Category: cardiac conditions

May 1, 2022: The Rx of Friendship

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD6 Comments

I’ve been living with the progressive condition of heart failure for over 13 years now. And for the bulk of that time, I have been relatively stable.  That long period of stability was recently disrupted, however, by an “episode” or two of nearly losing consciousness in late March, which resulted in some hastily arranged tests, lab work and  appointments with different members of UHN’s cardiology team.  While I consider myself lucky to have the extraordinary quality of medical care than I do, the impact of the past few weeks was more emotional for me than I anticipated.  In truth, my emotions took a veritable ride on a roller coaster following this latest episode. 

As part of the ongoing treatment and evaluation, another medication has been added to my growing handful of pills, and I’m scheduled for a transesophageal cardiogram later this month to determine if I am a viable candidate for a mitral clip, which could help minimize the leakage from my mitral valve.  “Progressive” has taken on more meaning, disrupting my sleep with late night intrusions of worry and anxiety.    It’s no surprise then, that my emotions have been in a bit of a slump.  Yet, thanks to the tender care and concern from my husband, daughters and some wonderful Toronto friends, my mood has finally lightened.

 “Oh you gotta’ have friends,” Bette Midler belted out on her 1972 album, The Divine Miss M.  How well I know that.  During the aftermath of my first husband’s death many years ago, I nearly wore a permanent groove in the vinyl, playing that  one song again and again. Thousands of miles from my family, I was in sore need of friends, and thankfully, I had them in a  handful of dear Nova Scotian friends who stood by me, offering immeasurable support and love to my daughters and me.  I have never forgotten their concern, support and love—and I remain connected with them now, even all these years later.

I am grateful to have a  handful of enduring friendships in my life–one even going back to grade school.  Yet in this extended time of COVID and its variants, my husband and I have seen or heard far less of our friends than we usually do.  I’ve missed the conversations, comfort and closeness that are unique to long friendships.  So it was a dose of good medicine to be invited to our friends’ home for a casual Friday evening dinner together—all of us still only slowly venturing into public places.  But that afternoon,  I had been out of sorts, my blues lingering like a relentless band of low pressure.   I finally complained that I really didn’t feel like going out. “Too late to cancel,” my husband said. “Besides, it’ll do you good.”   He was right:  it did. 

Our friends are wonderful hosts, and dinners together are always relaxed, with great conversation and more than a little laughter. Friday evening was no exception, and the time together did much to raise my spirits.  When we stood to don our coats for the ride home, our hostess remarked, “It’s good to see you smile, Sharon.”  I realized how true her words were.  It felt good to smile, to share stories around the table and bask in the warmth of our friendship.  I was still smiling as we got into the car, and two hours later, as I got into bed, the smile remained. I was grateful for the evening and the friendship we shared.  Then again last night, another friend invited us for dinner on the spur of the moment.  There was no special occasion, she said, “I just want to do it.”  Later, as we returned home , any lingering doldrums I felt had been feeling had completely vanished.  I felt more like “myself” again, something I owe to the good medicine of close friends.   

Lydia Denworth, author and contributing editor at Scientific American, whose book, Friendship:  The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond, published in 2021, sees friendship is a lifelong endeavor, something we should always be paying attention to throughout our lives.  Here I pause, remembering that there have been times, despite how important my friendships are to me,  that I have sometimes let them take a back seat to an over busy, over demanding life.   Yet it is our friendships we benefit from, as research  has demonstrated many times, helping us find meaning or purpose in life, and important to our health and longevity.   “Good friends are good for your health,” the Mayo Clinic states,  and matter to our health in multiple ways:

 “Friends… play a significant role in promoting your overall health. Adults with strong social support have a reduced risk of many significant health problems, including depression, high blood pressure and an unhealthy body mass index (BMI). Studies have even found that older adults with a rich social life are likely to live longer than their peers with fewer connections.”

Do you remember the song “You’ve Got a Friend?”  Written and first recorded by Carole King in 1971, singer James Taylor’s recording of it that same year became the number one song on Billboard’s “Hot 100.”  It’s been sung and recorded by many other vocalists since, the lyrics an enduring testimony to the importance of those true and enduring friendships in our lives.

[Chorus]

You just call out my name

And you know wherever I am

I’ll come runnin’

To see you again.

Winter, spring, summer or fall

All you have to do is call

And I’ll be there, yes I will

Now ain’t it good to know

that you’ve got a friend…

Writing Suggestions:

Write about friendship this week.  What role do your friendships play in your life?  Why do they matter to you?

We have more than a few good friends over time—and our friendships can change as our lives do.  Write about a best friend.  Or a friend who has been invaluable to you at a difficult time.  Or writing about losing a friend to time and distance.

How do your friends make a difference in your life?  Write about a friend whose friendship has stood the test of time and life stages.

How have you shown up as a friend for others? 

During the prolonged pandemic of the past two years, how have you sustained and nurtured your friendships, whether close or far away?

What Illness Teaches Us About Life

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD4 Comments

“It’s not that we have a short time to live,” the Roman philosopher, Seneca wrote in his treatise, On the Shortness of Life (49 AD), “but that we waste a lot of it…life is long if you know how to use it.”  Knowing how to use life is something that requires, for most of us, occasional review and re-setting of our goals and intentions for ourselves.  But I have come to believe that my most important life lessons have come from loss, hardship, and living with progressive condition. Such experiences force behavior changes on us, like it or not.

I’ve experienced challenging life events as we all do from time to time, but more than any experience, it’s living with heart failure that has forced me to confront the reality of mortality and relative shortness of life.  Diagnosed in 2008 after collapsing on the pavement, my initial panic and fear gradually subsided the first few years as my life, for the most part, seemed to go on as usual.  I’d never had my defibrillator go off, and as a result, even questioned one doctor if, in fact, it had really been necessary!  For the first few years, at every follow-up appointment, the routine, “you’re doing just fine” reassurance from my then-cardiologist lulled me into a less “vigilant” state, and gradually, my life became as hectic and busy as it had been before.   

When we returned to Toronto in 2017, I had the good fortune to become a patient of one of Canada’s top cardiologists, and in the first appointments, the thorough examination, tests and education I experienced (a far cry from anything I’d gotten when I was first diagnosed) were somewhat unnerving.  I realized that “doing just fine” had not exempted me—or my heart—from the progressive nature of heart failure.  Medications, diet, and exercise could help slow the progression, but not cure it.  I felt the fear and anxiety rise to the surface.  I think it was only then that I truly began to face the prognosis and ramifications of the heart ailment I was living with.  I doubt I had truly confronted my own mortality, or rather, fear of a shortened life, despite the fact so many of the men and women who’d come to my expressive writing groups had often written about it.  It was my turn to confront my fear.  Yet again, and as I met so many heart patients with far more serious conditions than my own, I slipped into that mental zone of “by comparison, I am doing really well.”

Then last week, my heart served up a reminder to me of its progressive nature—and of my need to periodically re-assess my life, change what needs changing and keep my sites on what matters most.  I admit an initial bit of denial.  I tried to ignore the symptoms—some lightheadedness, then nearly passing out one evening, and finally, at the insistence of my husband, notifying the clinic a day later to report the symptoms.  The response was immediate.    I spent much of last week in the cardiac clinic for a thorough going over of my defibrillator function, bloodwork, ECG, and at week’s end, being fitted with a Holter monitor (a small, wearable device that records the heart’s rhythm) to better evaluate what is happening with my heart) for 24 hours a day for two full weeks. (I am now relegated to my most unfashionable gear to cover up the device as much as possible—nevertheless, it’s a trivial inconvenience.)

I believe that many of my greatest teachers are the cancer and heart patients who have shared their experiences, fears and challenges in my writing groups.  There is no false bravado.  They write courageously and honestly.  By writing, they release the emotions and experiences triggered by serious and unforgiving illnesses and progressive conditions.   Some are painfully aware they’ve been given a death sentence—a terminal diagnosis—and they grapple with impending death.  Others experience the after-effects of surgeries and treatments that permanently alter their bodies and their lives. Time and again I am moved and humbled by their honesty, courage and determination to live whatever life they have left as fully as possible.  They are clear about what matters most. Living intentionally requires not only the will to do so, but courage, and for many of us, real change and commitment.

Perhaps the question to ask ourselves is not so much, “how do I want to live?” but “how do I want to live the life I have left?”  That’s the irony I suppose, that Seneca referred to in his treatise:  we need to be faced with the “shortness” of life to truly learn how truly live.

I recall a poem a former mentor shared many years ago in a creative writing workshop.  Entitled “What Matters Then,” the poet, Margaret Robison, asks the question “what matters then? of the reader and, beginning the image of a single gardenia on a branch, moves us quietly to the essential, from bush to branch to a single flower.  For me, it speaks of the necessity of winnowing down to the essential and the certain beauty of it.

…What matters then?

A single gardenia broken

from the dark-leafed branch.

What matters then?

The dark leafed bush.

What matters then?

The gardenia.

–Margaret Robison, Red Creek, A Requiem, 1992

What matters to me?  That I live as fully as possible each day.  That I have time with close friends and especially my family: husband, daughters and grandchildren.  Especially my grandchildren—funny, bright, loving– they are the best medicine for my metaphorical and physical heart.   That I give back for as long as I am able, continuing to volunteer in leading writing groups for those living with life-threatening illnesses.  I must make time for solitude and reflection; my morning writing practice, part-meditation, part-creative work, is critical to my daily life.  I am intent on continuing to live as healthy and active daily life as I can.  Yet, I must practice humility, recognize and accept my limits, and not unimportantly, make gratitude as a daily mantra.

What has living with a serious condition like heart failure taught me?  I think it has taught me how I want to live to live for however long a life I have.   And that’s a lesson worth living, isn’t it?

Waking up this morning, I smile.

Twenty-four brand new hours before me.

I vow to live fully in each moment

and look at all beings

with eyes of compassion.

-Ticht Nhat Hahn, Buddhist teacher

Writing Suggestions:

Write about the experience of becoming a patient, of living with a life-threatening illness or condition. What have you learned about yourself?

  • How has your life changed—for the positive and the negative?
    • How do you want to spend your days–to live your life?
    • What matters most to you?

February 27, 2022: Music Matters: An Rx For Troubled Times

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD1 Comment

“Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting… It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It’s uplifting, it’s encouraging, it’s strengthening.” — Aretha Franklin


I’ve mulled over a blog post for days, uninspired and struggling with the blank page staring back at me each morning.  I’ve blamed it on the lingering malaise from a prolonged pandemic, the political and economic unrest, news headlines I try to avoid, and a lack of inspiration.  Yesterday I realized the solution to my struggle had been close at hand all the time: my long-standing morning diet of classical music, playing softly as I write.  It’s been a lifetime source of comfort, contemplation, memories, even inspiration.  In the prolonged period of COVID’s continuing waves, necessary restrictions and isolation music has been the best medicine for my spirit.

As I began to write, I realized that music has played an important role in my life for a long time.  My father’s family loved to sing together at family gatherings.   My parents danced around our living room to the big band music of Tommy Dorsey and Glen Miller.  I showed “musical aptitude” in grade school and was soon enrolled in piano and violin lessons.   Any promise of a musical career, however, was short-lived.  Despite weekly lessons, my preference was to play popular tunes “by ear” on the piano rather than practice the assigned keyboard exercises.  I quit violin lessons, and my piano lessons soon met a similar fate.  For my final recital piece I chose Chopin’s somber “Funeral March,” signaling a conclusion to my piano career, despite the despair of my piano teacher.   I settled on the school band as my next musical challenge but I was assigned a French horn to learn to play, since, as the band director explained, the horn section needed “beefing” up.  My band experience may have permanently soured any inclination to pursue a musical career.

Our high school band was predominantly a marching band. The members were outfitted in uniforms reminiscent of toy soldiers—unattractive for any developing girl.  The band accompanied small-town parades and halftime entertainment during high school football season. Worse, the repertoire of marching music for French horns translated to little more than bruised lips bouncing against the brass mouthpiece and a monotonous succession of after beats, “te ta, te ta,”.  Only when football season ended, did we have an opportunity to play more engaging music. In the Spring of my senior year, our band leader chose Dvořák’s “The New World Symphony” to play for the regional competition.

When our semi-conductor
Raised his baton, we sat there
Gaping at Marche Militaire,
Our mouth-opening number.
It seemed faintly familiar
(We’d rehearsed it all that winter),
But we attacked in such a blur,
No army anywhere
On its stomach or all fours
Could have squeezed though our cross fire…

I like to believe our enthusiasm for leading with those first few opening measures of the symphony was entirely understandable.    Given the opportunity to finally “shine” in the opening measures of Dvorak’s symphony, we made certain we were heard, blasting out the opening notes with no attention to subtlety or modulation.  I still remember the look on our band leader’s face.

By the last lost chord, our director
Looked older and soberer.
No doubt, in mind’s ear
Some band somewhere
In some Music of some Sphere
Was striking a note as pure
As the wishes of Franz Schubert,
But meanwhile here we were:
A lesson in everything minor,
Decomposing our first composer.

From: “The Junior High School Band Concert,” by David Wagoner; Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems.  University of Illinois Press, 1999. 

I gave up French horn when I left for college, opting instead to sing in the college choir my first year.  Despite ultimately veering into psychology, my short-lived musical forays had lasting benefits, fostering a deep and lasting love of music. Many years later, as a young wife and mother living in a small university town in the Maritimes, music returned to my life, this time in the form of a recorder quintet with four friends.   We practiced diligently each week, even occasionally performing in our community.  The weekly practices were a source of happiness and temporarily took me out of my unhappiness.   

A few short years later, my first husband drowned, and again, I found comfort in music during the long nights of grief and sorrow.  I recorded a musical history of our marriage, comprised of songs from the 70s and 80s, listening to it until the tape was finally too stretched and worn to be played.  Many years later, by then remarried and living in Southern California, I enrolled in African drumming lessons, learning and playing West African rhythms on the djembe and dunun. Whatever pressures I felt during the week vanished in the drumming classes. Drumming together with others was an inspiring and joyful activity, one I still miss doing.

As I look back on my musical life, what emerges is not only love and interest in music but my understanding of how beneficial music has been in my life.  I understand why music had such an important role in medicine and healing throughout history. The ancient Greeks believed music could heal the body and the soul. Ancient Egyptians and indigenous peoples used singing and chanting in their healing rituals. After World War II, the U.S. Veterans Administration incorporated music as an adjunct therapy for shell-shocked soldiers. Today, music therapy is widely used to promote healing and enhance the quality of patients ’lives. 

The power of music to integrate and cure is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest non-chemical medication. — Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author of Awakenings

There are many ways in which music is good for us, something I’ve experienced many times in my life.    Music is beneficial to heart health, positively affecting blood pressure, heartbeat and breathing. Used with cancer patients, it helps to decrease anxiety and ease nausea and is also effective in pain management. Music helps us to relax, reduces fatigue, stress, and alleviates depression. Used during exercise, music can enhance physical performance and help us exercise more efficiently. 

I now appreciate that however undistinguished my musical achievement was in my teens, there were still benefits gained from my experiences.  Music has the potential to enhance youthful self-esteem and academic performance.  As we age, it helps to protect mental sharpness and brain functioning.  Among Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, music has been shown to play an important role in enhancing memory, triggering life stories and face-name recognition, something I witnessed in interactions with my mother in her final years as an Alzheimer’s patient.

Music continues to inhabit my daily life. It’s been an important source of comfort and solace during these many months of COVID, helping to diminish anxiety, stress, restless nights and even the doldrums.  It has been my most available and comforting balm in this prolonged pandemic.  

I think I should have no other mortal wants if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

—George Bernard Shaw

Writing Suggestions:  How has music influenced your life?

  • Consider the role music has played in your life.  How has it been beneficial to you?
  • Was there particular music that helped you through treatment, recovery from surgical treatment or another difficult time?  Listen to it again, closing your eyes, and try to remember that time and how the music made you feel.
  • Recall a lullaby from childhood, a favorite song, a bit of classical music, or even the somewhat dissonant music from your high school band. What memories or stories does the music trigger?
  • Take any favorite musical recording and listen to it.  Keep your notebook nearby. Capture the random thoughts and associations that come to mind as you listen. Once the recording ends, begin freewriting. Re-read what you’ve written and underline one sentence that has power for you in some way.  Use that sentence to begin writing again on a fresh page. This time, set the timer for 15 minutes and see where your writing takes you.

January 16, 2022: Altered Body: Altered Self-Image

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD1 Comment

And the body, what about the body? –Jane Kenyon

“Would you be willing to write a short piece for the patient website?”  It was a request sent in a short email from Samantha, who does much of the behind-the-scenes coordination and publicity for “Writing the Heart,” the expressive writing workshop I lead through Ted Rogers Center for Heart Research.  I didn’t hesitate and said, “yes,” and agreed to brainstorm possibilities together in a short virtual meeting two days ago.   What I didn’t expect was to find tears running down my face as we explored possibilities.  The topic I suggested as we chatted was, as it became apparent (no pun intended…) close to my heart.

In my cancer writing groups, I often invite the participants to explore their feelings about their bodies, before and after a cancer diagnosis.  Cancer patients often feel betrayed by their bodies—and at the same time, they are more apt to define cancer as an invader, a foreign aggressor.  The metaphors they use often include a sense of fighting back, overcoming the invading cancer cells.  Bodies are altered; body parts sometimes lost or scarred by the disease or treatment.  Yet cancer research and treatments continue to advance, and there is, for the majority of those I’ve experienced, hope for a cure.

 By contrast, the heart is our life-giving pump, not an invader, and while advances have been made in heart transplant and medications for heart patients, heart failure is not curable.  It is progressive, and the medications I take twice daily are those that help aspects of heart functioning so that I might “keep going a little longer.” The irony for me is that in all likelihood, as my cardiologist suspects, my cancer treatment twenty-one years ago, specifically, the radiation to my left breast, is likely the culprit in my diagnosis of heart failure.

Since my diagnosis of heart failure in 2008, I have, in comparison to so many people similarly diagnosed, been doing relatively well, and given the privilege to encourage and hear cancer and  heart patients’ stories as I do in our writing groups, I am humbled:  my own experience seems relatively lightweight.  More than a few times, I’ve said to my husband that in comparison to other heart failure patients, I am very lucky.  So when I suggested to Samantha I could write a piece on coming to terms with an altered self-image due to heart failure, I was surprised to find my eyes teared up quite unexpectedly. 

And while I do feel “lucky” in many ways, it also masks the emotional impact of living with heart failure I’ve experienced, a progressive condition that, thus far, has no cure.  I was first diagnosed in late 2008 after collapsing on the sidewalk while I was walking my dog, rushed to emergency, hospitalized for three days of tests and observation, undergone an angiogram and, without much discussion or explanation, while I was still regaining consciousness after the angiogram, asked if I “wanted” an ICD.  Unsure if an ICD was warranted, I reluctantly agreed when the cardiologist said, “think of it as insurance,”  and after it was inserted, then spent another three nights in the hospital.   I spent the days dazed and feeling as if I was living in a strange dream. The only heart failure patient I had ever met was a 90-year-old neighbor.    

For the first months after the entire episode, I settled back into a life that was relatively unchanged.  Other than the bulge on the left side of my chest, nothing seemed very different as far as my daily life was concerned.  I had regular cardiac visits, but they were little more than a 15-minute conversation and the assurance, “You’re doing fine.”  My ICD checkups came every six months—and once I’d struggled to understand the technological explanations by the ICD specialist, assured “everything was fine.”  I felt like my ICD got more attention than I did in my hospital visits!  What wasn’t at all clear to me is that my heart failure was progressing, and it wasn’t until we’d  returned to Toronto, and I became a patient at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, that I began to understand the impact heart failure would continue to have on my life.

Within the first year back in Toronto,  I noticed I was a little shorter of breath than usual.  As the year progressed, I began having more and more difficulty climbing the stairs—something I blamed on a case of Achilles tendonitis.  The tendonitis is long gone, but stairs have now become even more of a challenge.  When we relocated to our current building, one with elevators, then I noticed that walking uphill on  Yonge Street was becoming more difficult than it once was, gradually, forcing me to pause multiple times to regain my breath when I ran errands on foot.  While my husband and still I walk together from time to time, it’s me who asks, “Can we go a bit slower please?” unlike a few years ago, when he would complain about my brisk pace.   

The deceptive thing about heart failure is that I don’t look different.  Oh sure,  I’m older, like all my friends, and one’s body shows those signs in little, but persistent ways:   graying hair, more lines in the face, declining muscle tone, stiffening joints–the complaints common to advancing years.  But I look normal. My ICD is beneath skin and clothing:  there are no visible markers as there often  are with cancer patients that tell people “She’s a heart failure patient.”   And unlike in cancer, there is no “hope for a cure” among heart failure patients, just the increasing number of medications, to “help you last a bit longer.”  Don’t get me wrong:  I am very grateful for those medications and for the exceptional medical care I get at Peter Munk, but I am much more aware of living with heart failure —and the insidious way in which doing so  sneaks up on me, sometimes triggering the blues.

The impact of living with heart failure is to challenge the very me I always believed I was.  My body’s betrayal has forced me to re-evaluate the image I have always had of myself—that active, healthy, fast-moving, multi-tasking self.  Mortality then seemed a long way off.  Now I realize that my heart might be concocting other ideas about my longevity.   Yet admitting all this is something I rarely do, and when  I opened up about it to the TRCHR team members in our meeting, I was embarrassed and surprised to find tears streaming down my face.  Obviously, I’d hit on a topic I felt strongly about—more than I was previously willing to admit. …Looks like I’ve got some writing to do.

This long struggle to be a home

In the body, this difficult friendship.

From “Cages,” in Collected Poems, 2005, by Jane Kenyon

Writing Suggestions:

  • Has a debilitating illness or progressive medical condition changed your life?  In what ways?  Write about its challenges to your self-image and how you manage those.
  • How has your relationship with your body changed due to a serious illness?
  • How has your relationship with your body been affected by physical aging?
  • Use the lines from Jane Kenyon’s poem, quoted in this post, as a place to begin writing.

December 4, 2021: Thinking about Courage

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD3 Comments

cour·age:  noun

  1. the ability to do something that frightens one.
  2. strength in the face of pain or grief.

–(Oxford Languages)

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone…

I doubt you need to look beyond your neighborhood or community to name more than one cancer survivor, a patient living with a progressive heart condition, or some other debilitating or life threatening illness, whose determination and bravery in the face of considerable odds has inspired you. You may call them courageous, and in fact, I think they are, but it’s not a kind of courage that comes easily or without its familiar sidekick, fear.  In life-threatening, terminal illnesses, fear is never far from consciousness.  Courage won’t cure a terminal diagnosis, so I wonder what we mean when we call someone living with a progressive and life-threatening illness “courageous.”   

Courage, for me, seems to have more to do with putting one foot in front of the other, in not putting on a mask of a brave front for our loved ones, even though we may feel we should.  I think courage has much more to do with honesty, with facing the truth of our situation, the fears and the sorrow, and yet, not letting those emotions overtake us.  Courage is facing up, to the fear of mortality and the progressive reality of the medical condition we have and yet, to find ways to live as fully as possible despite the odds.   And that’s not easy.

It’s one of the reasons I am continually inspired by the men and women who participate in my writing groups.  We mean well, calling someone with a life-threatening illness, “courageous” and ignoring the fact that the very label denies them the freedom to express the truth of what they are experiencing. Expressing the truth of one’s experience is one of the powerful aspects of the writing groups I’ve led for so many years.  Having the freedom to relieve the burden those fears and concerns on the page, that simple act of honesty and release, is freeing, but it is far more than just release: it is the discovery that they are not alone in what they are feeling or fearing.  The honest expression and release, coupled with the support of others similarly diagnosed offers a chance to discover they are not alone in what they feel or fear—and out of that shared experience, a sense of community begins to form. 

That sense of community–of finding others who share similar fears and feelings–is part of what helps many patients feel less alone. I think it also enables them to be more courageous. I remember one particular l one cancer patient who participated in my writing groups several years ago.   Diagnosed with breast cancer, S. first attended an introductory workshop I led at a San Diego cancer center in 2008.  More than a year passed by before our paths crossed again.  When we met a second time, she enrolled in the ten-week writing workshop series I was leading for another cancer center.  Her cancer had, unfortunately, become metastatic, and its spread was rapid. When we began the series, she often volunteered to read aloud. I could hear the shift in her writing as it grew in expressiveness and depth, something I’d witnessed before with terminal patients.  Coming to terms with mortality forces us to go deeper into the unexplored regions of our own darkness and to write honestly and authentically from that place.  Simply put, it is having the courage to “tell the truth,” what writer Maxine Hong Kingston advised the veterans do as they wrote with her about their traumatic experiences of war.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing…

To write the truth of our inner lives, of our experiences, is a courageous act. To write honestly avoids the pretense of being “brave” or “courageous.”  It avoids showy descriptions or flowery language, because living with the reality of a life threatening illness forces us to confront all we taken for granted and define what, in our lives, is truly essential—what matters most. That honesty in the face of dying is probably what I find most courageous among many patients who have participated in my writing groups.

As the writing series progressed, so did S’s cancer.  The toll on her body and spirit was apparent to the group.  When she began struggling to attend the sessions on her own, another group member volunteered to drive her.  She lost the use of one arm, but determined to write, she bought a laptop to the sessions and tapped out her stories with one hand.  One morning, late in the series, S. lost her balance and fell as she tried to take a seat at the table.  Several members jumped up and rushed to her side, but she brushed them away, determined to get on her feet by herself and take her usual place.  But we all knew the progression of her illness was quickly intensifying.   By the final weeks, she had been forced to give up her apartment and move to assisted living, no longer able toc attend the writing group.  We dedicated our booklet, a collection of shared writing, and sent it to her.

Nearly three months later, as another writing workshop series was beginning, S. sent me an email.  Wheelchair bound, she was now receiving full time care in a nursing home, but she still wanted to participate in the writing group.  She asked if there was a way she could do it by email (ZOOM was an unknown in those years). My “Yes!,” was immediate.   I sent her the prompts ahead of each session, and in turn, she emailed her writing to me to share them with the group.  The group members, in turn, offered their positive comments to her writing which I captured in an email and sent to her after each session.  By then her writing was little more than a single, brief paragraph in length, but her tenacity, honesty, and humor were as present as ever.  There was rarely a time that members didn’t have tears in their eyes when I shared her writing aloud. 

S’s courageousness and determination to accept her illness and yet find ways to do what she loved and what kept her connected to others is only one small example of the kind of courage I witness repeatedly among the men and women who participate in my writing groups, whether living with cancer or heart disease.   Courage, as defined in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus (2004), is a quality that endures through difficult times, as so many of these of these men and women have demonstrated.

Courage is what makes someone capable of facing extreme danger and difficulty without retreating…it implies not only bravery and a dauntless spirit but the ability to endure in times of adversity.  (p. 187)

True courage, as S. and so many others have shown me, endures.  It doesn’t retreat despite great difficulty or danger.  S. openly shared her journey with us, and as her life was ending a few months later, she was supported by many who had also been in the writing group, who had experienced cancer but who had been touched by her indomitable spirit.  I have often wondered if I were faced with the same hardship as S. and as many others in my groups over the years, would I be as courageous?

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you’ll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you’ll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

(From “Courage,” by Anne Sexton, In:  The Awful Rowing Toward God, 1975)

Writing Suggestion:

  • This week, think about courage, what it is, how you define it.
  • Have you discovered unexpected courage in yourself you didn’t know you had? 
  • Has someone else inspired you with their courage? 
  • This week, explore courage:  what it is, and what it looks like, where you find it, or someone who has inspired you with their courage.

November 8, 2021: Using Metaphors in the Medical Experience

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

Poetry and medicine share a long history, something for which we can thank Apollo, the Greek god responsible for both healing and poetry.  If you had any idea that metaphors are only the creativity of poets and poetic imagination, think again.  Metaphors are common and pervasive in our everyday lives, influencing the way we think and act.  Metaphors, which compare two seemingly unrelated things, are not only common in poetry and everyday life, but also in medicine.  (Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980).

Consider the sports talk that dominates the televised football or hockey seasons.  Sports metaphors are commonly used to describe experiences in our daily lives, for example, in companies, where employees are encouraged to be team players” or “run with a good idea.”  When I was young, high school football games were not only popular, but the language of the game made its way into aspects of our teen-age dating lives, as when someone might “made a pass at you,” or behaved in a way that were “way out of bounds.”

Why do we use them?  Metaphors are visual and illustrative, but they sometimes run the risk of creating stereotypes, confusion, or becoming clichés.   Some, like sports and military metaphors are so common in our daily language, they are frequently used to describe the medical experience.  Common examples include parental metaphors, “she’s too sick to know the difference,” engineering metaphors, “coming in for a tune up”, or the commonly used military metaphor of cancer as a “battle” to be fought and won.  Nevertheless, metaphors are essential in our ability to describe and convey the experience of illness—and not just for the patient, but for the physician as well.

Dhruv Khullar, MD, in a 2014 article, “The Trouble with Medicines’ Metaphors, “published in The Atlantic, stated:   

The words we choose to describe illness are powerful. They carry weight and valence, creating the milieu in which goals of care are discussed and treatment plans designed. In medicine, the use of metaphor is pervasive. Antibiotics clog up bacterial machinery by disrupting the supply chain. Diabetes coats red blood cells with sugar until they’re little glazed donuts. Life with chronic disease is a marathon, not a sprint, with bumps on the road and frequent detours...  Military metaphors are among the oldest in medicine and they remain among the most common. Long before Louis Pasteur deployed imagery of invaders to explain germ theory in the 1860s, John Donne ruminated on the “miserable condition of man,” describing illness as a “siege…a rebellious heat, [that] will blow up the heart, like a Myne” and a “Canon [that] batters all, overthrowes all, demolishes all…destroyes us in an instant.”

As Khullar points out, “…we’ve internalized these metaphors, so much so that we often may not recognize how they influence us.”  Nevertheless, they are important and necessary to help convey what is difficult, at first, to describe, offering a shorthand way of making sense and communicating the experience of serious illness.   Just as we use metaphors to communicate to our friends and others, physicians use them to help patients understand the ramifications of their illnesses.  Interestingly, Khullar cited a 2010 study finding that physicians use metaphors in nearly two-thirds of their conversations with patients diagnosed with serious illness.  In fact, the doctors who used more metaphors in explaining medical conditions were seen as better communicators. Why?  Because “patients reported less trouble understanding them, and felt as though their doctor made sure they understood their conditions.”

 Metaphors get our attention.  They offer us a vivid way to communicate in an understandable way our experience of serious and life-threatening illnesses, whether patient, physician or care-giver.  If you explore any poetry of the medical experience, you’ll discover it is rich with imagery and metaphors that resonate with your own experience. For example, I have often used Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac,” with its extended metaphor to encourage writing group members to explore their metaphors used describe the experience of diagnoses and treatments.

Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest
without a sound.
The hunter, strapped to his rifle,
the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles—
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,
without a sound…

(In: Blue Horses, 2014)

Donald Hall, in his poem, “The Ship Pounding,” creates a powerful, visual metaphor of a great ship to describe the hospital and his experience of the final days spent with his dying wife, the former poet, Jane Kenyon.  He first describes going to the hospital to visit his wife:

Each morning I made my way   

among gangways, elevators,   

and nurses’ pods to Jane’s room   

to interrogate the grave helpers   

who tended her through the night   

while the ship’s massive engines   

kept its propellers turning…

—–

At first the tenor of the poem feels almost hopeful:

—–

The passengers on this voyage   

wore masks or cannulae

or dangled devices that dripped   

chemicals into their wrists.   

I believed that the ship

traveled to a harbor

of breakfast, work, and love…   

When the infusions

are infused entirely, bone

marrow restored and lymphoblasts

remitted, I will take my wife,

bald as Michael Jordan,

back to our dog and day.

But Kenyon’s illness is terminal, evident in the final lines, and as her disease progresses, his trips to the hospital become anxious, as he and his dying wife return to the hospital:

…I listened in case Jane called

for help, or spoke in delirium,

ready to make the agitated

drive to Emergency again

for readmission to the huge

vessel that heaves water month   

after month, without leaving   

port, without moving a knot,   

without arrival or destination,   

its great engines pounding.

(In: Without, 1998))

“The Ship Pounding” is a moving and visceral image offered by Hall, one that makes experience of the narrator and his dying wife readily understood.

I often return to the wonderful book by former literary critic, Anatole Broyard, who died in 1990 from prostate cancer.  Entitled, Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death (1993) Broyard also explored the use of metaphor to think about and describe his illness:

Always in emergencies we invent narratives. . . Metaphor was one of my symptoms.  I saw my illness as a visit to a disturbed country. . . I imagined it as a love affair with a demented woman who demanded things I had never done before. . .   When the cancer threatened my sexuality, my mind became immediately erect. 

Medicine continues to advance and offer us much more precise understanding of medical conditions and diseases, yet “metaphor,” as some authors have stated, “remains essential” as a way to convey the experience of illness.  As Broyard remarked, “Metaphors may be as necessary to illness as they are to literature, as comforting to the patient as his own bathrobe and slippers.”

Writing Suggestions:

What metaphors have you used to describe your illness?  How did they change as your condition changed?

  • Think about the ways in which you have used metaphors with family, friends or your doctors, to describe your experience of serious or debilitating illness.  How have they helped you understand and communicate?
  • Explore the different metaphors that describe your illness or condition.  Begin with a phrase, for example such as “Cancer is a…” or “Living with heart failure is like a…,”or “A heart attack is like…”  and finish the thought, noting what image or word emerges.  Remember, write quickly, without editing. Set the timer for five or ten minutes and keep your pen (or fingers) moving. Generate as many comparisons or metaphors as you can.  Once you’ve finished, read over what you’ve written.   What surprises you?  Do you discover any unexpected insights to your feelings?  How do your metaphors you navigate and explain your illness to others? 
  • Try writing a poem or narrative using the metaphors to describe your experience of illness or disease.
  • “Physicians who used more metaphors were seen as better communicators.”  True or False for you?  Has your physician used metaphors in communicating aspects of your diagnosis?  If so, do any stand out?  Were the metaphors useful in helping you understand your illness?

October 24, 2021: Writing From the Fault Lines

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD2 Comments

“You must learn to live on fault lines.”
― Suleika Jaouad,Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, 2021

My childhood and teenage years were spent growing up in Northern California, a life that included annual water rationing during summertime, seasonal forest fires and the expectation that periodically, the earth could move beneath our feet, something which had little to do with a sudden jolt of teenaged romance.  The occasional movements of the earth were due to the sliding boundaries, the fault lines that define the earth’s tectonic plates. California has many of these fault lines, and sometimes, as witnessed in the Loma Prieta quake of 1989, significant upheaval and damage–even loss of life—occur.

Living on the fault lines is not something Californians have to learn; it’s what they do.  But the periodic upheaval created by the “fault lines” is an apt metaphor for what happens in our emotional lives when unexpected trauma or life-threatening illnesses occur.  In those periods of stress and anxiety, old emotional wounds can also make their way to the surface, adding to the emotional challenges facing you in the midst of a new life crisis.   

In 2007, I began teaching creative nonfiction writing for the UCLA extension Writers’ Program.   My first course was one of several other offerings, and I titled my course “Writing from the Fault Lines:  Writing to Heal,” a title that lasted for three years, until expressive writing gained a foothold in public popularity. To distinguish it from the many and varied writing workshops that seem to blossom everywhere, the course was re-named “Transformative Writing.”

Now many years later, I live far from California, having returned to Toronto in 2017. I no longer teach for the UCLA program, but I continue to lead expressive writing groups for cancer and heart patients.  This past weekend, while working with an inspiring group of young adult cancer survivors, the Young Adult Cancer Canada “YACCtivists,” I re-read portions of Suleika Jaoaud’s extraordinary and thoughtful cancer memoir, Between Two Kingdoms:  Life Interrupted. I paused when I read her sentence, “You must learn to live on fault lines.” The young adult survivors representing YACC had definitely learned that lesson—and then some. 

I thought back to the time the word “cancerous” was spoken to me in a physician’s office in California.  My husband and had returned to California after nearly 26 years in Canada, only to run headlong into a family crisis full of resentment, accusations and the losses of my parents:  my father had died of lung cancer and my mother was lost to Alzheimer’s disease.   At the same time, I was overseeing a difficult and emotional downsizing of a nonprofit organization while trying to navigate the unexpected familial acrimony.  Writing was my refuge.   I filled page after page in my notebook with disbelief, questions that couldn’t be answered and even some misplaced sense that I must have brought on the cancer myself.  Yet my initial outpouring soon gave way to the deeper wounds, to losses and hurt I’d amassed in trying—and failing—to deal with the estrangement from my two siblings.  My “real” story was not about cancer; it was what lay beneath the surface, pressures within my emotional interior begging to be released.

I have often witnessed similar struggles for some individuals in my writing groups.  The experience of a life threatening illness can unearth other, unresolved, feelings.  Painful memories or traumatic events of the past can be triggered by the most benign of writing prompts, and as they rise to the surface, they too are expressed in what gets written.  Writing our healing stories often goes well beyond the experience of serious illness as some plumb the depths of their lives, bringing into the open what they were not able to do before.  

Did you ever think there might be a fault line
passing underneath your living room:
A place in which your life is lived in meeting
and in separating, wondering
and telling, unaware that just beneath
you are the unseen seam of great plates
that strain through time? And that your life,
already spilling over the brim, could be invaded,
sent off in a new direction, turned
aside by forces you were warned about
but not prepared for?

From:  “Fault Line” by Robert Walsh (in Noisy Stones:  A Meditation Manual), 1992.  

Emotions can inspire us or hold us hostage.  Negative emotions—anger, fear or feelings of unworthiness—accumulate, just as stresses along the earth’s plates.  They weaken our ability to fend off illness, depression or disease.  Writing allows us, if we let it, to translate those negative emotions into words, make the connections between what we feel and why, and begin to understand or even forgive ourselves and others.  It is in the act of writing and sharing our stories that we release the pressure of old wounds, that we begin to heal.

Writing Suggestion:   This week, write from your own fault lines.  Go deeper in your writing. Explore those sometimes difficult and painful life experiences that still linger beneath the surface.  

September 22, 2021: Our Stories: Our Legacies

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

“Death steals everything but our stories.” – Jim Harrison (“Larson’s Holstein Bull”)

She was first diagnosed with metastatic cancer in 2014, but N., one of my former writing group members recently died after a valiant struggle less than two months ago.   Her struggle was a valiant one amidst considerable odds, but she began, in the months after her diagnosis, collecting poems and quotations that, as she put it, “uplifted me.”  A year or so later, N. joined one of my “Writing through Cancer” workshops.  She. embraced the expressive writing approach and continued to explore and deepen her writing, studying with author Natalie Goldberg and poetry with haiku masters.  She also a two year study of teacher training in mindfulness meditation training with Jack Kornfield, even as she was weakening and hospitalized for infections.  In short, N. was a person a who inspired not only me, but many of the people who knew her.

I believe the greatest teachers in my life have been the men and women in my writing groups, like Nan, who have shared their experiences of living with metastatic cancer over the years.   While I have mourned their deaths, even years later, their memories are vivid in my mind.  The writing they shared was as powerful as any found in published memoirs and poetry collections—even more so for me, for they are the living legacies of who they were, what they experienced and what they endured.

“I will tell you something about stories.  They aren’t just entertainment.  They are all we have to fight off illness and death.  You don’t have anything if you don’t have stories.  (Leslie Silko, Ceremony)

N. was such an inspiration.  She was, I knew, intent on writing a book before she died.  We had exchanged emails about the possibilities—and challenges—a year before her death.  Her plans crystallized in Spring of this year:  it would be a book to give to her partner, family, close friends, and teachers before she passed.  And, at the end of July, I was delighted to receive her gift of the book in the mail.  Entitled Legacy of Love:  Gifts I Received on the Path of Life, it is a beautiful book:  professionally bound, illustrated with her partner’s nature photographs, and filled with the reminiscences, stories and learnings from her life and cancer experience.  Quotations, meditations, prayers, and poetry that she found meaningful are interspersed among the stories of her life’s journey.  Writing prompts she’d experienced in the writing groups and other workshops are followed with her written reflections and haiku. 

It was a deeply moving experience for me to read N.’s book; I lingered over the pages, remembering her presence, the enduring love and support of her partner she’d often written about, and her deeply moving prose.  I immediately wrote to her, expressing my gratitude for such an intimate gift of her life.  In the weeks that followed, I returned to it again and again—and a week or so ago, I was moved to write her again to express my gratitude.  But unlike before, I heard nothing in return from N.  I contacted her partner and learned she had died, apparently within a day or two just after I had received her book.  My sorrow was softened because I felt Nan’s presence so vividly between its pages.

My story is myself: and I am my story. This is all you will know of me; it is all I will know of you. This is all that will survive us: the stories of who we are. — Christina Baldwin, Story Catcher

Her death saddened me, yes, as the deaths of others have who have been part of my writing groups.  Yet I was reminded again of how fortunate I am to witness and experience the many gifts of poetry and stories written and shared in the workshops I have led for so many years.  I still hear their voices and remember their faces as I read and re-read some of their stories or poems—ones that frequently took my breath away with its power and depth, ones that still bring tears to my eyes with its honesty and poignancy, writing that was lyrical, poetic, profound—the stories of their illness experiences, of their lives.  Writing I have wished more than once could have been shared with their doctors to illuminate the patients’medical experiences:  the good, the difficult, and the sometimes cold and impersonal.

Their stories, yours, mine—it’s what we carry with us on this trip we take…we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.

—Advice to a medical student by William Carlos Williams, physician and poet

Patient stories have begun to be recognized as important to the medical experience, thanks to the work of Rita Charon, who created the term, “narrative medicine,” a medical practice that uses patient stories in clinical practice, research, and education as a way to promote healing.  Storytelling, as several researchers suggest, is a powerful tool for patients and healthcare providers alike.  It provides the patients with a way to give voice to the experience of illness and, in turn, to begin to confront their illness, questions of care and mortality. 

Stories offer insight, understanding, and new perspectives. They educate us and they feed our imaginations. They help us see other ways of doing things that might free us from self-reproach or shame. Hearing and telling stories is comforting and bonds people together….Being able to narrate a coherent story is a healing experience.2,3… stories keep us connected to each other; they reassure us that we are not alone.—Miriam Divinsky, MD, Can Fam Physician. 2007 Feb; 53(2): 203–205.

Illness, unexpected tragedy or hardship may be the triggering event in our lives that ignites the desire to write, but what I experience with every writing group in the weeks together, is that other stories begin to be written — stories of love, loss, family, childhood, life’s joys and sorrows.  These are the stories of the experiences that make us unique, that make us human.  Writing and telling our stories offer a way to understand and make sense our lives.  In sharing them, our lives are affirmed, our legacies articulated.   Our stories say: “This is my life.  This is what I have experienced.  This is important to me.  It is what has shaped me into the person I am.” 

But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story—and there are so many, and so many—stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, and death. — Virginia Woolf

As I write now, I instinctively reach out and touch N.’s book—her stories and poetry; her life captured in its pages, her willingness to look death in the face, to ask herself the hard questions, to give us glimpses of what she suffered, feared, learned and loved and ultimately how she prepared herself for death, just as others faced with the prospect of mortality have written and expressed, sharing their lives, their fears and courage, so honestly and poignantly.  It is an extraordinary gift, a way to remember, a gift from the heart.

Poetry, stories:  it’s what I carry with me…and, I hope, what I can leave behind to say, “This was my life.  This is what mattered to me.”  (N., 2021)

Writing Suggestions:

  • What are the stories you want to tell?  The ones about you, your life, what matters most?
  • Has your illness broken you open?  Offered new insights or ways of seeing your situation?
  • What has had the most impact on your life?  Try this three part exploration:
    • Who were you?  (Look to your past)
    • Who are you now?
    • Who are you becoming? (What are you learning about yourself now?)
  • Use a line from a poem, essay or story that you love.  Begin with that line and then keep writing—wherever it takes you.  Here are a few you might try:
    • “Starting here, what do you want to remember?”
    • “Before you know what kindness is, you must lose things…”
    • “It is in the small things we see it.”
    • “Let the hard things in life break you.”
    • “I am falling in love with my imperfections.”
    • “But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod…”

August 3, 2020: COVID: A Time for Reflection

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD4 Comments

(Illustration by Maurice Sendak, From:  Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krause)

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?…

For the month of July, I took a month-long hiatus from writing my blogs–something I haven’t done in the 14 years since I first began my “Writing Through Cancer” blog.  But in this unusual time created by COVID, I felt the need to break from my self-imposed schedule of posting and instead, have the freedom to let my mind—and my pen—wander where they would.  It was a necessary period to simply reflect and be, in the sense of writing, quiet for a time.

I kept my daily writing routine—a habit indispensable to my day.  Some days my notebook pages were half empty, as though my muse had gone into hiding; on other days inspiration would strike, playful, serious, or lead me into a re-examination of past writing—it hardly mattered.  I simply let whatever emerged on the page, be.  I began re-reading pages and pages of old posts, books of poetry, and others about writers and writing.  I questioned whether to continue my blogs or to let them gradually fade away from inactivity. I questioned the writing of separate posts for cancer and heart failure as I’d initially done.  The two had already begun to converge in recent weeks, and not surprisingly.  Writing about serious illness, trauma or suffering is less about the illness itself and more about the human experience.  It is writing about life.

The upending of what was normal, months of social isolation, social distancing, closures, and virtual everything has been sobering.  During the early months of COVID, I had celebrated another birthday, less welcomed this year as my birthdays before COVID and when I was much younger.  My past birthdays signaled a new year, one that held promise, opportunity, new plans and dreams, while this most recent one was punctuated with questions:  How long will this continue?  Will my life be shortened by this virus?  What will the coming year hold for all of us?

Of course, there were always some years I was happy to bid farewell–ones marked by personal tragedy, loss and illness–but even then, the passing of another year signaled the possibility for something better.  Looking back, I realize that my “crosshairs” were firmly set on what Wallace Stegner once described as “the snow peaks of a vision” in his Pulitzer Prize novel, Angle of Repose, (1971).   I was always looking ahead to the “what’s next? “What’s possible?”   Before COVID, I still had that “looking ahead,” the hope, possibilities of something “new” to look forward to, a new goal to achieve, a trip to another country, some “better thoughts” that might turn into something significant on the page.   COVID, like cancer and heart failure temporarily did, foisted a “hold” on those future possibilities, and the longer our lockdowns and restrictions have continued, the more I realize we—all of us– are unlikely to return to the same world we knew—and took for granted—just six months ago.  What, then, I wondered, do we look forward to now?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

The little respite from the blogs that  I granted myself has helped me realize that this strange and unusual time has given me a chance to look back, reflect and have gratitude for the life I’ve been fortunate enough to live thus far, even if I sometimes regret I haven’t accomplished all I set out to do.  It’s also helped me clarify what matters most to me and how and where I want to expend my energies as life moves forward.

I am more aware than ever of the fragility and uncertainty of life.  I take nothing for granted.  My brushes with cancer and heart failure, the experiences of the men and women who write with me from the experience of life-threatening and terminal illness continue to remind me how precious life is and yet more, how challenging and difficult it can also be at times.  None of us is immune from illness or hardship. No one escapes.  Cancer, heart failure, a pandemic of COVID:  serious illnesses remove any pretense or assumptions about ourselves we may have—a time, perhaps, when we need to pause and reflect, gain insight and discover so much more of who we are and have the potential to be.   Maybe that’s one important lesson I will take from this time of pandemic—and use it to continue to inform how I want to live and engage with others.

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

From: “You Reading This, Be Ready,” by William Stafford)

Writing Suggestions

  • What has been your COVID experience? Write about the concerns, reflections or insights about life as you’ve known it—and how it may change.
  • Do you agree or disagree: “Writing about serious illness is really writing about life.” Why or why not?
  • What new glimpse of life and living have you discovered out of hardship or serious illness?
  • Begin with the line, “Starting here, what do I want to remember?” and keep writing for ten minutes.  Re-read.  What stands out?

 

 

A Brief Hiatus

Published on by Sharon A. Bray, EdD6 Comments

Dear Readers of “Writing Through Cancer,”

As you might have guessed from my last post, I’m in need of a little respite to refuel and re-energize.  I’ll be offline until August, but please do use the archives during this time…there’s well over a year’s worth of bi-weekly posts and prompts to help ignite your writing.

Stay well and stay safe…a friend of mine wrote about being a “good masketeer,” and for a good time yet, I’ll be wearing my mask anytime I’m out and about in Toronto.

Warm wishes,

Sharon Bray