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Archive for September, 2013

For the Week of September 29, 2013: Fall, Falling, Fallen

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 29, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Although there were no witnesses
In the hallway outside the women’s room
Of the Hotel Coronado,
When my aunt stumbled
And fell to her knees on the ancient marble…

(From “The Fall,” by George Bilgere)

I fell this past Thursday.  A slip of the foot as I walked down the five steps into our garage.  Fortunately, nothing was broken, although I ended up a little bruised and battered on my foot, knee and elbow.  I had a witness, unlike the aunt falling in the hallway of the Hotel Coronado, and I vaguely remember how his eyes widened in alarm as I suddenly hurled my body toward the floor.  I was rushing about, preoccupied with my travel preparations, and, as I am prone to do, moving much too quickly in my haste to get things done.  Of course I joked about it, brushing aside my husband’s worry and remarking that well, I was in season after all, which was a weak attempt to associate my falling with the “Fall,” the season which has just begun.

But falling is no laughing matter, as my physician reminded me the next day during my checkup.  Falling, particularly as we age, account for the leading cause of emergency room visits, over 8 million a year.  And the incidence of falls goes up with each decade of life.  According to the National Institute of Aging, 30 % of people over age 65 will sustain a fall, and of those, 10% will result in serious injury.  Since I’m traveling to Okinawa to care for two preschoolers for a month while my daughter recovers from some surgery, it was a rather sobering reminder to be very careful as I navigate up and down the stairs in their two-story home.  An energetic and fun grandmother, yes, I’m that, but I can afford to move a little more carefully without sacrificing the spunky image I like to nurture with my grandchildren!

Yet there’s that word, “fall,” again, and I couldn’t resist thinking about all the different meanings we attach to a single four letter word.  The  word, “fall,” defined on page 606 in the New Oxford American Dictionary, takes up nearly half the page (and one needs a magnifying glass to read the small print size!).  Use fall as a verb, and it means to descend, become born, become lower in level, drop down wounded, decline in quality, set about actively, or occur at a particular time.  Couple the verb with a descriptor, and there’s even more possibilities, for example, to fall apart, to fall flat, to fall short, or fall into line or, for that matter, love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window, .

and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

(From ‘”Aimless Love,” by Billy Collins)

Of course, there’s “fall,” the noun, another versatile addition to the English language.  Think “fall,” the season, and we remember the smell of autumn, the leaves turning color from green to vivid hues of scarlet and gold.

Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.

(From “Fall,” by Edward Hirsch)

But there’s so much more, “fall” is also a costume decoration, a hoisting-tackle chain, a loss of greatness, a downward slope, even the act of falling, just as I did three days ago.  I’m on the mend, carefully following my doctor’s instructions, icing my strained knee, applying the lidocaine ointment twice daily, and at night, falling asleep grateful that I will still be able to make the trip across the Pacific to spend time with my grandchildren.

And then we return to everyday life, where we fall
into bed exhausted, fall asleep while reading,
forget the solid planes of the body in the country
of dreams.

(From:  “Away In Virginia, I See a Mustard Field and Think of You,” by Barbara Crooker)

Now believe me, I’m not recommending you try falling down as a way to inspire your writing, but this week, why not explore all the meanings attached to the word, “fall.”  Play around with the word and all its meanings.  Write about Fall, a fall, or falling.  See what happens.

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For September 22, 2013: In Each Memory, A Story

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on September 22, 2013 | 3 Comments »

We sang our duet off-key this morning, my husband’s voice searching to find the same notes as mine, but still we sang.  “Happy Birthday to you,” the familiar refrain transmitted over the vast network of technology, our faces visible as we serenaded my eldest daughter, captured with the ipad’s camera and her smiling image appearing on our screen.

“Happy Birthday, dear Elinor,” it’s the song I’ve sung every September 22nd since her first birthday over four decades ago. And in just five more days, on September 27, we’ll repeat our musical performance again, an inharmonious chorus to her sister,Claire, just one year and five days younger, as she celebrates her birthday.

We’re separated by distance.  Each of my daughters lives in a different country, one in Canada, the other in Okinawa.  I routinely complain about the distance between us, but they often remind me that at age 24, I left my family and California to marry and go to Canada, not returning for twenty-three years.  As their mother, I encouraged independence, a love of travel and adventure, even a sense of “global” citizenry.  It turns out that they took me seriously.  Now, as I face the gray-hair chapters of my life, I wonder why I didn’t reinforce, instead, the desire to stay close to their parents!

My daughters’ birthdays inevitably trigger a flood of memories.  It seems impossible, on the one hand, to accept how old they now are (which means, of course, that I am much older too).  Yet I see them both as accomplished women, mothers of preschoolers.  In their children’s’ faces and mannerisms, there are remembrances of my daughters at similar ages—a flash of knowing.  I think about our lives, the happiest times and the darkest ones.  As children, they lost their father to an accidental drowning, and yet, they kept me going as surely as I tried to protect and care for them in those difficult years.  I remember the challenges of adolescence, when I swore that the two teenagers living in my household were surely someone else’s offspring, so tumultuous and difficult some of those times were, and yet, somehow, some way, we survived it all, and they grew into lovely, engaging young women, and I’m eternally proud to be able to say, “my daughters…”

Memories, dozens and dozens of them, flashed through my mind this morning as I thought back to their births and history of birthday celebrations.  And in each memory, a story.  What is it about birthdays that makes us remember so vividly?

There’s an exercise in Roger Rosenblatt’s wise little book, Unless It Moves the Human Heart (Harper Collins, 2011), a glimpse into his “Writing Everything” class, that I have used in my writing groups, always with great results.  It’s one that began by Rosenblatt asking if anyone in his class has recently celebrated—or is about to–a birthday.

I…then burst into song:  “Happy Birthday to You.”  They [his students] give me the he’s-gone-nuts look I’ve come to cherish over the years.  I sing it again.  “Happy Birthday to You.  Anyone had a birthday recently?  Anyone about to have one?” …just sit back and see what comes of listening to this irritating, celebratory song you’ve heard all your lives” (pp.39-40).

What happens, of course, is that everyone has a host of memories associated with the birthday song.  But Rosenblatt isn’t the only writer who has used birthdays for inspiration.  Go to www.poets.org and you’ll discover that poets like William Blake, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti and many others have used birthdays as a time for retrospection.  I’m especially fond of Ted Kooser’s “A Happy Birthday,” a short poem that manages to capture the moments of introspection triggered by one’s birthday:

This evening, I sat by an open window

and read till the light was gone and the book

was no more than a part of the darkness.

I could easily have switched on a lamp,

but I wanted to ride this day down into night,

to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page

with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

Poems about birthdays reflect the passage of time, aging, even the opportunity for change, for example, Joyce Sutphen’s “Crossroads:”

The second half of my life will be black 

to the white rind of the old and fading moon. 

The second half of my life will be water 

over the cracked floor of these desert years.

“Happy Birthday to you.  Happy Birthday to you…”  What memories, good or bad, does that traditional little ditty evoke?  Whether you’re soon having a birthday, have recently celebrated one, or joined in the birthday celebrations of other family members—siblings, children, or grandchildren–why not explore the memories of past birthdays  as a way to inspire your writing.  Where were you?  Who was there?  What was most memorable about that particular birthday?  Why?  Remember, In each memory, a story…   Write one.

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For September 15, 2013: Moving In and Out of Different Worlds

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 15, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

We humans are complex.  Unlike other members of the animal kingdom, our lives involve much more than basic need.  We have the unique capacity to live more than one life at a time.  As Patrice Vecchione describes in her book, Writing and the Spiritual Life, we live our lives on more than one plane.  Our inner and outer lives interact; they affect and inform each other as we move between our different worlds throughout each day, each involving particular aspects of ourselves.

“I know I walk in and out of several worlds every day,” poet Joy Harjo wrote in her essay, “Ordinary Spirit” (Swann & Krupat, 1987), Harjo is referring to her mixed race, in part, and the struggle to “unify” her different worlds.

We often move between our own different worlds as if they are separate, assuming—without even thinking about it–different roles as other aspects of ourselves come into play.  It’s a bit like being on an elevator, one that is constantly in motion, traveling between floors.  Push a button, elevator moves up or down, then comes to a stop.  The doors open. “Second floor, family life.”  Push another, “Third floor, workplace,” and still another, “Fourth floor, Exercise and Fitness.”  On another floor, perhaps we step into a world of friendships or even a classroom, where for an hour or two each week, we become students again.   Another floor might open to our spiritual worlds:  quiet, meditation and solitude.  In our busy lives, we move between our worlds without much thought, and one can seem far removed from the other.

But add cancer, hardship or trauma to the different worlds we inhabit, and the boundaries between our inner and outer lives, between the “worlds” we inhabit each day, begin to blur. We realize that it is “only an illusion that any of the worlds we inhabit are separate,” to quote Harjo’s 1987 essay.   This “new” world, the one where we suddenly become patients, survivors, grieving spouses or parents, affects all the others.  Any predictability and routine we thought we had in our daily lives is thrown asunder.  Where we once felt some control over the course of our lives, now we’re in free fall, unwilling passengers in a wayward elevator, moving randomly between floors.  Fear and depression color every aspect of our lives, and hope is more than a silent prayer.  It’s the daily mantra we chant aloud.

Everything in our lives is affected by this crisis.  We numbly move through diagnoses, treatments, appointments, aware of a lurking shadow of fear, anger or sorrow.  All that we are—who we have thought ourselves to be–mind, body, and spirit–is thrust into a state of upheaval.  We no longer inhabit our different worlds as we once did.  What was once familiar seems strange, and when the elevator finally stops its terrifying ride, the doors opens to a new and confusing world.  We stumble out, breathless and try to make sense of it.  We struggle to find the way to wholeness and healing.

Try describing the worlds you inhabit each day, the many roles you play in your life.  How did you move between them before cancer (or some other trauma)?  What has changed?  How have those “different worlds” of your life been affected?  What have you learned from the experience?

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For the Week of September 8, 2013: When I’m Up, I Can’t Get Down

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , dance and healing, , , , , , on September 8, 2013 | 1 Comment »

Earlier this week, my friend Lynn sent me a link to a Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) television interview.  “This reminded me of you,” she wrote. I wasted no time in clicking on the link, to watch an interview with a young cancer patient, Tiffany Staropoli.  Diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer, Tiffany’s  video, “Dancing Through Cancer” has gone viral on You Tube.  And no wonder!  I watched the video three times , laughing out loud at the unabashed exuberance and delight captured in the several different scenes of Tiffany dancing—enthusiastically, if not gracefully—to Great Big Sea’s “When I’m Up, I Can’t Get Down,” a song I downloaded a short time later.   Even with something as traumatic as cancer, Tiffany told the interviewer, it’s still possible to have a good time.  When asked what she thought of her dancing, she laughed, “It’s terrible…I crack myself up.”  Well, she cracked me up too—her fun and joy is absolutely infectious, which is undoubtedly why the video has been viewed by so many thousands of people.

As for Lynn’s comment, “This reminded me of you,” I remembered when, soon after my first marriage had ended with my husband’s death, how late at night, after my daughters were asleep, I’d go into the living room, put on Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” and dance crazily around the living room until exhausted—and my spirits lightened—I’d fall into bed.  I cracked myself up too, just like Tiffany, even though no one was watching me cavort to disco music in the dark!  My daughters and I also danced together during that turbulent time, devising crazy routines to seventies’ hits and performing them for family and friends, everyone laughing.  It wasn’t about dance as much as it was about fun, and having fun and laughing together played a huge role in our recovery from grief and loss.

You might be surprised how often you’ll hear laughter among the cancer patients and survivors who attend my writing groups.  Many strong feelings are expressed, emotions that are the inevitable accompaniment to the experience of cancer,  but in every session, laughter invariably bubbles up among the group as stories are shared with one another..  Those shared stories, the tears and the laughter means everyone leaves the group feeling lighter, and perhaps, better able to cope with the immediate demands of treatment and recovery.

One of the most memorable accounts of the health benefits of laughter came from Norman Cousins, former editor of the Saturday Review, diagnosed with an illness called “ankylosing spondylitis,” a degenerative disease that causes the breakdown of collagen.  Given up to die and nearly completely paralyzed, Cousins did something radical.  With his doctors’ blessings, he checked out of the hospital, moved to a hotel room, and began watching Marx Brothers movies, enjoying plenty of hearty belly laughs each day.  After laughing for a few minutes, Cousins found he experienced relief from pain.  His condition began to improve. He regained the use of his limbs and returned to his position at the Saturday Review.  “Is it possible,” Cousins asked in his 1979 book, Anatomy of An Illness, “that love, hope, faith, laughter, confidence and the will to live have therapeutic value?”

All these factors are important in improving the quality of life and coping ability for patients with debilitating illness.  Medical research has shown that laughter is beneficial for those with cancer, heart disease and other illnesses. Laughter boosts levels of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers while suppressing the stress hormone, epinephrine, and improving the activity of natural killer cells.

“A clown is like an aspirin,” Groucho Marx said, “only he works twice as fast.”  Remember Patch Adams, the physician who dressed as a clown to cheer up his patients? He believed in the importance of developing compassionate connections with his patients, and his approach to patient care relied on humor and play, which he saw as essential to physical and emotional health.

Humor won’t deny the reality of cancer or heart disease, but it can help us cope with our illnesses more effectively.  Think of Gilda Radner of Saturday Night Live, Michael Landon, former star of Bonanza, or Jennie Nash, who wrote The Victoria’s Secret Catalogue Never Stops Coming.  Each reminds us of the importance of finding humor in our situation—of having a good belly laugh now and then, despite everything.

What has helped you get through the cancer journey or another difficult time?  What gave you joy?  Made you smile or laugh a little?  Dance?  Drumming?  Playing with grandchildren?  Watching silly movies?  Being silly yourself?  Write about laughter, smiling, or just having fun when you least expected it.  Remember, laughter is contagious.  We  feel better for it.  Like the Great Big Sea’s song says, “When I’m Up, I Can’t Get Down.  Certainly all of us who watched Tiffany Staropoli’s dance video understood just how infectious having fun—cracking ourselves up—can be.

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For the Week of September 1, 2013: The Club No One Asks to Join

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 1, 2013 | 1 Comment »

“Whether you’re younger or older, you may find yourself in a new role as a caregiver. You may have been an active part of someone’s life before cancer, but perhaps now the way you support that person is different. It may be in a way in which you haven’t had much experience, or in a way that feels more intense than before.” – National Cancer Institute

Becoming a caregiver to a cancer patient or to other loved ones stricken with debilitating illness, is, as described by Matthew Biggin, this week’s guest author, a club that no one wants to join.  Matthew was suddenly thrust into the role of caregiver when his girlfriend, Kerry, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  In this post, he describes the experience and the emotions that accompany such an unexpected and unsettling event in his life. [S.B.]

The Club No One Wants to Join

It was April 2013. I don’t remember the exact day. But that was the day my life changed. I was one of 5 people sat in a consultation room of St Richards Hospital, Chichester, where less than 60 seconds prior my girlfriend Kerry had just been diagnosed with cancer. Pancreatic Neuroendocrine to be precise, but at that moment the minutiae hardly mattered She had cancer. That was where it stopped for me.

The other people present in the room with me were Kerry, her mum and dad and the consultant, Mr. Bowyer. He riffed a list of why’s and wherefore’s designed to cushion the blow, which though I was listening to them, my sub-conscious barely seemed to absorb.

Apparently Pancreatic Neuroendocrine (or PNET’s as medical bods refer to it) is a rare form of pancreatic cancer. It is particularly rare for Kerry’s age, she’s 23. Reputedly only 2% of all people in the world diagnosed with this type of cancer are under 40. The cancer is very aggressive, it’s at Stage IV and we’re told it’s non-curative. Well, you know what? As Benjamin Disraeli once said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Every case is different, of course it is. Besides, this is generally an old-person cancer, yeah, yeah, I know, statistics etc., but the fact that Kerry is young and (otherwise) healthy is on our side. I suppose I should feel lucky that she has the exuberance of youth on her side as well as a fighting spirit. I suppose I should feel lucky. But I don’t. All I could think about was the fact that someone I love had just been diagnosed with one of the deadliest diseases in the modern world.

A quick check on Google – I’m a glutton for punishment – tells me that in 2007 alone cancer killed 7.9 million human beings worldwide. To put that in perspective, that’s more people than were killed by the holocaust, cholera and Jack Bauer combined. That’s a terrifying statistic for anyone. If cancer was an assassin for hire it would doubtless be the best in the world. The silent, ruthless killer.

It’s hard to describe exactly how I felt/feel. It’s different for everyone. It’s always different. My entire life was stripped away in the blink of an eye. Things that had previously seemed important to me–what movies are out this month? Did I set Luis Suarez as my captain on fantasy football?–suddenly slipped into staggering insignificance. All that mattered now was her.

I was too broken to cry, too crushed to be angry, too distraught to speak, too numb to feel, too naked to hide, too concerned to panic, too scared to be positive, too skeptical to hope and too positive to doubt. I felt all these things at once. You never think it’ll happen to you, even when it does. I wanted to tear my hair out, trash the room, punch the consultant, renounce God and all his works, scream, cry, yell, hide. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Most of all I didn’t know if I could do this.

I would never and will never presume to know how difficult it was for Kerry. She’s the strongest person I know, the strongest I’ve ever known. Much stronger than me. And she took it better than any of us. ‘I’m going to beat this,’ she said. And that was that. Game face on. From then on I had to be there for her. She had resolved to beat this illness and so I had to do the same, despite my fears, of which there were many.

Because I am not Kerry and I do not have an open-all-hours invite to her thoughts, and because I am not River Tam, I cannot tell you what she thought or felt. As such, this blog will document MY own personal journey through this. Not that I’m trying to imply that I have/had the roughest ride here, not by a long shot. But I am me. And I can only tell you how ‘me’ has been affected by this. I can’t speak for anyone else, nor would I wish to. The thoughts and feelings I detail here will be my own. I don’t wish to sound like a self-aggrandizing idiot who thinks the weight of the world is on his shoulders, but I can only give you my perspective. If you can’t deal with that then feel free to stop reading.

The thing is, not to sound like a moaning, self-centred moron, but no-one ever tells you how difficult it is for those close to a sufferer. Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way attempting to postulate that my suffering could even reach the same vicinity as Kerry’s. Lord knows it never could. And I could never imagine what she must have been going through, despite the front she showed. It must have been hell for her. The thing is though, there are all these books and articles and movies about battling through cancer, which I think are awesome, don’t get me wrong. But there is so little literature about how to deal with life as the “care giver”. Perhaps that’s because it’s different for everyone. But let me tell you, life on the periphery is horrific. Being the loved one of a cancer patient is truly one of the worst things you will ever go through in your life, save perhaps being a sufferer yourself. And anyone who says otherwise has never experienced it; or is just completely ignorant.

I can tell you the layout of every A&E, ICU, treatment centre and chemotherapy ward from here to Scafell Pike; I can tell you the name and effect of every pain killing agent in the medical world; I can tell you the exact cost of a cup of coffee in a hotel restaurant; I can tell you the difference between an EKG, a CT scan, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, stem cell treatment and blood transfusions; I can tell you the prognosis and treatment plans for half a dozen form of cancer. But I can’t tell you how to do this. And that’s because I don’t know. Neither does Kerry. Nor her parents. Nor our friends. We are all now members of the club that no-one wants to join…

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For this week’s writing prompt:  Whether caregiver or patient, write about becoming part of that club that no one wants to join.

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Our guest author Matthew Biggin is a 29-year-old freelance writer from the UK. He hangs his hat in Bognor Regis, a sleepy seaside town on the south coast of England. Matthew has been writing for a decade, penning articles for various websites, magazines and content mills, as well as screenplays and is currently writing a book. He is also running a blog detailing his experiences with cancer.  For more from Matthew, see his blog at:  http://facingcancerheadon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-club-no-one-wants-to-join.html

 

There is a wealth of information and support available for you if you have become a caregiver to someone with cancer or other debilitating illness.  For example, see:  http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/coping/familyfriends

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