divorced people who went to the baseball game and kind of sat near each other and rooted for our kid. I just never saw him.
He was sort of a ghost to me. So I got really sick, and of course, the two members of the stage of my story who mattered the most were my two children. And immediately once you hit that level, you realise, whoa, the person then who matters the most needs to come in from the wings is their dad. And so he reentered and was very, very present in those first days. And it was very awkward because I hadn’t seen him in so long, but I knew it was right for my kids to have their dad because they looked at me and they thought, “Is mom dying?” You need your dad. So it started there and then it really began to evolve, which is what you alluded to, I had a significant surgery, it was around Christmastime, and for all the reasons that I knew were right, the person that was best equipped to essentially care for me at my most physically vulnerable was my kids’ dad.
They needed to see their dad loving me because if I was going to disappear in a few weeks, that is the last memory I wanted them to have. And if that was going to happen, I needed to grapple with this idea of forgiveness in a far more rugged way than I had grown to feel okay about, which was the language that I grew up with in my own Christian home. Well, he’s very wounded and I’m better now, so he’ll be fine and I’ll be fine. And I wish him well, and there’s no bitterness.
I was good at all of those words, but I had not fully embraced a deeper, deeper space theologically of forgiveness. And I also was mortified that of all the people in my life who was going to care for me in the most intimate ways would be him. I would’ve rather had my sister or my best friend or someone else, but I thought, “Nope, I want my kids to wake up on Christmas morning knowing that he’s going to hold my hand down the stairs and he’s going to make sure I don’t fall,” and that’s what I want them to see. And so I think, I hope that was my best parenting moment, but that’s only half of it. The other half was coming to a far, far deeper understanding of what I learned about forgiveness.
Mark Labberton:
So let’s explore that. I think your way of summarizing kind of a classic language that often happens around forgiveness all makes sense. But what deeper place did you go to and how did that unfold? I think the way you explore that in the book is one of the richest parts of the book.
Amy Low:
So I think before my notion of forgiveness is the idea of somebody asking for permission or an excuse. Like, “Will you excuse me, please?”
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
“Sure. I don’t really know if I want to, but sure.” That’s the flat version of forgiveness. Here’s what I actually learned. What I actually learned was, no, no, if you’re really going to do this, you are going to move to a place where I’m going to see this man wholly and separate from what he did. In fact, what he did has nothing to do with who he is. In fact, who he is is a child of God. And that is the person in my life who I will say, “I believe in you, I forgive you.” And that is all I see. And I will say this, you are 8 million things. You are messy. You are marvellous. You’re generous, you’re hilarious. You are so flawed. You are so generous. You’re so stingy. All of us are. Because the minute you step into that, you realise, “No, no, I think I’m talking about myself,” because all of us are all these things.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes.
Amy Low:
And then you kind of find, “My goodness, that’s really an interesting idea.” And yet the wound is all I saw for so long. And so what I thought was, if I’ve really come to this deeper place of I don’t think I see the wound, I don’t see the harm, I just see you, then humanity is restored. Now, here’s the wild puzzle that I really struggled with because cognitively I started to turn this on for size, and I knew it was right for my kids, but because see, this affects my behavior, my interaction, my conversations.
Mark Labberton:
Sure.
Amy Low:
It goes from being flat and kind of thank you, and I’m out of the room to looking someone in the eyes and saying, “You’ve been heroic. Thank you for being here.” Everything begins to change. Well, what I was most afraid of is that I thought I would be erased from the story because if I were that kind of heroic and that I only see this, I no longer see the harm, I thought, “Well, look, that’s hard enough even if you’re healthy. See if you’re sick, who’s going to tell your story?”
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
What if my kids are 29 and don’t remember?
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
Is it his job to tell the story? And if I’ve fully forgiven him, will he not even think to do it because he’ll be kind of off scot-free? I was so consumed by that fear, and the best part of what I learned through all of this in this notion of remember the stage, the two most important people on the stage are my two kids. I realised, “No, wait a minute. If we cross over this bridge together and I have fully forgiven their dad and I look at them and say, “Your dad is beautiful.” Now he has his own work to do. He’s got to work out what he did to us, but he’s at his core. He’s beautiful because God made him beautiful. What that does is it actually gives the best gift of all to my two kids to create a new story. What they’re not going to do through their adulthood is keep litigating the old story and holding maybe bitterness that mom had when she was sick, and how dare you? She was so sick. How dare you?
And that’s to me a very cultural element that I think so many of us are stuck and generationally living out the wounds that so many of us carry. And I started to become just captivated the idea of this could enable my two children to tell new stories and to create something new. And that to me is ultimately the gift of forgiveness. You get to create something new.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes.
Amy Low:
So I spent a long time wrestling with that. I will say at the end here, nothing about this is linear. Did I have some bad days where I’m like, “Get out of here, I cannot handle it, this is too much”?
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
You bet. I think we have to give ourselves a ton of grace in this stuff.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes.
Amy Low:
I could sometimes see him and think, “Are you kidding me? I mean, this is so awful.” But the core of it did shift.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
And I think that’s a miracle.
Mark Labberton:
I’m Mark Labberton. Thanks for listening with me. One of the frequent definitions that’s used for forgiveness is that it’s releasing people from the negative consequences of their bad behavior. And that sort of paradigm is at least a piece of what you’re describing, that you’re releasing his life from being defined only by the wound that he caused, and not by the totality of who he is is a person created in the image of God, but also a person that has great capacities to love and to care and to support and encourage. Is that an apt way of describing what you’re describing, or does that feel quite different than what you’ve been naming?
Amy Low:
I think a little different in my situation, because I think harm comes in lots of different-
Mark Labberton:
Indeed.
Amy Low:
… flavours. I know what happened for me is that the shame was released.
Mark Labberton:
Interesting.
Amy Low:
And so to be seen truly as opposed to seen with this filter of harm released the shame. And I happened to have an ex-husband who was just riddled by shame. So see, not everybody does. See, some people think, well, look, there’s nothing really weird about what I did. And you think, “Okay, well, so that’s a different project actually,” but this release of shame I mean, to me, I thought a lot about the prodigal son, and I think it’s harder than we understand to give yourself permission to be truly loved and to be truly released by the shame. I think we gloss over that too often because we care so deeply about how we’re thought of and our reputations matter so much.
I had a friend once describe it as, and it’s a little, I don’t know, it’s a little tripe, but she said, “Well, at its essence, it’s holy amnesia.” She’s like, “You’ve just totally forgotten about it.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s it. I don’t know when I’m ever going to forget about it.” But I like the notion of that, of like, “No, no, no. See, you live on the other side of it.” And I’ve always kind of held that in my hip pocket. I like that.
Mark Labberton:
It’s like Bryan Stevenson’s comment that we shouldn’t be remembered for the worst thing we’ve ever done. And that’s another aspect of forgiveness, which I think comes through in the book in a way that is really quite remarkable. I will say that as I was reading the book and trying to as deeply as I could absorb the story and the consequences of the story as it was unfolding, even the period that you described as a betrayal of yourself where you felt like you were wandering in a way that wasn’t consistent with who you were. Even in that part of the book, I found a tremendous sense of legitimate grace that you were extending to yourself even as you were simultaneously confessing, that there were certain things about that chapter that were not what you would’ve wished and would not have unfolded in that way. And it felt to me like that was in a certain sense as grace can often be a gift that even in its struggle and pain was also redemptive. Is that correct?
Amy Low:
No, I think that’s exactly right. I worked really hard to be as truthful and frankly uneven as possible because there’s a risk here in coming to these beautiful aha moments and wrapping them up with this really thoughtful bow that I think actually betrays the complexity of what we’re talking about. And I think, I know I would’ve benefited from more contemporary writing, especially when I was going through my divorce, but certainly when I was sick about, let’s just get into the complexity of this. This is terrible and God is so faithful in the terrible, but can I mention how terrible it is and how flawed I am? And that’s not because I don’t believe, and it’s not because I’m not faithful.
I would just like to note this is just a broken, broken season, and I worked very hard to not gloss over that. But I also worked very hard to point the utter humanity of that because I am just certain that most of us carry deep brokenness, but we, maybe it’s not as pronounced as mine, but we all carry these little wells of sadness, and we don’t give ourselves permission too much to know how to describe it without feeling a bit defensive. And if anything, the invitation of my book is like, “Let it out. Let’s just do it.” I love the epigraph of the book, which is one that I know many people have used, but Frederick Buechner’s beautiful observation that, “Here’s the world, beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” And that’s the key sentence, don’t be afraid.
And the more I spent time writing, the more I realised this really is a book about grappling with fear. It really is. And I think that’s why for me, divorce was harder because I woke up afraid every single day, and it was grief, but it was really fear-based grief. Cancer was like, “This is so terrible.” I’m afraid. For sure, I’m afraid. But also, I knew I was part of a larger story, and I thought, “Well…” And there’s another great Frederick Buechner line where he says, “The worst thing is not the last thing,” which is really for him. He’s like, “Well, see, that’s proof of the empty tomb.” Right?
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Amy Low:
See, that was the worst thing of all. See, it wasn’t the last thing. And I thought, well, I mean cancer’s not going to be the last thing. Cancer’s going to lead to this other thing. Now, the hardest part, the part where I’m just crushed and I sob because I don’t gloss over this, the worst possible thing about being sick is leaving my kids. Here’s a little just word to listeners, please don’t ever say kids are so resilient. Stop it, take it out, out, out, out, out, out. Let’s not say that ever again. It makes us feel better.
First of all, I’m not even sure it’s true. What you’re really trying to say is the great hope is that kids are going to have longevity and kids are going to have new stories. But if you don’t acknowledge that these kids, however, if they’re 6 or 19, will be devastated. Now, who are we going to be about that? How do we want to think about that? That is an act of love. Kids are resilient. It’s not an act of love. It’s a way to give us permission to say, “I think that part of the project’s going to be fine.” Now, how are your headaches?
Like, “No, you missed it. You’ve missed it.” And I think any parent would understand. Don’t ever say that. While I appreciate there’s a truth that’s held in that, it just creates, I think, extraordinary harm. Anyway, I have my own list of things of dos and don’ts.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Well, I think that observation is a really, really important one because in a way, one of the other things that stands out in the book is the way that you really do, I think artfully, but candidly, let all of these raw facts sort of get picked apart for the way they get easily summarised by language. And your language is a deliberate attempt to try to disentangle things and to make tangled things clearer. That must be one of the characteristics of your life and your work life, I would suppose. But I’m also thinking it really matters in the core of this storytelling, because you’re creating an opportunity for people to make sense of some pieces that may well be resident inside complicated problems, but which people are not necessarily have either not taken time or not had the inclination to do the kind of diagnostic analysis that I think your book really provides with compassion and with real story, not just as an abstraction.
Amy Low:
Well, I have a dear friend, Shirley, who makes an important contribution in the last part of the book when she names my own little struggle. But she said something to me once, she said, “You tend to write a metaphor.” And I do. I mean, not everybody’s a metaphor person, but you can’t get through four pages of the book without, “Oh my goodness, she’s on her eighth metaphor.” So I worked through a lot of metaphors, but I do, because she said to me once, “Well, look, see, metaphors are places that hold ambiguity.” And I really love that sentiment because there is a deep mystery to what’s unfolding in all of our stories. And we so desperately want to know what is going on, what is going on?
And as it turns out, what’s going on is a grand mystery, and you’re a part of it. You barely know where it’s headed. Your job is to be as faithful and as unafraid as you possibly can be. And while you move through this mystery, you may find toeholds of, “Is it a little bit more like that or is it a little bit more like this?” And inside of those places, I think we can find a little bit of peace around that ambiguity. So for me, I call it the last room. See, for other people, they might call it something else. But I can see that in my mind because it’s a real place. It’s a place I’d like people to visit. Not all the time. Sometimes it’s better to find your own, but it’s a place that’s warm and lovely and was made just for me, and I didn’t want to be there.
But this is the room that I have. And so all of a sudden you can start to feel your way around it. And if you’re not a metaphor person, I don’t know how you do it. It must be just very tricky because you’re more of an analytical person. So you’re trying to put maybe puzzle pieces together. We’re all wired a little differently. For me, the language that I use is really based on trying to say, “Is that it was a little bit more like this? Is it was a little bit more like that?”
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
Because I’ve embraced the mystery of all of this.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
It’s very important. I’ll just note this. One of the most important elements of the book for me is that I do think this decade, this decade of often life-changing mountaintop moments that I’ve had, because you’ll know from some of the chapters, when I have had joy. Holy cow. It has been joy upon joy upon joy. So I have had beauty, beauty, beauty, and I’ve had terrible, terrible, terrible. I deeply, deeply believe that all of this has deep purpose. I know that there are others out there who kind of on the spectrum have gone a little bit more toward it, a little bit of a rejection of that idea of, “No, no.” I mean, just the notion of, well, everything happens for a reason. That actually is hurtful language. I would never say that to someone, but nor would I say… See, the worst thing anyone has ever said to me, it was only one person. The worst thing anyone ever said to me was, “This whole thing is so random. I’m so sorry. I was really unlucky.”
And I thought, “No, no. The minute you call this random, the minute this doesn’t have any meaning. And if it doesn’t have meaning, why on earth am I even showing up for a scan? I mean, why would I do that?” And so the mystery has great meaning. I think it has great purpose, but we better be careful with that because we don’t want to assign our little formula of, “Doesn’t God have a great plan for your life?” Well, yes. And you may have a terrible, terrible, several decades of pain. So what do you do about that? And I think this book is an invitation to grapple with that tension in a little bit more of an earnest way, but also very human storytelling way. I don’t know how else to talk about this except through stories. So it’s very character rich.
I mean, even when I compare the two hospitals at Stanford, what comes out of that is that I end up falling in love with beauty and loveliness and the people that were behind the buildings as opposed to just the buildings. So there’s always something to see. I mean, if there’s one great just gem of a last room, and again, you can do this in every room, of course, but I will tell you what, you see things. I miss them all. I miss so many things. You spot moments that are so small, and I just have awe. So I know that’s veering a little bit to the cliche. It’s a lovely habit though anyone could adopt whether they’re in room two or room nine.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. Yeah, that’s a great way of capturing it. One of the things that comes through loud and clear is that this is not a private journey, and that there necessarily involves, first of all, the medical people who it turns out are actually people and not just doctors and who have different ways of expressing care, embodying their support, the nurses, the technicians, the whole panoply of people. But I’m here thinking more about the way that you refer to various friends and their capacity to surround and encourage you. I wonder if you could just give people a little bit of a flavour of that, because certainly your journey has been made of many parts, but friends have been a very significant part of it.
Amy Low:
Yeah, I’ve been really lucky to have wonderful friends, some from humongous chapters ago who I lost touch with who kind of came back. So that’s a fun surprise that happens to a lot of people. But one of the things that I’ve discovered is, and this is just true for everybody, all of us have what I call kind of our signature thing, an asset that we’re particularly good at. Hopefully most of us are good at a lot of things, but most of us have that. I kind of have that, I’m good at this really one thing. So my friends brought their core asset to this project in a way that kind of really lined up quite beautifully. So I’ve got a wonderful girlfriend named Jacqueline. She is as left brain as they come, like we’ll have dinner and I’ll be into my eighth metaphor. And she’s like, “What are you talking? I don’t even know. Is it a room or not a room?” She’s a very left brain person. So we love each other, but we just talk very differently.
Anyway, there’s a scene early on where it looks uncertain as to whether or not I’ll even get surgery. And if I don’t get surgery, then we’re just talking about months. We’re not talking about years. And I called her and I was sobbing, and I said, “I don’t think it’s going to happen.” And what was so great about it is what she said and what she didn’t say. What she didn’t say is, “I think it’s going to be okay. I mean, you don’t know until Friday, right? So let’s just wait until Friday. I think it’s going to be okay.” She didn’t say that. She said, “This is awful.” She’s like, “Do you really think it might happen?” I said, “Yeah, it doesn’t look good.” And she’s like, “Yeah, that’s bad. That’s really, really bad.” So she had the courage to name what was true.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
And then she said, “Okay, what’s your worst fear?” One of the best questions you could ever ask anyone. And I just was like, “Well, Connor and Lucy are 16 and 14. It’s too soon. I can’t leave them. There’s so much I have to tell them.” And she said, “Okay, let’s do this. If we don’t have good news on Friday, why don’t next month, why don’t we get your best friends together? Let’s do a weekend retreat and let’s just talk about all this stuff that you’re going to want them to know and get your best people together. And let’s whiteboard it. Let’s just figure out, do you want someone good on career? Let’s get a good career person because they might be the right mentor to both kids. Who’s good at fashion? Because we might need someone really good at fashion for… Do you know anyone who surfs? Because somebody might want to teach them how to surf.”
And I’m like, this is a… And I’m like, “I don’t want to do a weekend retreat. This sounds terrible.” And she’s like, “Yeah, you do. Yeah, you really, really do because that’s your worst fear.” And I thought, “This is the bravest friend I’ve ever had.” And she said, “If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it, but I think we could pull it off.” And I thought, “Okay, that’s amazing.” So I have the Jacquelines of the world who go straight to kind of-
Mark Labberton:
Yes, exactly.
Amy Low:
But I also have comforting friends. I have a lovely friend named Tracy who embodies… I know it’s a bit of a cliche for those who’ve been trained to be Chaplains, but you know that truism don’t just do something; stand there.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Amy Low:
Do you know that?
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
It’s so beautiful. She’s the ultimate stand there person. So she’s visited me so many times and we just don’t need to talk. We can just be present.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah.
Amy Low:
We can just talk about how terrible it is. And that’s such an exhale because she’s the least fixer person. She’s just what I call an accompaniment.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Amy Low:
“I’m going to just be right next to you.” Okay. And then I have a lovely friend, Patty, who is the ultimate, ultimate fixer because when I was first moved, her daughter, my daughter became fast friends, so that she and I had coffee just to kind of the moms to get to know each other. And she figured out my story and she thought, “Well, this is terrible.” And she immediately was like, “Well, you’re going to need help figuring out dentist, right? And do you ever need help with carpool? Because I’m a retired pediatrician, so I mean, I can always pick up Lucy. That’s easy.” And she just takes at her notebook and starts writing down all these little… She called me, these are the easy things.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes.
Amy Low:
Now, now remember, I knew her eight minutes, eight minutes. And then she’s like, but there’s going to be harder things, so let’s save the harder things for our next coffee. But dentist, carpool, if she ever just needs to be at my house a little bit after school, if you’re late, let’s do that. And I thought, “Who are you people?” This was before I even got sick. So the point of this is all of us have these lovely assets. This is a lovely… These stories I hope are memorable enough that readers will say, “Do you know what? I’m like a Patty. I’m good at that. I can do dentist and I can do carpools. Why don’t I just offer?” And all the person has to do is say, “No, I’m good.” Great. No problem. For me, it was life-changing,
Mark Labberton:
Right. Absolutely.
Amy Low:
And then five years later and Patty’s in the ER with me, but it starts with, “Let me help you find a dentist.” So that’s a postcard of some friends. I have others that had very particular roles.
Mark Labberton:
It’s a beautiful portrait. And because it happens, as we both know that some of the people who are these friends are people that I also know. I can just validate again as an outsider that the characterization of them is accurate, and the power of their capacity and willingness and genuineness in standing toward you and getting closer in doing the particular thing as you say that they can really do is just an amazing, remarkable thing. Not everyone does have that, but more people have it than they might think.
Amy Low:
They do. And most of the time they’re really small. You don’t have to be this miraculous mountaintop person. What I’ve found is, “Oh my gosh, they’re kind of miniscule.” I think for me, and if you’ve got last room people listening to this, one of the quagmires has been, it can be very complicated over a long stretch of time to basically only be the receiver and that I’m still working through. Because you just feel so… Your instinct is you want to give back. You want to give back. But I’m at a spot right now where physically I can’t really give back. But a friend of mine was here a weekend ago, and I was lamenting this to her, and I said, because she was just doing, oh, she was emptying the dishwasher, was doing everything. And I said, “I hate that I can’t give back.” And she looked at me and she goes, “You’re a book. You gave it back. You have to understand that that’s…”
She goes, “Do you not know that’s the thing that you’re good at?” And I thought, “Well, it’s a book. It’s different.” She’s like, “No, most of us don’t really story tell this way.” And it was funny because, see, I thought this was just something inside of me. And she’s like, “No, I think we’re actually all going to be better for it.” But isn’t that funny that it only dawned on me when she pointed it? Because I thought, “I don’t think that’s super helpful.” She’s like, “No, it could be. I think you should just let that go.”
Mark Labberton:
Exactly. Yes. I think you’ve created something that can be very, very helpful to people.
Amy Low:
I hope so. But I do, it’s a different book and it’s something I hope people talk about, but those who have to be receivers, have to adopt a very different disposition. And I’m one of them. And I’ll tell you, I think it’s really hard.
Mark Labberton:
Amy, this has been such a rich conversation, and the vulnerability of your story that is in the book is just really something very exceptional. And the sacredness, as you say, of the last room is profound. So I wonder, you said earlier that you have done a lot of reflecting on heaven. Tell us something, as we finish our conversation, tell us something about heaven that you found yourself dwelling on, and that I hope is a word of strength and hope to you and maybe just some others who are listening.
Amy Low:
Okay, now you have to give me a little room here, because what I’m going to say might be borderline bananas, but it’s the thing I’ve been given to my little brain, and I-
Mark Labberton:
We’re here to receive. We’re here to receive.
Amy Low:
Okay. So we lost my dad two weeks after I got sick. And my dad was a gem. He was just a treasure. He was a last room person. But see, he didn’t know. He had, we think maybe kind of a sudden heart attack. So we lost him very suddenly, and we didn’t really understand he was sick. And I think for a couple of weeks he held this dread of me being sick, and it was kind of too much for him, which I don’t blame myself at all for him exiting fast, but I don’t… I also think he might’ve been like, “Do you know what? I may be a better advocate for this girly on the other side.” We don’t know. But we lost my dad fast, and I was really lucky to have one of the world’s best dads. So my dad raised us, my brother and sister, and I, to love…
I talk about this in the book, sports, but especially sports without clocks. Because see, golf, tennis, and baseball, there’s so much hope all the time. You just never know. Basketball, there’s a buzzer and you know it’s going to end. But baseball, every at bat, the whole story could change. The whole story could change. And that’s especially why he loved loved baseball. I would sit next to him and he taught me how to keep score. And he’d say, “You know what…” Because say, “How much time is left?” I was little. And he’s like, “We don’t know. It’s a mystery. It could be 15 minutes. It could be two hours. Isn’t that the best part?” Like, “Ah, I want to go home.”
But he just embraced the goodness of baseball. He played in the minor leagues for a while too. So anyway, okay, with that, a friend of mine a couple of months ago sent me, it was like a little Instagram thing. This year the Seattle Mariners have created what I think is the most delicious, cute baseball moment of all. So somewhere in the seventh or eighth inning, they release, anybody can look this up. They release little parachutes all over the stadium, and underneath the parachute is harnessed in a hot dog. So they only release 100 or 200 of these. So you have to be very, very lucky to grab the hot dog. But the parachutes are so adorable, because they sort of sprinkle down-
Mark Labberton:
I can picture this.
Amy Low:
… on all the people, and you’re like, “Oh, they’ve released the Frankfurters.” The parachutes are coming down and they play this song. Okay, so it’s the song from the ’80s. The song is Heaven on Earth. It’s a Belinda Carlisle song. But I thought it’s the song. I mean, the whole point is you are now sitting in this ballpark watching baseball. Hot dogs, you might get one, and this is what heaven will be like. This is it.
Mark Labberton:
Raining hot dogs.
Amy Low:
Yes. So I, in my darkest moments, I’ll close my eyes and I think, “Okay, somehow my dad and I are going to watch a baseball game. I’m certain of it within minute five of a glory of heaven. And if there are not hot dogs raining down with little parachutes, I think I’ve missed the story.” Now all of us are going to have our own version of parachuting hot dogs. I get it. For some people it’s the 12th hole at The Masters. For other people, it’s getting to see a puppy for the first time, discover a flower. It’s beauty upon beauty upon beauty. But there’s a joy about that moment that just engulfed my heart. And I thought, I still am in the most early stages of what is this really going to be? But if it’s truly paradise and if it’s truly joy, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it on this side, and I think we’re going to see it in abundance. So I just love that they use the song, this is Heaven on Earth. I thought, I think they may have nailed it. So anyway-
Mark Labberton:
That is too good, Amy.
Amy Low:
… that is my rather-
Mark Labberton:
Too good.
Amy Low:
… my rather slightly bananas take on what was a beautiful question, but maybe we’ll just leave it there.
Mark Labberton:
Absolutely. No, I think it’s a wonderful story and an exact taste, again, of the quality of your storytelling and of the profanity, whimsicalness, honesty, candor, love, joy, beauty of your book, which I just hope many, many people will have an opportunity to read and to let it really speak to them.
Amy Low:
Oh, you’re so lovely to endorse it. Yeah. And if we can’t just laugh at… I mean, if you don’t giggle at that, you’re asleep. You got to wake up. So that’s the great hope is that we all wake up and we laugh at the good stuff and be brave at the hard stuff.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah. Amy Low, thank you so much for this conversation.
Amy Low:
Thank you. This was such a treat.
