Afterword
I want to thank all those who have responded to this series, “A Life Lived Well in France.” It has been a pleasure to hear you share memories of Elizabeth in response to these episodes. She embodied the rare combination of beauty, warmth, intelligence and kindness. And deep Christian faith.
Her grave marker reads.
Jeanne Elizabeth New Seitz
Ma femme. Belle. Forte. Fidèle.
Le Roi d’Amour est Mon Berger.
I wrote these episodes a year ago. For their own sake, and to preserve the rich and rare time we shared together.
I wanted to allow a single year to speak in its most uplifting and joyous register. An eternal register.
During this same year, Elizabeth’s struggle with LAM disease, a rare pulmonary condition, was reaching its final phases. We had moved to France for several reasons, but the main factor was that the National Institute of Health was no longer able to find medicines or surgical procedures that would halt the decline. The surgeon said plainly, “go live your life.”
And so, we did.
The health care in France was superb. During the year related here, Elizabeth was under expert care with one of the world’s top specialists in pulmonary hypertension – the condition that would kill you in the end, when your lungs could no longer supply sufficient oxygen. His encouraging word to her was, “we are going to run a marathon together.”
He meant after a successful transplant. But in some ways, equally, in the run-up to it.
I wanted to tell this story, “A Life Lived Well in France,” and omit any reference to the LAM disease journey. It would be in the following year when preparations for a lung transplant would become necessary and, hopefully, lifesaving. As it happened, with days to live, on my birthday, 22 May 2017, a donor would give Elizabeth a chance to live. After six days in reanimation, she awoke in the Paris transplant hospital to new life.
Confused, frightened, fragile, all she could say was “kiss me.” I had my beautiful, intelligent, kind Elizabeth back again. A six-year decline stopped, and new lungs sown into her tired body.
The French nurses would have her up and walking within several days. And we would make our way home. Marcel squealed and whined with joy. As did I.
New life after what would be certain death changes the way you think about this life, and eternal life.
To have her back alive and at the start of a new journey together, free of LAM, would take some getting used to.
But not too long! We would be enjoying some nice days in Normandy only a month later. And nearly two and a half years of further French adventures like those related here, now free of six years of living with a terminal disease.
Elizabeth had received “A Breath of French Air.”
This is the title of Part Two of the book to be published next year, Le Grand Voyage: Life, Loss, Love. It describes our journey with LAM disease and the victory of new lungs in May 2017/
Part Three speaks of “The Love That Grief Is.” Here I seek to help those who have suffered traumatic loss by speaking of the love that continues and takes new form when the loved one is no longer physically present. Losing someone as precious as Elizabeth makes finding this truth hard, but it is also very, very necessary.
I pray the book shows us a measure of what we mean by eternal life. Larger life. A measure of the life she and I shared together in the year I relate here, filtered through the lens of Eternal Life.
We are solemnly told about this life.
“They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne shall be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water; and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
Disease did not have the governing word in what I have written here of a life lived well in France. And it will be banished forever in the life God declares Eternal.
Thank you, friends of French Affaires. Special friends of Elizabeth. Our friends.