“Tell me,” I said
“something I can’t forget.” Then the story of
your mother, and when you finished
I said, “That’s good, that’s enough.”
(From “Each Bird Walking,”by Tess Gallagher)
Many years ago, I attended a summer creative writing workshop led by Pat Schneider, author of Writing Alone and with Others. Still numb and disbelieving from completing a seven-week regimen of radiation for early stage breast cancer, I’d signed up for the workshop at the urging of a dear friend.
The first morning, I sat in a circle of men and women, feeling empty. Why was I there? What was I going to write? “Tell me something I can’t forget,” Pat said, quoting a line from Tess Gallagher’s poem. Something she couldn’t forget? I doubt that the first few stories I wrote were memorable. I relied on what was most accessible: old childhood memories, humorous stories told and re-told at family gatherings. It would take nearly the full week before I opened the door to my experience of cancer. But once I did, I began to understand how cancer—even early stage—had altered my life. I had embarked on my journey to healing.
“A patient is, at first, simply a storyteller,” Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote in The Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, “a narrator of suffering—a traveler who has visited the kingdom of the ill. To relieve an illness, one must begin, then, by unburdening its story” (p.46).
Writing and sharing our stories of cancer can help repair the damage done to our lives, the sense of who we are, the disrupted futures we face. “Decay is the beginning of all birth,” Kat Duff wrote in The Alchemy of Illness. We are our stories, and in the act of sharing them, we affirm our uniqueness and discover is most meaningful. “I did not want my questions answered,” Arthur Frank wrote, describing, his illness in At the Will of the Body. “I wanted my experience shared.” In telling and sharing our stories, we remember who we were, and we learn who we are becoming. While cancer–or any other serious illness–changes us, perhaps it has the capacity to “remodel us,” as poet Jane Hirshfield says, “for some new fate.”
Our stories do something else for us—they can help to alleviate loneliness. Stories are the language of community. We discover we are not alone and remember that suffering is part of the human condition. The act of sharing our stories with one another is about telling the human story—the one told and retold throughout human existence, whether around a campfire, at a family gathering, or in the countless books, magazines and blogs we read.
“Tell me something I can’t forget…” I still hear Pat’s voice from the Berkeley classroom than summer’s morning so many years ago. She offered an opening, a door into the “real” story I was struggling to tell at the time. As my words poured onto the page, I realized how profoundly my life had changed—and was still changing—as a result of my experience. I was being remodeled for “some new fate.”
“Recovery is only worth as much as what you learn about the life you’re regaining,” Frank wrote. It’s not just cancer that teaches us—any momentous, challenging chapter of our lives has the potential for significant learning. But to learn from our experiences requires something of us, the courage, as Maxine Hong Kingston tells the veterans who write with her, to “tell the truth.” It’s difficult, sometimes, this act of writing and telling our cancer stories, because we have to be willing to dive deep beneath the surface of the events and do some hard soul-searching. That’s where the real treasure lies, in the truth we discover, and in unearthing that truth, the potential for healing begins.
To relieve an illness, one must begin, then, by unburdening its story. What is the story you want to tell? Try beginning with the prompt: “Tell me something I can’t forget.”
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