We’ve all crossed different borders in our lives, some of them geographical, some of them metaphorical. I crossed over several borders this week, leaving San Diego on Wednesday to fly across the Pacific to Okinawa, where my youngest daughter and her family live. I made the same trip two years ago, so I some familiarity with disembarkation in Japan. I stood in line at customs, then at the baggage claim to wrestle my large suitcase from the carousel, re-check it to Okinawa and locate the gate for my connecting flight to Naha. Unlike my first trip two years ago, I had a sense of how to navigate smoothly through the process.
But not all border crossings go so smoothly, whether they are geographical ones or life transitions. The shift from the familiar to the unfamiliar can be abrupt, thrust upon us with little warning, and filled with turbulence. Like hearing the words, “you have cancer.”
No one asks for your passport or smiles and says, “Enjoy your stay.” The terrain is unfamiliar, and the roadmap you’re offered is sketchy at best. Even the language is strange to your ears. There’s new terminology to learn, colloquialisms, and even if you studied a foreign language or two in college, it doesn’t prepare you for the multi-syllabic utterances from your physician’s lips.
Barbara Abercrombie, author of Writing out the Storm, describes how it feels to cross into the place called “cancer.”
There’s a moment, not necessarily when you hear your diagnosis, maybe weeks later, when you cross that border and know in your heart and soul that this is really serious… The hardest thing is to leave yourself, the innocent, healthy you that never had to face her own mortality, at the border. That old relationship with your body, careless but friendly, taken for granted, suddenly ends. Your body becomes enemy territory (p. 39). …The sudden crossing over into illness or disability, becoming a patient, can feel like you’re landing on another planet, or entering another country…what Susan Sontag [in Illness as Metaphor] called “emigrating to the kingdom of the ill (p. 41).
You’ve entered the foreign territory of your body’s betrayal, where nothing seems quite real, and fear is a constant companion. For a time, you feel like you’re traveling solo, without an interpreter, in a confusing and difficult place. You have to learn how to navigate, to cope, and learn it quickly. Your life may depend on it.
Gradually, however, you discover other travelers, men and women who, like you, are struggling to make sense of this strange and hostile territory. You share the experiences of your journey and feel less alone. There’s comfort and support to be found among a community of survivors. As you share your experience, fears and hopes, you gradually find your way through this new country.
Somewhere out there in that darkness are hundreds of thousands … like myself …new citizens of this other country… In one moment of discovery, these lives have been transformed, just as mine has been, as surely as if they had been plucked from their native land and forced to survive in a hostile new landscape, fraught with dangers, real and imagined. — Musa Mayer, Examining Myself: One Woman’s Story of Breast Cancer Treatment and Recovery).
Write about crossing the border this week, about entering this “enemy territory,” “the kingdom of the ill.” What was it like? What old assumptions have you had to leave behind? How has your relationship with your body changed? What helped you navigate through the country of cancer?
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