Now Ashley sees God

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
--Matthew 5:8

Today, Ashley Holmertz is looking into the her savior's eyes.

I'm sure of that truth, because for the past eight years, the 23-year-old Nashville teen to young woman has been battling bone cancer. And Ashley was mostly beating it with the grit, toughness and heart she showed on the soccer field.

Yesterday afternoon, the cancer won a brief battle, but all of us who know Ashley and her faith realize that she won the war.

Today, she shares the crown with her savior because she, too, carried the cross.


Treatments, heroics and an army of followers

As extraordinary a fight waged and life lived on this earth, Ashley's army of followers and admirers included some heroic captains and foot soldiers. She was a Joan of Arc in what she championed and believed.

Her mother, Judy, was with her for every treatment, wave of nausea and onset of depression -- except when she had to have a double mastectomy. They say God never gives you more than you can handle. He sure came close with these two women.

Judy's faith supported Ashely's. And each time the teen-turned-adult could return home to be with her family, a celebration was held. Each moment was precious, which is what God wants us to realize about the value of life.

Mother travelled with daughter from Vanderbilt Medical Center to MD Davis in Houston to a Mexican cancer clinic where toxins are drained from the body and back to Nashville again.

Health care coverage paid for few of these heroic trips and treatments. So an excellent company of mothers, fellow church members at Judson Road Baptist Church, friends from Overton High School and an assortment of colleagues and friends of family members raised tens of thousands of dollars regularly to pay these treatments.

Family expenses also rose for an organic, healthy food plan of nutrition Ashley required to keep her body strong and keep it out of the hospital.

And Ashley did. She lost the bone in the leg where the bone cancer began. Metal bars replaced the body structure there. Yet Ashley learned to walk again.

She would not be deterred, even when Vanderbilt doctors told her she had only three months to live. Instead, she stormed out of the offices there. That was three years ago.

But she prayed even more, fought harder and survived longer. The cancer disappeared. She returned to work and her love of caring for children. And she tried to catch up with high school friends who had gone on to college and were set to embark on professional careers and starting new families. Her wish was the same, particulary in starting a family with the man she saved herself for and loved.


Cancer does not discriminate

I met Ashley 10 years ago. She was the babysitter for close friends of ours in Brentwood. Ashley was invited into dozens of households in Nashville and Williamson County. In each she was entrusted with the households' most valuable possessions --
the children. And she never failed.

The Overton High School graduate counted her friends like the stars in the sky. Her beauty was as attracting inside as outside. She did modeling work with her blonde hair, blue eyes and soccer star body. Then she went to Latin America to bring the Good News and the good work to children there. Just like the God she sees today, all children were precious in her sight.

I wrote several columns about this remarkable young woman -- Ashley the fighter and Ashley the giver. My last last one in April 2005 noted that she had been given only three months to live and how the promise of the coming Easter would be for her.

O, how God and Ashley must have shook their heads.

The Easter actually was for me. Seven months later, I would be diagnosed with leukemia and two of the three factors limiting possibility of survival. Ashley's mom immediately came to see me in the hospital, and I kissed her hand for her act of kindness. She was the one who raised Ashley into the wonderful person she became to all she touched.

Over 13 days at Vanderbilt in June and July 2006, I almost died from an infection. My wife told me that I looked like I was ready for a casket. By the grace of a forgiving God and the intervention of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Perregrine, I am alive today.


God's justice and wisdom

And so I write about Ashley's new life today. By human wisdom, I should be dead and Ashley alive under the justice of an all-seeing God. But scripture asks: "Who has ever been God's counsel?" So I do not question God now.

Instead, I remember His promises and that he so loved the world, that he gave it the life of his only son. And I remember that the heart of our Holy Mother was pierced seven times for this greatest act of love.

So much death has surrounded my life this year. And my own is not out of the near-term question, as my cancer is not cured. The most crushing death was that of my mother, a marvelous friend of passionates political ideals and deep religious faith -- particularly in the intercessionary powers of Our Lady and St. Jude, the patron of lost causes.

Momma passed away in her sleep -- on the birthday of her mother, Luz Olmos Hernandez, who died almost a half century earlier. Momma was the last of four sisters, all devoted to Our Lady's courage and faith. It's obvious her mother and her sisters wanted her home. And so did my father who had died almost five years ago.

Yet she was not visibly dying the days before she passed. The week before, she sat in her recliner drinking coffee and watching morning TV. She told her caregiver that she was going to live forever.

Cancer does not allow for that luxury. Ashley's decline took weeks after doctors sent her home with Hospice care. Her favorite thing to do was to go with her sister, Alli, a short distance in a wheelchair to the Kroger's. There, she would smile as they passed by the row of candy in the baking goods aisle. But Alli would remind her that the candy she so loved was not part of her cancer-fighting, nutrition diet.

Ashley could sense the end was near when many relatives started showing up to see her. She asked her Hospice nurse, "Am I dying?" The nurse replied, "Yes." Ashley asked, "Will it hurt?"

Though I miss my mother desperately, I am consoled and even happy in knowing that she has been reunited with her sisters and momma. Their faith has been re-affirmed, their crosses carried to a just reward where Lazarus suffers no more.

Neither does Ashley, in the gaze of a loving God.