Why write from the pain and struggle that comes with cancer?Studies have shown it can actually be good for you.When you repress emotions and silence your stories, your ability to heal is weakened. Writing offers you the safety to unearth and express all that you think and feel.And when you begin to shape those thoughts and feelings into story, it helps you to make sense of things and to cope more effectively with the emotional roller coaster that a cancer diagnosis can trigger.
Writing is also a form of creative self-expression that is readily available to anyone who wants to do it. You don't need a special place or a lot of special materials. You can write almost anywhere:at home, on the train, in a waiting room, or at a cafe. All you need is a pen, paper or a laptop and the freedom to express what resides in your heart and mind.
Writing Through Cancer is a website designed for anyone whose life has been touched by cancer. If you've accidentally stumbled onto this site but are struggling with some other serious illness or painful situation, you'll find many of the prompts are very easily applied to anyone who wants to write for healing purposes.
Here's how it works: each week, I'll post a writing prompt designed to inspire you to write from your cancer experience. Every prompt will be available on the site for one month.You'll also find writing from other cancer patients and survivors from my various writing groups. Whether through the prompts I provide or the words of others who have written with me, I hope that you'll find this site a source of inspiration and encouragement, a place that offers you a gentle nudge to write and discover its wonderfully healing benefits.
In Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day,” her final two lines pose a question directly to the reader:“Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?”
Oliver’s question is one I asked my Stanford Cancer Center writers to respond to last Wednesday.The writing was poignant and powerful, but as we shared our writing aloud with one another, we stumbled onto an interesting realization about the effect of cancer and our raisons d’être.
A diagnosis of cancer, while shocking and upsetting, also focuses your energy on one thing:winning the fight against it.You’re clear about your purpose and rarely lose sight of it during the entire process of treatment and recovery.You’re intent on surviving and living. But what about after treatment has ended?Our group members agreed that the territory one navigates post-cancer treatment is often surprisingly unfamiliar.You feel robbed of the clarity of purpose you had during treatment.You’re cut loose, adrift, and left to ask, “What is my life purpose now?”
Cancer survivors often report that the time after treatment is one of the most emotional—even unusual—periods of their lives. Fears of recurrence are common as are the stresses of returning to “normal” life with others’ expectations, lists of “to dos” and unfinished projects all waiting for you.So much has changed, yet so much appears the same.You might feel as if others can't understand what you've been through, and that triggers feelings of sadness, anger or loneliness.Your body may be altered or scarred, and you discover you’re feeling an adult version of pre-pubescent self-consciousness. You might even feel guilty when a friend or acquaintance dies from cancer, wondering why you were spared.
Cancer treatment offers us a clear purpose; it provides us with a structure to our days, a ritual of appointments, infusions, radiation, and support groups.Ritual is comforting.It keeps us tethered to the familiar.
In a recent article entitled “Losing a Comforting Ritual: Treatment,” author Dana Jennings described the letdown occurring after his treatment was completed: As I was being treated for an aggressive prostate cancer this past year — surgery, hormone therapy, radiation — I experienced an unexpected side effect: post-treatment letdown. It tended to arrive right as a cycle of treatment was ending. It snuggled up against its old friend uncertainty and whimpered, “So, what’s next?” None of us want to be sick, be obliged to take our medicine. But we are also creatures who love habit and ritual, and medical treatment is a very structured exercise that plays to that craving. When I had radiation for about two months last winter, it began to feel as familiar as a job. I knew the names of the hospital parking attendants and the receptionists. The nurses, doctors and therapists all smiled and said hello, and I did the same. Each day I arrived at radiation oncology, checked in, got my hospital bracelet, changed into a drafty gown, then waited with my fellow patients — my colleagues in cancer — to be treated. Once a week, my weight, blood pressure and temperature were taken and I met with my radiation oncologist. I had become a regular at the radiation spa, had even learned to artfully jiggle the key in the stubborn locker doors. Then it was over. Which is a good thing. But even though it was a relief to be done with the radiation, it still felt like getting fired or laid off. For two months I was the subject of intense attention by the medical staff. And there was the professional yet intimate laying on of hands each day as I was positioned just so in the TomoTherapy machine… (New York Times, June 30, 2009)
What about you?What was it like to be finished with treatment?What did you feel? What got you through that period of adjustment?How have you re-discovered a new life purpose?What is it?
Try answering the question Mary Oliver posed, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with you one wild and precious life?”
For the Week of June 28, 2009: How I Want to Be Remembered
The events of this past week have been sobering.Michael Jackson’s and Farah Fawcett’s deaths on Thursday made the headlines.Their legacies are being discussed in papers, blogs, and national television news, overshadowing other lives lost closer to home.
This week, friends and family said farewell to Geri, who battled ovarian cancer for many years and to Ady, a breast cancer survivor who also suffered from chronic lymphocytic leukemia.As I thought about the women, each a member of one of my writing groups, I was called with the tragic news of the sudden death of a cousin, who chose to die by his own hand.
It was impossible not to think about lives ending and the legacies left.I listened to the coverage of Jackson’s death and artistic legacy.I sat and watched Fawcett’s “Farah’s Story,” a moving and honest documentary of her cancer journey.The film is also part of the legacy she wanted to leave behind as a courageous cancer patient and advocate.I also read the obituaries for Geri and Ady before turning to my cousin’s obituary, which appeared only Friday.Although beautifully written, I wondered how each of them might have written their obituaries, given the chance.How, I wondered, would they have wanted to be remembered by the rest of us?
In the January 16, 2009 issue of The Huffington Post, Lloyd Garvey wrote about writing one’s own obituaries.“A while back,” he wrote, “somebody quite wise - I think it was my rabbi - suggested that people should write their own obituaries. Now. Regardless of age or medical condition. That way, you'll think about how you want to be remembered and what you want to accomplish in the rest of your life.”
Leadership guru Peter Drucker told a story in The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done:"When I was thirteen I had an inspiring teacher of religion who one day went right through the class of boys asking each one, "What do you want to be remembered for? None of us, of course, could give an answer. So, he chuckled and said, "I didn't expect you to be able to answer it. But if you still can't answer it by the time you're fifty, you will have wasted your life."
The question, "What do you want to be remembered for?" is one, he stated, that induces you to renew yourself.You’re forced to see yourself as a different person:the person you want to become.
Marilyn Nelson answers the question in a poem, “Cover Photograph,” using the line, “I want to be remembered” in each stanza to describe the different aspects of herself that she wants others to remember:
I want to be remembered As a voice that was made to be singing The lullaby of shadows As a child fades into a dream…
I want to be remembered As an autumn under maples: A show of incredible leaves…
I want to be remembered With a simple name, like Mama: As an open door from creation, As a picture of someone you know.
(In Mama’s Promises:Poems)
How you want to be remembered? Who is the person you want to become before you die?This week, try writing your own obituary or eulogy. What would you say about yourself? How do you want to be remembered? Think about the things that really matter, the things that will ultimately define your life’s legacy, and the way in which you would like to be remembered by others. You might even begin as Nelson did in her poem:“I want to be remembered...”
For the Week of June 21, 2009: Fathers
www.vvmf.org
It’s Fathers’ Day today, and whether your father is living or dead, no doubt you’ll pause to remember your father, your children’s father, or other men who, as fathers, have touched your life in some way.
“I miss you every day,” Ted Kooser writes in his poem, “Father:”
the heartbeat under your necktie, the hand cupped on the back of my neck, Old Spice in the air, your voice delighted with stories. (In Delights and Shadows) We’ve been celebrating fathers for over 100 years.The first known celebration of Father's Day was commemorated at a West Virginia church on July 5, 1908 after a deadly explosion in nearby Monongah had taken the lives of 261 men the previous December.
However, our contemporary Father’s Day celebration is most often attributed to Sonora Smart Dodd, who was raised by her father after her mother’s death.She became inspired by Mother's Day and wanted to show how thankful she was to her father.She initiated the first Father's Day celebrated on June 19, 1910.Father’s Day, despite the support from churches and the YWCA, took several years to become official.Unlike Mother’s Day, it was often the subject of parody and laughter.However, in 1924, President Coolidge recommended that Father's Day become a national holiday, and in 1966, President Johnson proclaimed the third Sunday of June as the national observance of Father’s Day.
I don’t remember Father’s Day as being much of a celebration during the years of my childhood.Mothers definitely got more attention in those days, but happily, the role of fathers in children’s lives is more visible and acknowledged than ever before. Fathers, and the importance they have in our lives, have been on my mind a lot for the past two weeks.I’ve been spending time with my grandson while his father is overseas, and it’s brought back many memories of my daughters and their father during those early years, how they squealed with delight when he arrived home from work each day, and how each of us offered something unique to them in our parenting.He died while my daughters were still in grade school, but their memories of him remain vivid and sometimes larger than life, just as my memories of my father are sometimes for me.
"It doesn't matter who my father was," the poet Anne Sexton wrote, "it matters who I remember he was." These memories, what we remember about our fathers, often make their way into essays, stories or poems. Here are some examples: Remember after work you grabbed our skateboard, crouched like a surfer, wingtips over the edge; wheels clacketing down the pocked macadam, you veered almost straight into the neighbor's hedge? We ran after you laughing, shouting, Wait!
Or that August night you swept us to the fair? The tallest person boarding the ferris wheel, you rocked our car right when we hit the apex above the winking midway, to make us squeal. Next we raced you to the games, shouting, Wait! (Elise Partridge, “For a Father" in Fielder's Choice) He wasn’t hard on us kids, never struck us, took us to doctors and dentists when needed. He used to sing in the car bought us root beers along the road. He loved us with his deeds. (Larry Smith, "A Father's Pain" from A River Remains) Wanting to say things, I miss my father tonight. His voice, the slight catch, the depth from his thin chest, the tremble of emotion in something he has just said to his son… (Simon Ortiz, “My Father's Song,” InA Good Journey) This week, try writing about fathers or fatherhood.What memories are triggered by the word “father?”What are the delights?The shadows?What things do you wish to say to your father, grandfather or even your children’s father?What do you remember or cherish most about your father?How has your father influenced your life?Write about fathers.
www.boston.com/... /photos/raw/Ready_to_surf.jpg
Week of June 14: Ready...
This past week I celebrated a birthday, one considered significant only because of legislation enacted during the Roosevelt administration, which arbitrarily determined the age of so-called “retirement.”Actually, the age of 65 was originally selected as the time for retirement by the "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck of Germany during the late 1800s. Our American social security law was passed 55 years later, in 1935, and at the time, the average life expectancy in America was just shy of 62 years.
I’m nowhere near ready to “retire,” and most of my peers are similarly inclined to pursue meaningful work for as long as the body and brain cells will allow.Nevertheless, the AARP card that joins the others in my wallet and the knowledge that at places like movie theatres or certain restaurants, I qualify for a “seniors’” discount is somewhat disconcerting for my self-image.I am not quite ready to accept the label, “senior,” and I suspect it is one I will never wear comfortably.
Are we ever ready for the changes life presents to us?Each stage has its challenges and its rewards, of course, and this week, as I celebrated my birthday with a four-month old grandson smiling in my arms, I was quite content to embrace the title, “Grandma,” something that most often accompanies the entrance into the “older” generation.On the other hand, I haven’t been as graceful in embracing the physical changes in my body that also accompany the advent of one’s “senior” years—the relentless pull of gravity, loss of muscle tone, the silvering of my hair.What happened to that younger, more attractive self in the mirror?I still balk at my regular visits to the cardiologists, who monitor the ICD that resides just above my heart, unwilling to accept that I have a condition I previously assumed belonged only to my aging grandparents and uncles. I wasn’t ready in my fifth decade either, when I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer, but the experience offered me new possibilities and a new direction for my work and writing. A few weeks ago, I read a poem, “Ready,” by Irene MacKinnon, on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.Her words have stayed with me.She begins with a memory: I remember a Sunday with the smell of food drifting out the door of the cavernous kitchen...
I’d begun my birthday this week with many memories—my daughter as a baby, the blue bicycle that was waiting for me the morning of my sixth birthday, the surprise party my husband and daughters managed to pull off just a few years ago.In the second stanza, the poet shift from her memories of the past to the more recent events of her present life:
I remembered this thirty years later as I got up from the hospital bed, favoring my right side where something else had been removed. Pushing a cart that held practically all of my vital fluids, I made my way down the hall...
How many of us were flooded with memories of our lives—the life before cancer—as we received our diagnoses, faced surgeries or transplants, endured the regimen of chemotherapy, the uncertainty of our futures?In a mixture of wry humor and poignancy, MacKinnon describes the moment of realizing that even though her old life was gone, she would continue into a new life:
I had no future plans, and I would never found a movement nor understand the simplest equation; I would never chair the Department of Importance. Nevertheless, I was about to embark on a third life, having used up the first two... Because I was determined to pull this together, hooking this lifeline into the next one.
This week, write about being ready—or not ready—for something that has happened to you in life.Write about how you will pull your present life together with your past.Write about the second or third life, the chance for another chapter, that you’ve experienced.Write about what “ready” evokes for you.
For the Week of June 7, 2009: Anniversaries
It's not uncommon that, in the years following a significant, oftentimes painful, event in our lives, that we re-experience grief or sorrow. Anniversaries also usher in memories--past holidays or birthdays, wedding dates or other major life transitions. For cancer survivors, the anniversary date of the initial diagnosis is testimony to survival, to beating the odds.
We might be caught off guard by our anniversary dates when it concerns cancer. Strong emotions can re-appear, seemingly out of nowhere, that take us back to the day of diagnosis, surgery or the conclusion of treatment. Our feelings may be confusing at first, but when we remember that a cancer diagnosis often signals a new stage of life--and the need to re-evaluate our lives--it's hardly surprising. The anniversary date of a diagnosis marks the end of our lives--our physical selves--that we once took for granted.
It's important to remember, however, that we have been challenged or struggled at other times in our lives, and that whether positive or negative, any anniversary date is a marker of our resilience and our ability to achieve, learn, overcome, change and grow. Anniversary dates are rich in memories, which are the source of many stories.
Years ago, when I was counseling people in transition, we often used a simple exercise called a "life line" that helped everyone realize that they had dealt with difficult--as well as joyous--events throughout their lifetimes, not just when a job had suddenly been lost or a relationship had fallen apart. A life line charts the significant high and the low points of each decade. It's a visual representation of "anniversary" dates--and of the human life cycle. Illness and other life hardships are often a catalyst for personal transformation. The lifeline, when drawn, is a visual map that helps us remember who we were--and who we have become. Why not draw your own lifeline? Begin with a simple life line from birth to the present, dividing it into decades like the one pictured below. Now, quickly mark the anniversaries of high points in your life above the baseline and the low ones below it. + Birth______________10______________20_______________30_______________40_______________now
_
What quickly emerges is a visual pattern of ebb and flow, ups and downs, joys and sorrows, such as the example below, that are part of the life journey.
Examine your life line, its anniversaries, and think about the life cycles you observe. Reflect on those times of hardship and what helped you deal with and survive each. Celebrate the anniversaries of all you have accomplished, all you have overcome, those you have loved, even those lost. Take any point on your life line and begin writing about it. Tell about the event: what it was like, what it has meant to you, what you've learned. Celebrate your life.
"The San Andreas Fault" by David K. Lynch, PhD www.geology.com
For the Week of May 31, 2009: Writing From the Fault Line
I felt the earth move several days ago.Honestly.I’m not attempting to describe the sudden jolt of first love or attraction, but a familiar physical occurrence that comes with living in California.It’s life along the fault line, whether the San Andreas, Hayward, or the Oak Ridge fault.
The movement is created by the sliding boundaries, fault lines, which define the earth’s tectonic plates. California has many of these faults.On average, the plates move past one another a couple of inches each year.On average, because the movement of the plates is irregular.As they push against each other, the plates sometimes lock and may not move for years.Stress continues to build along the fault, however, and when it exceeds the strain threshold, the energy is released suddenly, breaking the rock along the fault and causing the plates slip several feet at once.Waves are sent out in all directions and felt as tremors, or at worst, a damaging earthquake. For the past three years, I’ve taught an online course for UCLA extension Writers’ Program entitled, “Writing from the Fault Lines:Writing to Heal.”I chose the title in part, because my language and the metaphors are influenced by the landscape in which I live, but also because writing to heal reveals the vulnerable landscape of our psyches, where painful experiences of our pasts may be buried. We may be "fine" on the surface, but in the stress created by cancer or other life suffering, our emotional fault lines give way; old wounds resurface, and we may experience the sudden tremor of old feelings--even an emotional earthquake.
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer several years ago, I filled page after page with my disbelief, my questions and my sense of having somehow brought it on myself.That outpouring soon gave way, however, to deeper wounds, to old losses and hurts I’d soldiered through and buried years ago.My “real” story was not about cancer; it was what lay beneath the surface, the pressure within my emotional interior that was begging for release.
It’s a phenomenon I witness again and again in my writing groups.The experience of cancer unearths other, unresolved feelings.Painful memories or traumatic events of the past can be triggered by the most benign of writing prompts, and they tumble onto to the page in stories, essays or poems.Writing our healing stories often goes well beyond the experience of cancer; we begin to plumb the depths of our lives, bringing into the open what we could not do before.
Emotions can inspire us or hold us hostage.Negative emotions--anger, fear or feelings of unworthiness--accumulate, just as pressure along the earth’s plates. They weaken our ability to fend off illness, depression or disease.Writing allow 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.
This week, try going deeper in your writing; explore what stories linger beneath the surface.Write from the fault lines.
Sharon Bray, Ed.D., author, teacher, & therapeutic writingpractitioner, has written and published poetry, memoir, and a number of professional articles. Bray is the author of WhenWords Heal: Writing Through Cancer (2006), a guide for the individual or writing group leader, and A Healing Journey: Writing Together Through Breast Cancer (2004), which chronicles the experience and insights gained from her own experience with breast cancer and her writing groups for cancer survivors. She recently co-edited an anthology of cancer patients' writing, Learning to Live Again, together with Patricia Fobair, LCSW, published by the Stanford University School of Medicine. As Wellspring Writers, Sharon leads writing groups for cancer patients and survivors at Stanford Cancer Center, Scripps Cancer Center, Sharp Cancer Institute and UCSD Moores Cancer Center. She is also a faculty member of the UCLAextension Writers' Program. Contact Sharon at sharon@writingthroughcancer.com or sharon@wellspringwriters.org. For more information about Sharon, her workshops & presentations or her books, see www.wellspringwriters.org.
