Writing Through Cancer

In one way or another, cancer impacts virtually all of our lives. On an individual level, it is a life-transforming experience that often challenges the mind, heart, and spirit of patients and family members as deeply—if not more deeply—than it challenges the physical body—Jeremy Geffen, MD, The Journey Through Cancer: Healing and Transforming the Whole Person, 2006

Cancer, or any other life threatening illness or trauma, changes you.  Not only is your life altered in different ways, even if you are pronounced “cured” or “healed,” you quickly discover that returning to the self, to the life you knew before cancer or trauma occurred, is virtually impossible.  Not only has your body been altered by treatment and surgeries, the way you think about yourself and your life has changed, whether you see yourself as “living with” cancer, “a survivor,” “in remission,” “a warrior”–as well as  how you experience people and situations that were part of your daily life before cancer.

You’ve suddenly been thrust into the necessity of revising the life you have known, the one you’ve been living.  Revision is not just reserved for writers in the process of creating a story or poem.  It’s a necessity for life.  Yet when you are challenged to change the way you live, it can be confusing and difficult to understand, let alone learning to accept some of the necessary changes in your life.  You’re thrust into a journey you wouldn’t have chosen to travel, but, as Mary Oliver describes in her poem, “The Journey,”

You knew what you had to do…

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little…

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and

deeper

into the world…

You knew what you had to do…

(In:   Dreamwork, 1994)

In an interview by William Young, appearing in a 1993 issue of The Paris Review, William Stafford was asked to comment on his choice of a title of one of his books about writing: You Must Revise Your Life.  “I wanted to use the word revise because so many books about writing make it sound as though you create a good poem by tinkering with the poem you’re working on. I think you create a good poem by revising your life… by living the kind of life that enables good poems to come about.”

Several years ago, after the death of my first husband and the years spent being a single mother, I felt I was ready to unearth the story of that particularly painful and traumatic chapter of my life.  I began by starting a memoir, one I ultimately decided to turn into a novel.  I sent the manuscript to a few respected writers for review, and as it needed, revised multiple times.  Yet it took several months of rewriting and revision to acknowledge that I was still skating on the surface of the story, overly concerned with descriptive details, grammatical nits, and developing a rounded protagonist, who was, in real life, me.  (I never succeeded with her–my protagonist was just too “good.”)  The writing dragged on, through four complete revisions—or rather, revisions I thought were complete.  Yet something wasn’t working. The story was no longer my story, nor was it the real story “It’s become a fairy tale,” I complained to my writing buddies, and I put the novel aside in frustration.  I’d lost sight of my story, and in the process, had not written myself “into knowing,” as author Patricia Hampl once said about the writing process.  I was farther away from the truth, the real meaning in my story than ever.  I put the manuscript aside and faced the fact that the real revision was one of coming to terms with my life–before and after the trauma:  what, in me, had changed and how had it changed how I now approached the life I had now.  I had to do a complete re-visioning of my story.

I’ve been working on my rewrite, that’s right
I’m gonna change the ending
Gonna throw away my title
And toss it in the trash
Every minute after midnight
All the time I’m spending
It’s just for working on my rewrite…

(“Rewrite,” by Paul Simon, from the album, So Beautiful or So What?” 2011)

I discovered that there was much more to the process of writerly revision as Simon’s lyrics suggest, getting beyond the “happy” ending and digging deep for the meaning of those events in my life.  Simon hints at that in his song, and it’s likely one of the reasons his “Rewrite” lyrics were published in a recent edition of The New Yorker under the heading, “Poetry.”  Listen carefully, and you realize the real story is of a Vietnam vet who’s had hard times, and his rewrite is an attempt to create a happy ending for himself.

I’ll eliminate the pages
Where the father has a breakdown
And he has to leave the family
But he really meant no harm
Gonna’ substitute a car chase
And a race across the rooftops
When the father saves the children
And he holds them in his arms…

We all fantasize about how our lives might have been different, “if only if I’d done ___ instead of …,” but that’s the stuff of dreams and wishes, of fiction instead of reality.  Happy endings aren’t like the ones we remember from childhood fairy tales.  Life–cancer, loss, trauma, hardship–these events challenge us to revise our lives, to learn to honor our uniqueness, even our struggles and losses, and learn from them.  Only then can we truly begin a new script for the life we have ahead of us.

At a breast cancer rally she rises

Above sixteen positive lymph nodes

To tell the world that cancer is a wakeup call

That resonates to the cell level…

Cancer is not a gift but a lesson

Full of seeing now and living presently.

(“The Lesson, by Judy Rohm, in The Cancer Poetry Project, V.1, 2001)

      …”cancer need not be a person’s whole book, only a chapter. Still, novelists know that some chapters inform all others. These are the chapters of your life that wallop you and teach you and bring you to tears, that invite you to step to the other side of the curtain, the one that divides those of us who must face our destiny sooner rather than later.”  — Alice Hoffman, NYTimes, August 2000.

Cancer, any serious illness or trauma can teach us to revise our lives in a way that we are more “alive” to the world, to paying attention to what’s in front of us, discovering gratitude in slowing down and being fully present to our daily lives.  Yes, we have changed, but we still have the opportunity to be considered in our choices, to make certain that however long our lives may be, we learn to live fully and with gratitude for each day we’re given.

As I write this post, I recall the first weeks several years ago, after I’d finished my doctoral research (a study of instructor thinking during instruction in a professional school of landscape architecture).  One of my “subjects,” a particularly gifted instructor wrote a short account of his experience in the study.  Entitled “The White Rat Talks Back,” he began his narrative with an old Fleishmann’s margarine advertisement, “I’m just a guy … who had a heart attack.  I’m okay now, but I learned a lot.”

“I’m okay now, but I learned a lot.”  Well, as Frank Sinatra once sang, “that’s life (that’s life)…  We all have chapters–those difficult experiences–that challenge us.  Some we remember fondly; others are the ones we don’t wish to repeat, but like it or not, we have to face the fact that our lives have been altered in profound ways,  even in ways we never imagined nor wanted, and we are left to re-consider and revise the ways we live from here on out.   How have you challenged to revise your life, your way of seeing the world, by cancer, by any life hardship?

 

Writing Suggestions:

• Imagine you had the power to rewrite your life, as the subject in Paul Simon’s song, “Rewrite” dreams of doing. What would be your “happy” ending?
• What have you learned from the painful chapters of your life?
• As you look back on the difficult times in your life, before cancer and after, how have you revised your life?  What changed?  What didn’t?