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For the Week of August 6, 2018: When the Heart Breaks: Loss of a Loved One

August 6, 2018 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

August 6th, and I remember that on this day, my father was born 100 years ago.  I also remember how his death from lung cancer twenty-five years ago left his family torn apart with sorrow and grief, some of the wounds never fully healed.  Remembering how deeply we felt the loss of our father got me to thinking about the impact of losing a loved one.   I recalled when, on a summer’s evening some time ago, my husband and I ran into a friend at a jazz concert.  Divorced in his 50’s, he longed to find a partner to share the rest of his life and had begun dating in earnest again after a long hiatus.  He introduced us to his evening’s date, an engaging woman we chatted briefly, learning that she had lost her husband a year or so earlier.

After his companion left to find the restroom, our friend turned to me and sighed, “Another widow.”  He shrugged his shoulders and added,  “I don’t if I’m ready for this,”  “this” meaning the emotional roller coaster that often accompanies new romances or relationships after a spouse’s death.

“Be patient,” I said, “it takes so much longer than you think it will to recover from a husband’s death.”  I was remembering how, in the year after the sudden death of my first husband, I had begun dating again several months later , hoping it might ease the constant heartache I felt.  It didn’t work.  I made poor choices in the process before I acknowledged I was simply not ready to begin any new relationship.  Healing had its own time schedule, and it couldn’t be rushed. Eight years later, I met and later married my current husband, but even in our early years together, I experienced an exaggerated fear of loss.

Whether the loss of a spouse, a child or a friend from serious illnesses like cancer, ALS, heart attack, or other unexpected tragedies, much is written about dealing with the loss of a loved one yet it’s not something  well understood by those who haven’t experienced it.  Some may think of grief as a single instance or short time of pain or sadness in response to loss, but the American Cancer Society reminds us that the real process of grieving lasts much longer.

When we are in grief and mourning, it can be hard on friends or acquaintances, even our family members.  Our North American society isn’t as adept at allowing grief to take a normal course as some other cultures do.  It’s painful to see someone we care about dealing with the heartache and sorrow accompanying the death of another, but it’s very important the bereaved feel supported through the process and are allowed to express their grief.  It’s why we have bereavement support groups, therapists and pastors who specialize in grief counseling.  Grief, although similar to us all in a general way, is experienced differently by everyone.  It’s  important to accept and honor the way in which a bereaved person chooses to express sorrow and grief.

This morning, my husband and I talked about the process of grieving when a loved one’s life ends, recalling the agonizing four year battle with bladder cancer my husband’s brother in-law endured before he finally died.  I remember telephoning my sister-in-law the day after his death, rehearsing ahead what I could say that didn’t sound trite.  The telephone rang once, twice and two more times before she answered it.

“Hello?” I knew immediately she had been crying.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I just went into his room and saw how empty it is, and then…”  She began sobbing again. “He’s gone, Sharon.” Her voice was heavy with grief and exhaustion.  “He’s been my life for sixty-four years.”

I could only murmur, “Yes, I know…” and think about what it meant to be together for so long.

It is hard to give up after months of making lists,

phoning doctors, fighting entropy.  But when the end comes,

a bending takes over, empties the blood of opposition

and with a gentle skill, injects a blessed numbness…

According to the American Cancer Society,” studies have identified emotional states that people may go through during grief. The first feelings usually include shock or numbness. Then, as the person sees how his or her life is affected by the loss, emotions start to surface. The early sense of disbelief is often replaced by emotional upheaval, which can involve anger, loneliness, uncertainty, or denial. These feelings can come and go over a long period of time. The final phase of grief is the one in which people find ways to come to terms with and accept the loss.”

Perhaps this surrender foreshadows my own old age

when I have raged to exhaustion and finally have to go.  For now,

the numbness wears off.  I drive to the market, cook my own food,

take scant note of desire

with no one to consider or contradict my choices.

Something in me will never recover.  Something in me will go on.

(From “Numb,” by Florence Weinberger, in The Cancer Poetry Project, 2001)

After sixty-four years together with her husband, my sister-in-law died barely a year later from a recurrence of inflammatory breast cancer after a five year remission.  Life without her husband, despite having her adult children and grandchildren nearby, was hard for her without her husband, who had been the primary decision maker in all their years of married life.   She seemed to grow increasingly tired and depressed, as if her will to live was fading.  As many psychologists and psychiatrists know, there are few things in life more likely to lead to depression depression than losing a spouse, especially for seniors.

More than a few research studies have demonstrated that spousal bereavement is a major source of life stress and not infrequently, leaves people vulnerable to other problems like depression, chronic stress, and reduced life expectancy.   Studies conducted around the world that shown that the rate in mortality often goes up among grieving spouses after their loved one dies. One such study conducted in Israel found the risk of death during the first six months after losing a spouse increased by 50%. The phenomenon is common enough that it even has a scientific name:”Broken Heart Syndrome,” which is defined as an impermanent heart condition caused by stressful situations, like the death of a loved one.

All lives are accompanied, at some point, by mortality, but some losses are far more difficult to accept than others.  Death from a protracted illness, at least, has a cause that we understand and allows the patient and the loved ones time to come to terms with the inevitability of death.  But the unexpected losses, like the sudden death of a spouse or child, comes as a complete shock, defies our sense of what is “supposed” to happen in life, and can complicate and extend the grieving process for years.

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

(Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking)

My own emotional state in the aftermath of my first husband’s drowning involved a complicated grieving process that took years to fully heal.  But I also remember how his parents, now deceased, and two siblings never fully recovered from losing a son, an older brother.  Nor did my daughters, then nine and ten, ever fully recover from their father’s death.  Even now, over 30 years later, remnants of grief and loss still surface from time to time.

In the turbulent days following my first husband’s death, a friend offered  me the poem, “And Death Shall Have No Dominon,” by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas,  to use in honoring my husband’s death with his family and closest friends.  Thomas’s poem celebrates the undying and everlasting strength of the human spirit, and reading and sharing it provided some solace in the face of tragedy, reminding me that even in death, our loved ones are not completely lost to us.  We carry them in our hearts, our memories and our stories.

And death shall have no dominion.

       Dead men naked they shall be one

       With the man in the wind and the west moon;

       When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

       They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

       Though they go mad they shall be sane,

       Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

       Though lovers be lost love shall not;

       And death shall have no dominion.

(From:  Twenty-Five Poems, 1936)

Writing Suggestions

This week, consider the process of grief and mourning:

  • Have you lost a loved one to cancer or an unexpected tragedy? Write the memory of the day someone you loved died.
  • What did you experience in the aftermath  of death? Write about the emotional ups and downs of grief.
  • What helped you deal with the loss and gave you the strength to go on? Write about the gradual process of healing from the death of a loved one.
  • Are you currently faced with a terminal diagnosis or is your loved one? Describe the process of grief and what, as you face a shortened life or potential loss of your loved one, gives you solace and the strength.
  • Write a favorite remembrance of a loved one who has passed on. What brings a smile to your face when you remember the person?  What qualities or traits do you remember most fondly?

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, life writing, poetry and healing, writing as a way of healing, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal |

For the Week of July 30, 2018: Transitions: Matters of the Heart

July 30, 2018 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

Earlier this morning I participated in a conference call with a group of medical professionals in the Canadian Heart Failure community, a group tasked with creating a joint paper on Heart Failure care guidelines in Canada.  I was invited to represent a patient perspective, but admittedly, I was taking copious notes in a conversation that, like most specialties, has its own lingo–acronyms and terms unique to the field but for me, akin to a foreign language.  At the conclusion of the call, the group was divided into sub-groups, each tasked with writing and submitting questions to be included in a national survey on heart failure treatment, care and transitions.   I was assigned to explore and formulate questions dealing with transitions for heart failure patients.

Ironically, just last week, I’d been part of a survivors’ retreat, “Transitions,” at Gilda’s Club here in Toronto, where I led a writing  workshop on the process of transitioning from patient to “survivor.”  After this morning’s call ended today, however,  I wondered how “transition,” in heart failure terms, differed from the way in which it was used in our workshop last week.

At the retreat, we used it synonymously with becoming a cancer survivor–someone who has been, if not cured, given a number of years of being “in remission.”  We all, of course,  still hope for a cure for cancer,  and new immunotherapies have given us more hope one will be found.  Yet heart failure, by contrast,  is a condition that isn’t cured by drugs, rather they are used to improve heart functioning for as long as possible.  Inevitably, the prognosis for heart failure patients has the upper hand, and the heart continues to weaken.  As I was assigned to explore questions for the category of “transitions” in a proposed model for heart failure care in Canada, I couldn’t help but think about the different implications what “transitions” between the way we’d used it a week ago at Gilda’s club and how, in this new effort to define a model of care for heart failure, a somewhat different meaning is implied.

Heart Failure, which I have, is a growing — and all too silent — epidemic according to Dr. Paul Fedak, a cardiac surgeon at the University of Calgary.  He explains: “Heart failure is the end result of all cardiac disease.  You get heart failure from everything that goes wrong with your heart–all roads lead to heart failure.”  While cancer remains the leading cause of death in Canada, heart disease is the leading cause of premature death for women.  In the US,  heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women with cancer running a close second.    Yet I cannot help but consider the number and variety of support programs for cancer patients that are far more developed, available and varied in both countries. than resources for heart disease patients.

I’ve been part of the cancer community for nearly twenty years, and gratefully so.  When asked to introduce myself on this morning’s call, I said that I was someone whose practice has been focused on individuals living with cancer by supporting their emotional, spiritual and creative well-being through encouraging the writing and sharing of their illness stories.  The thing is that the prevalence of a variety of supportive care programs, such as we have in the cancer community, are scant by comparison in the heart failure community, although there are some recent efforts, like the HeartLife Foundation of Canada, working to provide information and resources as well as create a sense of community through social media.

I have come to realize now that my work with cancer patients and survivors has been my greatest teacher in  understanding the impact of serious or terminal illness on our lives.  My personal experience with cancer was not a  life threatening one.  But the negative side effect of my treatment didn’t make itself known until my diagnosis of heart failure eight years later.   It wasn’t until that incident,  perhaps, that I understood how the fear of premature mortality that can inhabit anyone’s mind who is diagnosed with cancer.  Heart disease and stroke kill seven times as many women as breast cancer, for example, and in Canada, a woman dies of heart disease in Canada every 20 minutes! According to the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation, women are five times more likely to die from heart disease than breast cancer. But it turns out that there are issues in research and treatment of heart disease and failure when it comes to gender.  Two-thirds of heart disease clinical research still focuses on men.  “Women are under-researched, un-diagnosed and under-treated, undersupported and under aware,” according to Yves Savoie, CEO.   “It’s unacceptable, and the situation has got to change–we need to smash this glass ceiling.”

Ironically, my cardiologist believes my heart failure was likely the result of radiation therapy I received for DCIS in my left breast eighteen years ago.  I was given “gold standard treatment,” as my oncologist described it, yet I didn’t feel like I was truly a cancer patient.  And I wasn’t, not really, because a short time later, DCIS was reclassified to “pre-cancerous,” so it was only after I collapsed  while walking my dog in December of 2008 and was diagnosed with heart failure, that I truly understood the words of Alice Hoffman, novelist, reflecting on her cancer experience:        

“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.” (“Writers on Writing, “New York Times, August 2000).

Cancer treatments have gotten progressively more refined and better, and now with new advances in immunotherapy, there is even more reason to have hope for a cure.  Heart failure treatment continues to improve as well, although it isn’t about cure as much as it is in medication that can help to improve, for as long as possible, the heart’s functioning,  but the slope is still gradually downhill, and one’s “destiny” is never far from consciousness.

What strikes me now, as I continue to go to my cardiology appointments, have tests, receive new or increased medications and talk with my cardiologist (who is truly exceptional) is how solitary a journey having heart failure has felt like to me when I  consider the supportive care and community organized around  individuals living with cancer.

Or have I been in denial?  Perhaps, to some extent, but for the seven plus years I was being treated for this condition in California, other than one “educational” workshop on heart failure, which failed to do much to enlighten me, I never encountered or was told about other programs supportive to heart failure patients.  While I read research studies on heart failure, I do it in small doses, because my sleep is woefully interrupted by the facts and statistics.  Yet I am gratified to be pulled into action concerning the condition I and so many others have, or as my cardiologist would call it, “engagement.”  In fact, at my very first appointment with her back in December of 2017, she asked, “Do you want to just be retired or do you want to be engaged?”

I was perfectly clear.  “Engaged,” I said. “I have no idea what just being retired would look like.”

“Well, we’re going to get you engaged,” she said emphatically.

And she did.  Four months later, I sat in a group meeting on Heart Failure Access in Canada, all the while wondering how on earth I could possibly contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way.  Yet perhaps now I’m realizing I can be helpful in offering a patient perspective as the committee works  to define an optimal model for Heart Failure Care in Canada.  And that has a lot to do with the past 18 or so years of facilitating expressive writing groups for men and women with cancer.  A vocation, I’ve said, that has always been dear to my heart…little did I realize how much.

Perhaps all that I have learned, cherished and experienced as part of the cancer community, and most of all, from the honesty and vulnerability of those who have come to write and share their stories and lives with me in the writing groups, will help be me a better patient and participant in this community of cardiologists, nurses and heart failure patients.

And perhaps I won’t feel, as I have in the past, as lonely in the journey of being a woman living with heart failure.

My outlook is it’s not how long you live, it’s what you put into your life.—Simon Morgan, 58, ( dilated cardiomyopathy;  heart transplant patient, UK)

Writing suggestions:

  • Cancer or any serious illness can be a great teacher.  What have you learned from cancer or other major hardship?
  • In your cancer experience, think about the kinds of support and help you were given.  What was most helpful?  Describe it and explore why you found it as valuable as you did.
  • Think about transitions–the many times in your life you’ve experienced that “in-between” period during change from one part of your life to another.  What meaning does “transitions” imply for you?  Why?

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, life writing, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal |

For the Week of July 23, 2018: Love to Read? It’s Good for You

July 23, 2018 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one’s encounter with it in a book. — André Maurois

It’s taken me the better part of three days to organize my books into some kind of order on my bookshelves.  In part, I have a lot of books, although far fewer than I used to when our move back to Toronto dictated some serious downsizing of our belongings.  Despite my reluctance to let many of them go, a feeling much like saying good-bye to old friends, I did, inviting writing group members to choose from the books tagged for donation, giving a few favorites to friends, and donating several boxes to the local library.  Yet I kept favorites, volumes of poetry, selected works of fiction, books on art and writing, and to my shock, I still had enough to fill three large bookcases.

The process of organizing was a slow one, alphabetizing poetry books, grouping fiction favorites and then nonfiction before several volumes on writing and poetry craft, even several favorite children’s books I have yet to let go of.  But as time-consuming as the basic task was,  I was further slowed in my progress by the constant desire to open a book to a dog-eared page, re-read the underlined passages, someone’s inscription on the title page, or if poetry, more than one of a poet’s collection.  I was often lost in remembering:  where I was, what was going on in my life, why I loved a book or a poem as much as I did.  My books, it turns out, have been as much a source of healing and happiness as they were about learning and growth.

“And death shall have no dominion,” Dylan Thomas wrote in his poem by the same name, his words offering me some measure of solace in the wake of my first husband’s drowning:

And death shall have no dominion.

They shall have stars at elbow and foot…

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Those lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion…  

My volume of e.e. cummings Complete Poems 1904-1962 was filled with marked up passages, asterisks, and dog-eared pages, among them one that during my recovery from grief and loss offered me hope and a new way of living:

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young…

I pulled Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Angle of Repose (1971), sitting down to re-read several pages.  I remembered reading the novel shortly after I  moved my children and myself from Halifax to Toronto two years after my husband’s death to begin my doctoral studies.  I was aching from loss and longing for what I still called “home,” the small Northern Californian town where my father’s family had homesteaded, settled and where, each day of my childhood, I gazed at the beauty of Mt. Shasta, one of the volcanic peaks in the Cascade Range.

Stegner’s book was a powerful read for me, and he became one of my favorite writers.  In Angle of Repose,  the protagonist, Lyman, a writer confined to a wheelchair, had been recently been abandoned by his wife.  He was filled with bitterness and a sense of defeat.  After moving into his grandparents’ house, he decided to chronicle his grandparents’  early days in the western frontier.  As he read through his grandmother’s letters, he discovered much more about their marriage, struggles and difficulties than he anticipated. Through their story, he learned not only of their lives, but his own.

I sampled passages from several of the pages, in awe of Stegner’s command of language, his deep understanding of the challenges of early life in the  West, and the way in which he artfully moved from the struggles of the grandparents to his protagonist’s.  There were lessons in the book had real impact for me at the time,  and I had underlined passage after passage.

  • Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend…” 
  • Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality…” 
  • We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again…”
  • She saw in his face he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He set his crosshairs on the snowpeaks of a vision.

It’s no surprise, perhaps, but as my shelving slowed and I paused to page through one book after another of the books I’d loved, I was reminded that reading, perhaps as much as writing, was not only an important part of my daily life, but of healing and happiness.

“Medicines and surgery may cure, but only reading and writing poetry can heal.”                    –J. Arroyo, author

It’s not a novel concept (no pun intended).  The notion that books can make us emotionally, psychologically and even physically better goes back to the ancient world.  “The Reading Cure,” published in a 2008 issue of The Guardian reminds us that Apollo was not only the Greek god of poetry, but also of healing.  Aristotle believed literature had healing benefits and could be used to treat illness.  Hospitals or health sanctuaries in ancient Greece were typically situated next to theatres, most famously at Epidaurus, where dramatic performances were considered part of the cure.

One sheds one’s sicknesses in books– D. H. Lawrence

A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to a 2015 New Yorker Magazine article “Can Reading Make You Happier?” by Ceridwen Dovey.  Dovey explores the origins of Bibliotherapy, which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “an interaction between the reader and certain literature which is useful in aiding personal adjustment.”  Bibliotherapy is a therapeutic practice, widely used in the U.K., that uses words to soothe the emotions and alter thoughts and to help people deal with psychological, social and emotional problems.   Covey notes that the Ancient Greeks inscribed a library entrance  in Thebes as a “healing place for the soul, noting that Shakespeare, in the play “Titus Andronicus,” encourages the audience to  “Come, and take choice of all my library, And so beguile thy sorrow …”

Bibliotherapy came into its own at the end of the nineteenth century. Sigmund Freud began using literature during psychoanalysis sessions, famously remarking, “Whenever I get somewhere, a poet has been there first.”   Following World War I, as traumatized soldiers returned home from the front, they were often prescribed a course of reading. Later in the century, bibliotherapy was also used in hospitals and libraries, and since, the practice has been utilized by psychologists, social and aged-care workers, and doctors as a viable mode of adjunct therapy.

You may be interested to know that there is scientific research that supports health benefits of reading, for example, Covey cites a 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology that showed when we read about an experience in a novel, we draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.  And other studies suggest that people who read a lot of fiction tend to be better at empathizing with others.  At the very least, reading does boost your brain power, like a good jog exercises your cardiovascular system, and it can help you relate to others feelings, particularly if you read literary fiction.  Reading helps us relax, and reading before bed even helps us sleep.

But perhaps the most important thing reading does for us is in its capacity to open our eyes, minds and hearts to the larger world, to immerse ourselves a world beyond our everyday lives, and to find ourselves among the words another has written on a page–words that speak to what we are experiencing, that remind us of hope and healing.  What good literature can do and does do best, for so many of us, is touch our souls.

From Great Expectations I learned the power the stories we tell ourselves have to do either harm and good, to ourselves and to others; from Death of a Salesman I learned the dangers of a corrupt version of the American Dream; from Madame Bovary, I learned to embrace the real world rather than escaping into flights of fancy; from Gulliver’s Travels I learned the profound limitations of my own finite perspective; and from Jane Eyre I learned how to be myself. These weren’t mere intellectual or moral lessons, although they certainly may have begun as such. Rather, the stories from these books and so many others became part of my life story and then, gradually, part of my very soul. –Karen Swallow Prior, The Atlantic, 2013. 

Writing Suggestions:

  • Consider how reading has played a role in your life.
  • What role does reading play in your life?
  • What kind of books or literature do you most prefer? Why?
  • Has reading helped you during difficult periods in your life? How?
  • What are some of your most memorable or enduring books or poetry you’ve experienced? Why?
  • Describe a difficult time in your life and a book or poem which offered you some solace and insight.

 

Posted in art and writing, healing arts, life writing, literature and healing, poetry and healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors | Tagged | 3 Comments »

For the Week of July 16, 2018: One Thing is Certain, Life Changes.

July 16, 2018 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

This morning, I opened my notebook for the first time in more than two weeks, a lapse created by the intensity of preparing for a move to a new apartment, then living among the boxes as we tried to make sense of fitting ourselves and our lives into a smaller space once again.  My pen felt awkward in my hand, and for a few minutes, I wrote aimlessly, without, it seemed, direction or meaningful content, before I paused, the wrote, I have missed my routine of writing–the space and quiet of solitude, hearing myself think, sorting out what I feel and stumbling in to a new insight or discovery.

When our lives are in upheaval, no matter the precipitating event, it’s not uncommon that the routines or daily rituals that we find calming and that help keep us centered, fall by the wayside.  Whether cancer or other serious health issues, job loss, aging and retirement or, as we have done in the past week, changing residences, we’re thrown off-balance, into a maelstrom of confusion, stunned, ill-prepared and questioning ourselves and our lives.  As one poet put it, it’s a bit like living atop 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 is 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)

Our moves, first from California back to Canada just one year ago, and now to a more convenient but somewhat smaller apartment in Toronto, have been welcomed, yet more challenging than either my husband or I anticipated.   It’s been much more than simply changing domiciles.  It’s the realization, coupled with the necessary downsizing, letting go of old mementos and boxes of belongings that tell the stories of our younger and different lives, that we are growing older, just as our parents did before us.

Like it or not, life for all of us keeps changing, and many times the changes are ones we don’t expect or underestimate the impact they have on us.  I ended my morning write, briefly describing what turned into an ordeal of moving, even though it was only nine minutes from our old apartment, writing Life continues to change and requires that we, too, adapt.  Change is the human experience.”  It’s true for all of us.  We think we’ve “arrived,” settled into a place, a career, and then something unexpected happens.  I recall Joan Didion’s first words her memoir of loss and life change,  “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. ― In:  The Year of Magical Thinking, 2007

Life, whether we like it or not, hands us events we have little or no control over: life-threatening illness, significant loss, tragedy, suffering, aging.   As sociologist  and cancer survivor Arthur Frank stated, “…by the time we have lived through it, we are living differently” (from:  At the Will of the Body, 1991).  Who we are, truly, may become more apparent how we choose to deal with our illness or loss.  This is what makes us uniquely human–our spirit, determination, resilience—and they are never more apparent than when we are faced with the unexpected, even the inevitability of our lives changing.

Any life threatening illness, significant loss or tragedy changes us.  As Professor Emeritus of Sociology (U. of Calgary) and cancer survivor Arthur Frank stated, “…by the time we have lived through it, we are living differently” (in At the Will of the Body, 1991). Who we are, truly, may become more apparent in how we choose to deal with the unexpected and inevitable changes we experience. This is what makes us uniquely human–our spirit, determination, resilience—and they are never more apparent than when illness or loss strips all pretenses away.

Life will sometimes wallop us, brings us to our knees, to tears, and yet it is our greatest teacher too.  It says, “Listen up,” and teaches us something about ourselves.  All we know for certain is that life will change again–and again.  We will be affected, perhaps multiple times, by a triggering event, whether tragedy, illness, empty nests, unimaginable loss or awakening to the reality that we are moving toward the winter of our lives.  It is the realization Linda Pastan describes in her poem, “Elegy:”

Our final dogwood leans
over the forest floor…

It’s a relic
of the days when dogwoods

flourished…

When I took for granted
that the world would remain

as it was, and I
would remain with it.

(In: Insomnia, 2015)

We all can be lulled into taking life for granted…that the world would remain/as it was, and I/would remain with it.  No matter what the actual event may be that brings us to our knees, we are forced to acknowledge and accept that our lives will change, not once, but many times.

How can you navigate life’s changes more successfully?  Transition has been written extensively about, and there are things you can do to lessen the upheaval and stress that comes with it.  Carol Berman, MD, writing in The Huffington Post, offers a few common sense suggestions for navigating through life transition and change:

  • Instead of being passive, try being active, anticipating outcomes, strategies you can employ to make the process of change better.
  • Take the time to acknowledge the past, the present, and what you believe is the future. 
  • If you experience strong emotions, such as anger or sadness, acknowledge them.Don’t stuff them down deep inside. Our emotions are pathways to a deeper and intuitive part of ourselves.
  • Breaking your transition into smaller steps can help you deal better with them.  When a major change is broken down in this way, it is not so overwhelming.
  • Reinforce and celebrate the positive steps you take towards navigating your transition.Give yourself a pat on the back!
  • Learn what a particular change or transition may mean for you.There are many resources on the major life events that affect our lives, whether cancer, parenting, retirement, job loss or many others. Read, talk to others who’ve experienced what you are going through.  It can help.
  • Reframe what change is to you. Change your perspective.  Life happens, and it changes constantly. If you don’t like what’s happening to you now or even if you do, the one certainty we all have is that it will change.

It’s taken me much longer to write a post this morning after a two week hiatus, and it was (I’ll admit) difficult for my perfectionist self to refer you, my readers, to the archived and previously published posts while my husband and I were consumed by our  moving process the second year in a row.  The good news is that the entire experience forced me to be a little more self-forgiving, to slow down and deal with the mountain of details and boxes that cluttered up my life for the past many days.  Change may be unsettling, but it is, after all, a great teacher if we let ourselves learn from it.  In the end, we discover that the resources for navigating through the ups and downs of life reside in us– not always easy, but necessary.  I turn to a favorite passage from the poet Wendell Berry as a reminder:

…And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear.  What we need is here.

(From: “The Wild Geese,” In: Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1998)

Writing Suggestion:

  • Before you write a longer piece, brainstorm: List the different/most memorable events that triggered significant life change for you, e.g., breast cancer, father’s death, loss of a dear friend, losing house to fire (earthquake, flooding, etc.)… Then, without spending too much time on each, start a another list, only this time, for each event, complete two sentences: “Before _____________, I was____________.  After _______________ I was _____________.
  • From your list, choose the change/event that was most difficult for you to experience. Tell its story.  What was the triggering event?  How did you react?  What were the emotions you experienced?  How did you navigate through the change?  What or who helped?  What hindered? What did you learn?

 

 

 

Posted in expressive writing, life writing, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal |

For the Week of July 8, 2018: A Short Hiatus from Posting

July 9, 2018 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

Dear Readers,

I’m buried beneath boxes.

Man covered in cardboard boxes - moving concept

Man covered by lots of cardboard boxes – moving concept

Please access the archive for writing suggestions (a year’s worth) as I contend with emerging from stacks of boxes filled with belongings in the aftermath of moving from one place to another.  At least I’ve found my computer…but wait, where’s my writing desk?  I’ll be back to a more reasoned life and resume posting next week, July 16th.

Warm wishes,

Sharon Bray

Posted in Uncategorized |

For the Week of July 1, 2018: In Transit

July 1, 2018 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

“I hear there are people who actually enjoy moving. Sounds like a disease to me – they must be unstable. ––Jan Neruda, Prague Tales, 1878

“It’s easier to die than to move … at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.” 
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose, 1971

Most people I know have endured at least one major move in their lives if not more and understand the impact it has on mind, body and soul.  For the second time in one year,  my husband and I are packing up our belongings in cardboard boxes, wrapping precious items in padding and paper, and gradually, taking apart one apartment to move to another just ten minutes away.  At least it’s not a transcontinental move as we made last summer, but it is still a challenge for body, mind and soul.

This week, I wish those of you in here in Canada a Happy Canada Day, and to those of you in the United States, a very Happy Fourth of July as I take a brief hiatus from posting this holiday week. The chaos that comes with moving is real, and worse, the heat wave has us all firmly in its grip.  My brain is crammed with the mundane but necessary “to dos” and details that clamor for attention…but the moving truck arrives early in the morning in just a few short days.  Sometimes life does get in the way of writing!

Enjoy your holiday celebrations, and if you’re inclined to want to write, you’ll find a year’s worth of past posting and prompts in the archive for this site.

Warm wishes,

Sharon Bray

 

Posted in expressive writing, writing as a way of healing, writing prompts for cancer survivors | 2 Comments »

For the Week of June 25, 2018: What We Keep: The Stories in Our Things

June 25, 2018 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

One year ago, my husband and I, with the help of friends, sat in the San Diego sunshine, tables and bookcases filled with the artifacts of our lives–old dishes, vases, kitchen goods, a few paintings, plants, pottery–all a blur now as I try to recall that Saturday afternoon.  The week before, we’d sold furniture–indoor and outdoor–that we knew would not transition well from a house to a city apartment in Toronto, pleased with our downsizing, and yet, feeling an odd sense of loss we couldn’t name.

“The effects of moving are experienced in the body, in the imagination, in the realm of desire. What the eye sees, what the body feels, what the heart yearns for, what remains and what has been lost — these are difficult at first to describe.” 
― Louise DeSalvo,  On Moving:  A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts and Finding Home Again, 2009.

We arrived in Toronto days later, our downsized belongings in transit.  Once they were delivered by the movers, we discovered, again, we were not done shedding ourselves of furniture and a number of odds and ends we had optimistically packed into the boxes arriving at our Toronto apartment.  It took weeks to settle in and arrange our lives and belongings into a three bedroom apartment after decades of home ownership.  We were packed in tightly, but finally, we could shut the doors to crammed closets and get on with life.  Now, almost exactly one year later, we are moving again.

As author Louise DeSalvo explored in her 2009 book, On Moving, and  what many of us experience, the pain, hope, and turmoil in moving from place to place are nearly universal.  We move with conflicted emotions:  hope a new home will be a positive change yet fear it may not, nostalgia coupled feelings of loss, yet the excitement of change.  We were happy to return to Toronto, the city where we’d met and married, where one daughter and her family live, and where we discovered a sense of “home”  still palpable.  Yet we missed our friends, the larger space of living in a house, and our deck that hung out over one of San Diego’s many canyons.  Our new digs, spacious by apartment standards, seemed confining and small.  But gradually, we adjusted and found there was so much in our favorite city to explore or re-acquaint ourselves with besides the long-awaited regular time with our daughter and granddaughter.  We began to reclaim our lives as “Torontonians.”

It’s not a transcontinental move we’re doing this year.  Our new apartment is located only a short distance from our current building, and is far more convenient for the two of us than our third floor walk-up has proven to be.  As eager as we are to have some amenities lacking in this older building, we are faced with somewhat smaller space and the task of downsizing more belongings, packing our lives into containers, and living, for the next few days, among stacks of packing boxes.  The most difficult part, just as it was last year, is not the physical labor, rather, it’s the sentimental aspect of sorting through mementoes and objects accumulated through our lives, ones containing memories and personal meaning.

“Every object is full of story.”  These are words I recall from the summer writing workshop I attended eighteen years ago in Berkeley.  Pat Schneider, author of Writing Alone and With Others (2003), was taking objects from a wicker basket and placing them on a white cloth before us.  I was there to venture back into what I loved most—writing—after a long detour through the soul-destroying path of a corporate career.  “Objects are how the world comes to us,” she said while we all sat quietly, watching as she placed random things on the cloth:  a metal hook, a rosary, shaving brush, wooden spoon…soon the cloth was covered in objects from the past, and Pat invited us to choose one, something that drew us to it without stopping to questioning why.

Just one week earlier, I had  just finished seven weeks’ of radiation therapy, and while my skin was still red and tender, cancer was not on my mind as as I listened to Pat’s instructions.  Most people were quick to choose, but I held back,  slowly scanning the diminishing collection of objects.  I felt a wave of anxiety as  others began writing.  What on earth was I going to write about?  That’s when I spotted a half empty pack of old Camel cigarettes.  I picked it up, smelled the odor of stale tobacco, and memories flooded back.   An image of my father, seated behind the steering wheel of an old Chevy pickup truck, a cigarette in his left hand filled my mind.  I remembered how, when I was in high school, a the two of us traveled the back roads of rural Siskiyou County to deliver a washer or refrigerator to a customer.  I loved those trips, although I was of little help to him, because I had my father to myself, and I listened with rapt attention as he told me stories from his childhood.  He died of lung cancer just eight years before the workshop I now sat in, pen poised over my notebook.  I began writing, “He tried them all, Camels, Marlboros, Pall Malls…”  Memories of my father clamored for attention. My pen raced across the page.  There were so many stories to be captured in one half-empty pack of cigarettes.

This past week, as I’ve gone through drawers, boxes and bookshelves, I’ve stopped frequently, pausing to examine pictures and little things wrapped in tissue, tucked into the corners of those drawers, cabinets and boxes.  It’s slow work, because without warning, some small object or picture triggers a memory, a story, the recollection of another time in my life, reminding me of what it was like to be me then, before now.  The  stories from my life and the people who were important to me are captured in those small mementoes.  I rememberd reading Maria Mutch’s 2014 essay,  “Ghost in the Machine:  A Typewriter, A Postcard, and the Objects of Memory,” which told of her search for an old black manual typewriter, not aware until later that the memories of a dead friend–one who had committed suicide years earlier–were embedded in her search.  Her friend had, just before her death, tried to give Mutch her Smith Corona portable typewriter.  It’s a beautifully rendered essay, reminding us of how our memories and stories can be triggered by ordinary, everyday objects—trinkets, toys, utensils—from our pasts, objects that while insignificant to others, are dear to us for the memories they hold.

Objects, the everyday tools of our lives, are the triggers for stories, real or imagined.  We visit museums and gaze at the artifacts of ancient civilizations and of our ancestors, gleaning a bit of history as we do, but little about the person or the events that are part of what we see behind the glass.  What stories might those objects tell us, if only they could speak?

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes

on a pile of broken dishes by the house;

a tall man too, says the length of the bed

in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,

says the Bible with a broken back

on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;

but not a man for farming, say the fields

cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn…

 

Something went wrong, says the empty house

in the weed-choked yard….

(“Abandoned Farmhouse,” by Ted Kooser, In: Sure Signs:  New & Selected Poems, 1980)

 

Significant Objects (2012) is a pictorial collection of random objects coupled with fabricated stories, edited by Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn.  It’s the result of a literary experiment designed to answer the question, “Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object?”  The project team invited several well-known writers to invent stories about a collection of secondhand items gathered from yard sales and thrift stores, bought for no more than a few cents to a dollar or two.  Over 200 writers contributed to the project, and the collection of objects was auctioned off on eBay.  Coupled with a story, those same objects now sold for considerably more than their original price, resulting in thousands of dollars donated to charity!

I sit at my desk as I write this post, half empty packing boxes a few feet away, and memorabilia scattered on the floor nearby.  There’s a plastic luggage tag, my father’s name and address written on the card inside in his fine, slanted hand.  Next to it, a round fabric emblem made with gold thread, rhinestones and stitching to create a monster’s face–originally sewn on the jacket of the character “The Hooded Fang,” appearing in Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre’s first production of Mordecai Richler’s children’s novel, Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, originally published in 1975.  I loved the book about as much as the children I read it to–my two young daughters and elementary school students among them!  I was lucky enough to get the Hooded Fang’s jacket emblem from a close friend, who was also the costume designer for the production.  Perhaps you understand now why I began packing three weeks ahead of the our moving date. Going through the keepsakes and mementoes slows my progress as  I reach for my notebook to jot down yet another story from my life I want to remember.

When I walk in my house I see pictures,

bought long ago, framed and hanging

—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore—

that I’ve cherished and stared at for years,

yet my eyes keep returning to the masters

of the trivial—a white stone perfectly round,

tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,

a broken great-grandmother’s rocker,

a dead dog’s toy—valueless, unforgettable

detritus that my children will throw away

as I did my mother’s souvenirs …

(“The Things,” by Donald Hall, In:  The Back Chamber, 2011.)

Writing Suggestions:  I’ve just paused, again, to gaze at the collection of little memorabilia on the bookshelf near where I sit each morning to write:  a piece of obsidian from the lava beds in Siskiyou County where I spent my childhood, a small clay bird, a roughly sculpted ballet slipper made by a child…  Every object has meaning, and each has its story to tell.

  • What objects or keepsakes do you have tucked away in drawers or placed on shelves or tables?  What memories and meaning do they hold?  Think of those objects as the keepers of stories.  Choose one (or more) and write the story, the memories that each represents.
  • Begin with one object or photograph.  Hold it and examine it closely using all the senses you can.  Let the object or photo take you to the story or poem contained within it.  You might be surprised at how much you have to write about.

 

Posted in art and writing, expressive writing, healing arts, life writing, writing as a way of healing, writing prompts for cancer survivors |

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