Writing Through Cancer

My husband and I celebrated New Year’s Day packing away the Christmas decorations, boxing up the remnants of toddler paraphernalia which our grandchildren have now outgrown, extra blankets and household items to donate, things we have held on to despite relocations and intentional simplification of our lives.  Later that evening, we sat together with a white board, dry erase markers and embarked on a process we once called “New Year’s Resolutions,” but, as we have allowed the word, “retirement,” to ease into our vocabulary, it has become a necessary conversation of planning–what we let go, what we keep, what we change.  By the time we put the whiteboard away,  filled with incomplete sentences (mine), diagrams (his), we didn’t have a plan,  but we had an illustration of movement, of the hard work giving voice to our hopes and dreams, concerns and fears as we face forward into the inevitability of aging and the changes implied for our lives.

In part, it’s a process of  letting go, acknowledging choices and changes we must make as we grow older, or experience losses, changes in health or circumstance.  I think of the men and women in my writing groups, how a cancer diagnosis forces them to confront mortality no matter their age, their lives altered without warning.  Letting go of what was before cancer isn’t an option.  It’s part of the hard reality of a life changed by debilitating or terminal illness.

But isn’t that also what we all must do, sooner or later, in life?  Clinging to a past that no longer applies to our present only seeds depression or regret.    Letting go of those worn out parts of our past is a necessary process, like post-holiday cleaning, choosing what to discard, what to retain and what to carry forward as we continue to shape and revise our lives.  It’s a process of revision–deciding what to keep, what to discard as we shape and re-shape our lives—and our life stories–at every stage.   It’s alot like the work of writing.  Writing is about rewriting, a process that allows you to see your work in a fresh light.  Naomi Shihab Nye described revision as “a beautiful word of hope… a new vision of something.”

A new vision of something…something like life.  Revision, borrowed from the French and derived from Latin, essentially means “to look, or see, again.” Check your dictionary and you’ll find synonyms like reexamine, reassess, rethink, alter, modify and change.  It’s what we do naturally whenever we try to make sense out of something that forces us to alter the course of our lives.

We are the authors of our lives and our life stories. Things happen to us; we make choices or take actions that influence events and outcomes. But the story closest to us–our own—can be the most difficult to understand.   In his book, You Must Revise Your Life, William Stafford wrote, My life in writing…comes to me as parts, like two rivers that blend.  One part is easy to tell:  the times, the places, events, and people.  The other part is mysterious; it is my thoughts, the flow of my inner life, the reveries and impulses that never get known—[it] wanders along at its own pace…

That undercurrent, the internal thoughts and feelings my husband and I have as we consider the next stage of our lives called “retirement” is the more difficult make explicit, and yet, that deep river beneath the surface is what we must voice to navigate our next life chapter together.

We must learn to do what artists do, let the material of our life talk back to us and see it anew.  Stafford tells us that revising one’s life involves embracing whatever happens—in things and in language.   “The language changes,” he says, and “you change, the light changes…Dawn comes, and it comes for all, but not on demand.”

Letting go.  It’s not easy.  Change can be unsettling.  Learning to embrace whatever happens?  That takes intention and courage.  I’m struggling a little today as the full impact of our New Year’s discussion begins to sink into my mind and body.  Like the writers I admire, I’m trying to work with the material of our lives and conversation—letting it talk back to me.  Seeing things anew, and yet, reminding myself that insight and the “right” choices will come as they come, gradually and not on demand.

So to you, Friend, I confide my secret:

to be a discoverer you hold close whatever

you find, and after a while you decide

what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,

you turn to the open sea and let go.

(From:  “Security,” by William Stafford, in:  Passwords, ©1991)

Let the material of your life talk back to you.  What has changed?  What will you let go; what will you retain as you move into a new year or another chapter of your life?