“Thank you Lord for giving me this information about my mother and my sister, but please HELP ME, cause I know I can’t handle this burden by myself. Take them CELLS from me, Lord, take that BURDEN. Get it off and LEAVE it there! I can’t carry it no more, Lord. You wanted me to give it to you and I just didn’t want to, but you can have it now, Lord. You can HAVE IT! Hallelujah, amen.”
For the first time since Gary stood from his chair, he looked straight at me.
I’d been watching all this from a recliner a few feet away, dumbfounded, terrified to move or make noise, frantically scribbling notes. In any other circumstance I might have thought the whole thing was crazy. But what was happening between Gary and Deborah at that moment was the furthest thing from crazy I’d seen all day. As I watched, all I could think was, Oh my god . . . I did this to her.
Gary stared into my eyes as he hugged Deborah’s sobbing body and whispered to her, “You’re not alone.”
Looking at me, Gary said, “She can’t handle the burden of these cells no more, Lord! She can’t do it!” Then he raised his arms above Deborah’s head and yelled, “LORD, I KNOW you sent Miss Rebecca to help LIFT THE BURDEN of them CELLS!” He thrust his arms toward me, hands pointed at either side of my head. “GIVE THEM TO HER!” he yelled. “LET HER CARRY THEM.”
I sat frozen, staring at Gary, thinking, Wait a minute, that wasn’t supposed to happen!
Deborah stepped away from Gary’s embrace, shaking her head, wiping her eyes, and yelling, “Phew!” They both laughed. “Thanks, Cuz,” she said, “I feel so light!”
“Some things you got to release,” Gary said. “The more you hold them in, the worse you get. When you release them, they got to go somewhere else. The Bible says He can carry all that burden.” [pp. 292-293]
As it happened, Rebecca’s tape recorder was running during this interaction, as well as during Deborah’s and Zakariyya’s meeting with Cristoph Lengauer described in Chapter 32. You can hear portions of those recordings — Deborah’s voice, Gary’s singing, the sounds of Lengauer’s lab — toward the end of this engrossing audio story on Henrietta Lacks produced by the WNYC public radio program Radiolab:
Remember — don’t miss your chance to hear Rebecca Skloot live at the Frank Bryant Jr., M.D. Memorial Lecture, tomorrow (Friday October 15) at 12:30pm, hosted by the UT Health Science Center’s Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics. The lecture will take place in the Health Science Center Auditorium on the Long Campus in the South Texas Medical Center, and will also be telecast live to the Regional Academic Health Center in Harlingen, the Laredo Regional Campus and the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research.
Tags: HeLa, OC/OB 2010, Radiolab, Skloot
