The Dance – The Rev. Jack Crandall found the courage, faith and hope to overcome a long tango with cancer”

By Dale Emch

Photographs by Nancy Gilstrap, Independent-Mail Photos

Printed Sunday, February 4, 1996

**Much gratitude to the author and to the Anderson Independent who graciously granted their permission to include this story on  www.jackcrandall.com **

Rev. Jack Crandall describes cancer as a brute who yanked him onto the dance floor and led for a year and a half.  He broke the brute's grip last summer and tried to dance off to his old life. But cancer has a long reach and the pastor knows he will continue to feel at least the touch of its shadow for the rest of his years.

What gets someone through the experience of cancer is any­body's guess. Faith, hope, courage, God, luck? Probably all of these elements.

Is a pastor better equipped to deal with the ordeal than the rest of us?

Mr. Crandall isn't sure. Surprisingly, though, he feels lucky, in a way, to have gone through the experience.

"The 'Why me?' questions have really been 'Why has all this good happened to me?'" Mr. Crandall said. "I don't believe God causes cancer - God picks people out and it happens to them. So having the cancer didn't really affect my belief system. If anything, it reinforced it."

Having that belief system to draw on helped him get through the ordeal, which played out as a gut-twisting good news, bad news drama until he received his clean bill of health last summer.

The dance started in November 1993 when Mr. Crandall was told he had a large tumor in his right kidney. Bad news. The good news prognosis was that the cancer was likely in the kid­ney only and removing the kidney would remove the cancer.

The bad news, delivered shortly after that prognosis, was that he also had cancer in his liver and on his spine. "Mr. Crandall, you have incurable renal-cell carcinoma and it has metastasized to other areas," his doctor told him. The words knocked the wind out of him. He still remembers the numbness he felt walking out of the office with his wife, Betty Jane, to a dreary fall day.

"I remember the feeling of standing and embracing in the parking lot," he said. " .. .It was probably just holding on for real. I sure was grateful that she was there."

He lived with the bad news until February 1991 when he found out the star-burst spot on his liver was symmetrical and thus not cancerous. This was in the midst of the Epiphany season, which symbolized by a star. That was good news, but still had the cancer in his spine to worry about.

More bad news came in June 1994 when a cancerous spot showed up in the bed that once: housed his kidney. Another bad news blow was delivered when it was discovered in August of 1994 that cancer had spread to a muscle in his upper right arm.

The next dose of good news was delayed for a while as immunotherapy (chemotherapy) was initiated and endured.  And eventually, surgery got rid of any cancer that chemotherapy could not. In July of 1995, his doctor poked her head in his Houston room, where he received much of his treatment, to tell him everything looked great.  He and Mrs. Crandall felt like that could jump through the ceiling, but they kept their celebration low key because they knew many other patients on the floor weren’t receiving such great news.

“It was exultation-“Oh, thank God,” he said of the feeling.  “Betty Jane and I both teared up and hugged each other.  We were overwhelmed with gratitude.  We thought we could fly home without the plane.”

Woven throughout this drama was a support system that Mr. Crandall said kept even the baddest of the bad news scenarios from dragging him down too far. 

Throughout all the ups and downs, all the trips to Houston, all the scary surgeries and chemotherapy treatments, was a group of friends that heaped affection upon him and Mrs. Crandall.

That collection of people has come to be known as his buffalos.  The term was originated by Bob Stone, a man who wrote about his experiences with cancer before succumbing to the disease last year.  Upon receiving his diagnosis, Mr. Stone wrote friends and acquaintances and asked them for prayers, funny cards, books and uplifting conversation because he didn’t feel he could battle cancer on his own.  He called them buffalos because the animal has proven so resilient, bouncing back after being close to extinction.

Mr. Crandall adopted the idea and soon buffalos were pounding the earth all around him.

A scene:  Early one Sunday morning in December of 1993, not long after an operation to remove the kidney with the tumor, Mr. Crandall was greeted by a silent herd of 80 small wooden buffalos standing sentry in the garden near the church entrance.   The message those silent buffalos were sending still resonates with him.  “We love you.  We support you they seemed to say.”

“I just had a big tennis ball in my throat.”

Another scene:  On Joy Sunday of 1993, the third of Advent, some church members came to Mr. Crandall’s home to visit him.  Soon after they arrived came another knock upon his door.  In streamed the choir from Bethel United Methodist Church of Pendleton.  The group formed a ring around his wife and him and stared singing “Joy to the World.”

Of these moments and others like them, Mr. Crandall has said it’s hard to stay down when so many people are holding you up.

Through the years it was Mr. Crandall who was called upon to hold others up.  He was the one at the hospital, the home, the funeral who could be counted on to lend support.  It became hard for him when he realized people had been holding back their own problems because they didn’t want to heap additional trouble on his shoulders.

But dealing with other people’s troubles is a major part of his life.  Dealing with issues such as mortality was not going to bring him down, he said, because as a pastor he had been attuned to the idea throughout his career.

“By virtue of this job, you’re involved with people going through the death process,” Mr. Crandall said.  “and when you conduct a funeral, if you’re listening to anything you are saying, you’re also talking to yourself, for yourself.  For me, each funeral I conduct puts me in touch with my own mortality.”

Cancer, though, has a way of bringing that notion to the fore.  And being a “cancer person” has provided him with knowledge he could have gotten no other way.

Now when he hears someone he knows is dealing with the disease, he jumps right in.  He’ll call or go over and visit.

“I’m walking proof that this can be dealt with,” Mr. Crandall said.  “They may not believe that right then, but that’s OK.  They may want to scream or holler and cry – just don’t let anyone stop you from doing that.”

Rounding up a heard of buffalos might not be a bad idea either.