Writing Through Cancer

Ironically, perhaps, the memories of the close community of friends I experienced while living in Nova Scotia were also punctuated by unexpected losses:   my first husband’s drowning, two friends dead from AIDS and another from cancer shortly after I moved to Toronto.  Then, yesterday, as I remembered it was the birthday of my dearest Nova Scotia friend, a memory of the telephone call, one I received barely 14 years after my husband’s death, and another of my friends telling me A. had committed suicide.   I felt the waves of shock and sorrow for days.  How, I asked myself countless times, could she have been so distraught to take her own life?  It made no sense to me.  I remembered how she and her husband had been steadfast in their love and offered such extraordinary support for me and my daughters after L.’s death.  To this day, I doubt I could have gotten through that period of grief without their unyielding support and kindness.

“Before you know what kindness really is,” poet Naomi Shihab Nye tells us, “you must lose things…”

feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

(In: The Words Under The Words ©1994)

“How desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness…”  Our world has, in the past many weeks, seemed, at times, desolate as thousands throughout the world have died or lost friends, family and acquaintances during this pandemic.   We have been forced, as individuals and as nations, to re-examine many of the assumptions we’ve held about life:  no one has been immune, and new cases of the COVID 19 virus continue to emerge.  Virtually every country has been in lockdown, financial outlooks seem precarious, and fear and uncertainty of what the future holds when—or if—life returns to normal are rampant.

Yet it’s easy to forget that throughout history, losses of similar proportions have been felt by people all the around the world:  disease, wars, unimaginable hardship and cruelty, starvation, massacres, deadly earthquakes and the unimaginable loss of human life.  In our country, we have been relatively immune to such disasters as other countries.  Yet such tragic loss of human life can ignite sorrow and grief that invade our very being.  For some, they are buried or forgotten until the next tragedy or loss, for others, the heartache and sorrow linger—even re-ignited by a calendar date, a photograph, a sound or a song—and it all comes back. We experience again the weight of loss, and we grieve.

Grief, the psychologists tell us, is the emotional state that accompanies loss, and although normal, when compounded by the unimaginable losses in life, when no explanation or rationale can be found,  the sorrow is deeper, more lasting, and we experience the kind of sorrow that resides in our hearts for a very long time. How can we make sense of these unexpected and even incomprehensible losses we suffer?

I am learning the alchemy of grief, how it must be carefully measured and doled out, inflicted—but I have not yet mastered this art.” –Judith Ortiz Cofer. The Cruel Country, 2015)

Since I began leading my “Writing Through Cancer” programs twenty years ago, death has become a frequent visitor, as cancer always claims the lives of one or more of my writers.  He death of a group member has never become routine, and nor have I developed some protective layer of numbness for those times that one of my writers dies. I am humbled by the medical professionals who, by virtue of their vocation, must continually deal with the loss of human life, for each time a group member’s life is taken by this disease, I must   learn again to confront my grief as well as the collective grief of the group.  Everyone has their way of dealing with the loss of life, but for me, it’s the reason I originally turned to writing and poetry as a way to make sense of sorrow and loss.

I’ve said before that writing, for me, is a kind of prayer.  It takes me deep inside myself and a way to remember, to mourn and yet to articulate what I feel when loss has, again, entered my life.  When words fail me in times of sorrow, and they often do, I turn to reading poetry.   Poets have always written, about human emotion, and their expressions of sorrow and grief helps me mourn, to name what I am feeling, and to take some kind of solace in knowing the sorrow and I loss I am feeling has been understood and put into words by others.  I not only discover new insights, ways of expressing my sorrow, but a kind of solace, a way to gradually let go of the grief I feel.   If you are someone who finds comfort or inspiration  in poetry, I recommend the collection of “Shelter In” poems, offered by readers to the American Academy of Poets during this time of pandemic and social isolation.

I am more aware than ever now that loss is part of our human experience, something we all must deal with, something we all have to learn to make sense of.  Knowing that doesn’t make it easier, but finding ways to put it in to words or discovering wisdom in the word of others helps to make it bearable and to let it go.  As Mary Oliver so beautifully reminded us:

To live in this world

 You must be able

to do three things:

you love what is mortal;

you hold it

 against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

(“In Blackwater Woods,” In:  American Primitive, 1983)

Writing Suggestions:

• Create a kind of balance sheet:  in one column, list the names of people you have lost; in the other, the acts of kindness you have experienced or discovered in loss.  What insights emerge?  What have you learned about loss, grief or sorrow?
• Re-examine periods of significant loss in your life.  Has your experience helped you to see things in a different life?
• Try expressing your feelings of grief or sorrow in a poem.  Stuck?  Model your poem after a poem you like or use the first line of someone else’s poem as a beginning.