Writing Through Cancer

I guess I have to begin by admitting

I’m thankful today I don’t reside in a country

My country has chosen to liberate, -

(From:  “Thanksgiving Letter from Harry” by Carl Dennis, in:  Unknown Friends, Penguin Press, 2007).

I returned to San Diego Monday afternoon, my feelings mixed, yet happy to settle into my space, surrounded by my own things, nap in my bed, and be in my house after nearly a month away.  Yet I was nostalgic, missing the enthusiastic greeting “Gramma!” I heard as my grandchildren, sleepy and smiling, opened the bedroom door to crawl under the covers with me every morning.  I was both grateful to be home and yet, reluctant to immerse myself in what had been so routine before I left:  a busy teaching schedule, errands to run, even my regular habit of tuning in, morning and evening, to the national news.  I resisted listening to the political circus in Washington, reports from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran that only spoke of ongoing violence and warfare, things happening in a troubled world that I’d left behind for the weeks I was in Okinawa.  I missed the sense of family—of the home that family offers, the laughter and delight of extended time with Nathan and Emily, the quiet graciousness of Claire’s Okinawan friends, the beauty of the island’s coastline, and, perhaps the more peaceful existence on an island once so brutally devastated by war.

My sense of “home” has changed over these past many years.  I left the United States in the sixties with my first husband to go to Canada.  It was a self-imposed exile, a kind of protest against the Vietnam War that mobilized so many in my generation.  We never imagined we would stay longer than three or four years at most, but it was twenty-three years later when I returned to California.  I was like a homing pigeon flying west, back the place I was born, to California, the place I’d always called “home.”  What I discovered, like so many emigrants before me, was that “home” no longer existed in the ways I had imagined it.   It—and I—had changed, and the very things that drew me back to the West were now elusive.

 “Goethe once wrote that all writers are homesick, that all writers are really searching for home.  Being a writer is being on a constant search for where you belong.”  It “comes out of a place of memory, not geography.” — Mary Morris, “Looking for Home”

Where I belong.  I admit it:  I don’t have the same sense of belonging to California that I once had.  But it’s not only years living out of one’s native country that changes things, even a brief time away, like the month I’ve just had, can shift your perspective for a time.  But the longer times, the years spent in different places, can change you in ways you aren’t even aware of.  For all the years I lived in Canada, I’d clung so tenaciously to a golden dream of California, the one harbored in my imagination, that I didn’t notice how Canada had quietly wrapped itself around my heart.  The people, culture, and experiences of the twenty-three years I lived there had defined me in ways that weren’t apparent until I attempted that return to my childhood home.  Canada was as much a part of me as California had been for the first twenty-three years of my life.  I just hadn’t realized how much until I’d left it.

You want to get a good look at yourself.  You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly.  The outer clothing falls from you.  You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet.  You remove your underwear.  At a loss, you examine the mirror.  There you are, you are not there.

–Mark Strand, “In the Privacy of the Home”

Now, these many years later, I am grateful my daughters have lived in other places in the world, as much as I hate the distance between us.  They are international citizens in a world that demands we not isolate ourselves nor see our country as somehow superior to others.  Each time I travel to spend time with them, I remember how young and naïve I was in those first years being in Canada, how lonely and overwhelmed I felt at first, but how, in the end, I became a better person, more accepting and my life enriched from the experience living in another country.  In truth, I still struggle to define California and San Diego, the place I live now, as home.  And I still search for that sense of belonging, of identity with a place that I once knew.  Even now, I hope to find it.

Yet Thomas Wolfe’s words play in my mind.  “You can’t go home again.”  And the truth is that even if we’ve never left a place, the events of our lives sometimes make us feel as if we’re suddenly strangers to it.  Cancer can have that effect; job loss, divorce, other difficult life events can too.  You cross the boundary into a strange, new territory, one in which the customs, the nuances are unfamiliar.  The world you now inhabit requires you learn how to navigate it, and yet, you long for home, for the feeling of belonging, for the life, the place you once knew by heart.  Only in returning to the life you once had before do you discover that you aren’t “at home” as you once were.

Home.  It’s a topic rich with memories, experiences, and stories.  Explore what “home” means to you.  Have you ever felt “of a place” and yet estranged from it at the same time?  Has cancer or other difficult life events changed your definition of home?  Write about leaving or returning to the place you call “home.”