Writing Through Cancer

In Worcester, Massachusetts,

I went with Aunt Consuelo

to keep her dentist’s appointment

and sat and waited for her

in the dentist’s waiting room.

 

(From “In the Waiting Room,” by Elizabeth Bishop The Complete Poems 1927-1979)

 I spent the better part of Tuesday in the outpatient waiting room this week,  while my husband, prepped and ready, waited behind closed doors, in a curtained cubicle outside the operating room.  We were there for a minor surgical procedure on his left hand.  We had just arrived at the check-in desk, when a nurse took him in for the pre-surgical preparations.  “Great,” I thought, “this is going to be quick.”  It wasn’t.  An hour passed, then two, and just as the hands on the clock moved toward a third hour spent in the waiting room, the nurse called me in.

“He’s all done,” she said.  John, still in the hospital gown,  held up a bandaged hand. “But first, you need to go down to pharmacy and get his prescription for pain medication.  We’ve already called it in.  It should be waiting for you.  We’ll get him dressed, and as soon as you have get the pills, just bring your car around to the entrance to Building C, and we’ll bring him out.”

I gave my husband a kiss.  “I’ll see you soon,” I said and left to get his medication.

I took the elevator down to the first floor, found the pharmacy and took my place in a long line of people, all waiting to have their prescriptions processed.  When my turn came, I presented the paperwork to the pharmacy associate.  She entered the information into the computer and politely smiled.   “It hasn’t been filled yet.  It will take about thirty minutes.   Have a seat and we’ll call you when it’s ready.”

I obediently sat down, foot twitching, and waited.  Meanwhile, upstairs, my husband was now waiting on me, dressed and ready to go home, but unable to do anything until I had gotten the medication and  parked at the entrance to the surgical wing.  An hour later, we were finally on our way.

What you do with time

is what a grandmother clock

does with it: strike twelve

and take its time doing it.

You’re the clock: time passes,

you remain. And wait.

 

(From:  “Mother,” by From The Plural of Happiness: Selected Poems of Herman de Coninck, 2006

Waiting.  We do a lot of it, and we’ve all been doing for a very long time.  Remember how eagerly you waited on Christmas eve, hoping to catch a glimpse of Santa?  Or that first crush you had on a boy or girl, waiting and hoping they might notice you?  As a young, expectant mother, I waited for my overdue daughter to be born, the one who, ironically, continues to keep me waiting even now.

Waiting dominates our daily lives.  We wait in lines for tickets or to get through security at the airport.  We wait to be served in restaurants or for a train in the subway station.  We wait for calls or letters from loved ones, for acceptances to schools, or the results of medical tests.  We wait in doctors’ waiting rooms for an appointment that was scheduled an hour earlier, thumbing impatiently through outdated magazines and checking the clock a dozen times.

We wait with hope; we wait with dread.  And if you’re anything like me, we wait impatiently, unable to concentrate on much of anything but the waiting

Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting

And the letter you wait for won’t come,

And I will sit watching the sky tear off gray and gray

And the letter I wait for won’t come.

 

(From “Caboose Thoughts,” by Carl Sandburg, 1878 – 1967)

No amount of sighing and toe tapping diminishes the waiting.  I’ve learned that it does little good to pace the hallway or sit at the table, foot twitching restlessly, willing something or someone to speed up.  Time—and events—move as they will.  So if we allow impatience to be our master, how much of life do we fail to notice?

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

 

(From The Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot, 1943)

The faith and the love and the hope are … in the waiting.  These words remind me to reconsider why life seems to make us wait.  I am still learning, despite my age, to accept what I cannot control, to let things unfold as they will–even if it’s as simple as waiting for a perpetually tardy adult daughter to meet me at the door and say, “I’m ready.

What do you wait for?   Or do you remember a particular time when your life seemed to be consumed by waiting?  Write about waiting.

 

 

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A friend is someone who likes you.
It can be a boy…
It can be a girl…
(From:  A Friend is Someone Who Likes You, by Joan Walsh Anglund, 1983)

This past Friday, I began another ten-week expressive writing series at Moores UCSD Cancer Center here in San Diego.  We were delayed in our start to the session since the workshop was held in a different room than we’ve previously met in—and finding it was a bit of a challenge for all of us.  But the late arrivals were punctuated with laughter and hellos, many participants returning for another series.   The first session is a time typically to get acquainted and together, begin to explore the experience of cancer.  But I couldn’t help notice the warmth and affection present in the room.  Writing, out of the shared experience of cancer, builds community and creates friendships between many of the participants.  So many of the men and women I write with tell me that cancer meant discovering who, among all those they called “friends,” were truly friends, people who stuck by them and offered care, love and support.

“But you got to have friends,” Bette Midler sang on her album, The Divine Miss M, “The feeling’s oh so strong. /You got to have friends/ to make that day last long…”  As we closed the session later that morning, I presented everyone with a small chocolate hearts and a short exercise to use “valentines” as the writing prompt for our final exercise.  A few wrote short poems; others wrote love letters to their spouses; some wrote about gratitude for the friends in their lives.

I thought about several of my friends over the years, but it was the photograph of my granddaughter, Flora, and her very best friend from pre-school, spending their Valentine’s Day together that got me remembering my first very best friend.

The obvious delight each girl has for the other in the other radiates in their smiles and faces.  They’re each wearing a “princess” dress and enacting fantasies of Elsa, the snow queen from Frozen.  I thought about their unabashed excitement—and of mine for a long ago friend when I was in kindergarten.

My very best friend in kindergarten was also named Sharon.  We did everything together.  Even in the class photograph, we sit together in the front row, she with short hair and long brown bangs, me with my then blonde  hair in braids wrapped around my head. I was enamored of Sharon, and she of me, but on Valentine’s Day, my affection for her was more than apparent to everyone.

The day before the Valentine’s party, we were buzzing with excitement in Mrs. Newton’s afternoon class.  Not only were we going to have a party, but for the very first time in our lives, we were exchanging Valentine’s cards.  We each decorated paper bags to hold our cards, decorating them in red and white construction paper, and pasting cut-out red hearts on them.  Our teacher was in charge of  our class mailbox—large enough to hold everyone’s valentines–and decorated in pink and red, the lid covered with lace doilies and red hearts.  She sent us home with a list of everyone’s names, and our mothers went to the 5 & 10 store to buy the cellophane packages of 36 valentines, ready for addressing to our classmates, with some parental assistance, of course.

Early the morning of February 14,  I tiptoed out of bed and made my way to the cardboard table in the front room of our apartment, where my package of  valentines lay waiting.  A blue ink pen was nearby.  Very carefully, I opened the package and quietly began addressing each card in my best printing:   “To Sharon H.,” I wrote, then misspelling a word, “Form Sharon B.”  Not just once, but over and over, one one card after the other.  By the time my mother awakened, I had addressed well over half of the cards and each to my best friend, Sharon.  Worse, I had done it all in ink.

I don’t remember how Mother got me off to school with  some kind of hastily manufactured valentines in my bag so I had something for everyone on the list, but the memory of Mrs. Newton passing out valentines that afternoon has stayed with me.  Again and again,  she reached in the big pink box,  looked over at me, then smiling turned to the class and said, “Why, here’s another valentine for Sharon H.”  I blushed furiously each time.

Sharon and I we grew apart by the time we entered high school.  Each of us had other best friends, some who endured; some who did not, but by graduation,  our sites were on college and getting out of our small town.  Sharon married her high school sweetheart, but became terribly ill soon afterward and died —the details of her death I no longer remember. But I do remember how important she was to me  those many years ago as my first best friend.   From her I learned something  about what it meant to have a special friend.   There would be other lessons to come on friendships,  as we grew into adolescence and adulthood, some difficult, others heartwarming.  I think  some friendships are meant to last decades.  Some are not.  Time, circumstance, unforeseen difficulties, distance—all intervene and challenge our friendships, yet each is important.  From them we learn more about ourselves and each other.

As I look at my life now, I’m grateful for the friendships that have continued despite years and the physical distances between us.  “Make new friends, but keep the old,” an old Brownie Scout song goes, “one is silver and the other gold.” Each time we’ve moved—more than I like—it means leaving old friends and again, making new ones.  The older we become, the more difficult making new ones seems to be, and yet “you got to have friends…”

Friendship, according to Rebecca Adams, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than our family relationships. Besides better health, a more positive outlook, a longer lifespan and a more hopeful attitude towards life are benefits of friendships.

Not convinced?  Take a look at the New York Times article, “What Are Friends For?  A Longer Life,” published April 20, 2009.  One ten-year study of older people found those with a large circle of friends were less likely to die than those with fewer friends. Harvard researchers also found that strong social ties may promote brain health as we get older.  There’s more.  In a 2006 study of nurses with breast cancer, the women without close friends were four times as likely to die from it as those with ten or more friends.  Proximity and amount of contact were not important; just having friends was protective.  And In a six-year study of 736 Swedish men, friendships was more important in lowering the risk of heart attack and coronary heart disease than attachment to a single person.

Do you remember your first best friend?  Write about your first friend or another special friend.  What memories you retain about him or her, the importance they had in your life?

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The phone rang late yesterday afternoon just as I’d decided to postpone my weekly shopping for another day, unwilling to face the crowded aisles of the stores.  It was the framing shop, telling me my artwork, purchased while I was in Okinawa, was framed and ready for pick-up.  It took only seconds for me to drop everything I was doing, hop in the car and drive to the mall.  I returned, oblivious to anything except getting my print, a colored woodblock by Japanese artist Hiroshi Gima, and famous for his body of work depicting the life and traditions of Okinawa.

(Hiroshi Gima, woodcut, “Woman from Okinawa”)

I drove straight home and spent the rest of the afternoon hanging, then admiring Gima’s woodcut.  It was my second, the first acquired during  the fall of 2013, when I first saw his work.   On the suggestion of a friend, I visited the small shop in Naha where the owner, an elder Okinawan woman conversed in Japanese in my daughter while carefully showing me several prints.  I choose one of an Okinawan boy and carried it home.  This trip,  when Claire asked me what I wanted to see or do, I had three requests:  1) to spend as much time as possible with my grandchildren, 2) to tag along with her as she traveled the island to teach, and 3) to return to the shop to see Gima’s prints again.  All three requests were honored, and my only purchase on the trip was a another small woodcut.

What is it about mementos–whatever form they take?  With them,  we carry back the memories of our travels, the remembrances of special times.  Among my  mementos from three trips to Okinawa are a pair of Shisa dogs  believed to protect one from  evils, a small pottery vase, and a salt charm to ensure my safe travel home, all gifts given from my daughter’s friends.  This morning I sat and studied the newly framed art and recalled the graciousness of the shopkeeper, her quiet pride in showing me Gima’s woodcuts, and how she repeatedly thanked me and wished me a safe journey home, bowing respectfully as I left the shop.

It’s been nearly two weeks since I returned to San Diego, my heart full, yet reluctant to re-enter the pace and culture that is Southern California.  I think of all I experienced in Okinawa often, and in small ways, try to capture remnants of what was so meaningful into my daily life here–things like simplicity, gratitude for a simple meal,  carefully prepared and artistically presented, the kindness, shared laughter and warmth of Claire’s Okinawan friends, the respect I continually witnessed for elders.

I spent one joyful afternoon at a senior day care program where my daughter volunteers each month.  Among the group, all over 85 years old, were three centenarians, and of these, the oldest was 103.  We sat in a circle as , they practiced simple English conversation, “How are you?”  “It is nice to see you,” together with Claire, laughing at their mistakes and, because I was a newcomer to the group, showing far more interest in me, my age, and how I cared for my skin!  Afterwards, they cheered me on as I tried my hand at writing my name in Kanji—much more difficult than I imagined.  I left smiling and grateful for the experience, hoping I will share as much laughter and respect with others in my elder years.

That afternoon is one part of what I carried home, along with a gift of Kanji script, to remind me of the senior center, the fun and happiness I experienced.  It’s no wonder that Okinawans live longer than anyone else in the world!   They also live better, with less heart disease, a fourth of the breast and prostate cancers, and lower rates of dementia.  While diet certainly is a factor—many Okinawans grow their own food–there’s more.  It’s something called“Ikagi,” which translated means “that which makes one’s life worth living.”  Craig Wilcox, author of the Okinawa Centenarian Study suggests that elder Okinawans’ strong sense of purpose may act as a buffer against stress and disease.

Laughter, joy, a sense of humor, the way that gratitude and respect infuse each day—a sense of a reason to keep on living–this is what I want to remember, what I want to retain, and what, I suppose, the small things carried home from Okinawa remind me of.  Whether memento or talisman, there are memories and stories in the objects I cherish.  They act as triggers, as reminders, as a way to remember the people and events so important in my life.  They may even, as I hope they will, remind me of the ways I want to live well into my elder years!

This week, find an object from one of your trips, a special event, a time in your life where you overcame an obstacle, or something given to you by a grandparent or long ago friend.  Study it.  What memories does it evoke?  Why do you keep it?  Tell its story.

 

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