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Archive for April, 2015

…I have learned that story assuages grief, and it also grants the chaos of our emotions some shape and order…Even as I watch my mother become more and more distant from the lives around her…I am doing what I have been preparing all my life to do:  listening again to the old stories and committing them to memory in order to preserve them.  I am still doing my work in terms of what I have come to believe defines immortality.  Being remembered.  (From:  The Cruel Country, by Judith Ortiz Cofer, ©2015. University of Georgia Press)

Every now and then, I’m sent a book to read with the request for a review or perhaps, quoting from it in my weekly blog posts.  I dutifully try to respond and incorporate as many quotes as are relevant to the theme I’ve chosen for the week.  Rarely, however, does a book arrive in the mail that not only speaks to the themes and issues faced by cancer survivors and others experiencing emotional pain and hardship, but envelops me as completely as Cofer’s new memoir on the loss of her mother and that uncharted territory of grief.  I am learning the alchemy of grief, she writes, how it must be carefully measured and doled out, inflicted—but I have not yet mastered this art.”

I am not sure any of us truly masters the “alchemy of grief,” because death, the loss of loved ones and friends, forces us to learn and re-learn what it means when someone’s life ends—whether anticipated, as often is the case in terminal cancer diagnoses, or unexpected, lives cut short by circumstances no one can predict.  So it has been with me this past week.

Robert, who had been part of my Moores UCSD Cancer Center writing group, died earlier in the month, but this week, we celebrated his life in a memorial service.  I was, I thought, “prepared” for Robert’s death.  He’d fought valiantly to live three years beyond the death sentence he’d been given with terminal prostate cancer.  But his death was the third in our writing group since December, preceded by Susan, then David, and as I walked into the chapel at his service, the skies outside unusually overcast and threatening rain, my heart was heavy with the weight of their combined losses.

The sky was again gray with cloud cover the next morning, mirroring my sorrow.  I stood on the front steps wondering if there was any chance of rain when I saw my elderly neighbor, Carroll, walking down the street toward our house.  I smiled and waved, “How are you?”  Then I noticed his face.  Something wasn’t right.  “I wanted you to know,” he said, “Mary passed away at four a.m. this morning in the hospital.”

“Oh no,” I gasped.  “What happened?”  I had visited them both at home just a few days earlier.   Without warning, tears streamed down my face.  “I’m so sorry,” I said, as we embraced, embarrassed that I was doing the sobbing as my neighbor comforted me after losing his wife of 65 years.

That afternoon, unable to write, I picked up Judith Ortiz Cofer’s book and began reading. Three hours later, I looked up at the clock, surprised to discover I’d read for nearly three hours. It was six o’clock, and I hadn’t prepared anything for dinner.  Still only halfway through her memoir, I’d underlined a dozen or more passages and tabbed several pages to re-read.  Among those pages, caught up in her eloquence and soulful writing, I was re-learning and remembering something about the “alchemy of grief” she described.

Mary’s service was yesterday afternoon.  The church was filled with their sons, daughter, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, lifelong friends, and most of us who live in this little neighborhood.  Together, we celebrated her life just as I had experienced a few days before at Robert’s service, as his adventures and enduring humor were shared by friends and loved ones.  …what I have come to believe defines immortality.  Being remembered

As I considered what to write this morning, I thought about my father and how, when members of our extended Bray family died, he, along with my uncles, preferred to separate themselves from their grieving sisters or cousins, all crying together in another room, and instead recount stories from the deceased relative’s life—the greater share of them filled with humor.  I was in high school at one such family funeral, and after several stories had been told, he turned to me, serious for a moment, and said, “Sharon, promise me that when I die, you’ll have a party.  I don’t want any tears and weeping.  Just invite all my friends, serve them Jack Daniels and tell some good stories about me.”  He wanted only to be remembered—and most often, with a chuckle.

There were more than a few “good” stories about my father I discovered at his wake many years later, and hearing them made me smile, knowing that we were remembering him just as he wanted to be:  not as a man whose addiction to cigarettes hastened his death, but as a man who loved to laugh, play a good joke on his brothers and friends from time to time, and more than anything, tell a good story.  Those stories keep my father’s memory and his legacy of humor alive.

Death steals everything but our stories–the final line of Jim Harrison’s poem, “Larson’s Holstein Bull,” I quoted in my April 5th post,” Why Our Stories Matter.”  Our stories keep alive those we’ve loved and lost.  We remember them.  Grief is softened, even transformed, and one begins to heal.  As Cofer reminds us:  Writing transforms.  And on the page, it is always now.

This week, think about what has helped you navigate the dark ocean of grief in the wake of a loved one’s loss.  Try writing from the memories you have of a friend or family member you’ve lost.  Or, try answering the question, “How do you want to be remembered?”

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Cancer is no laughing matter.

Yet if you happened to pass by the conference room in the cancer centers where I lead expressive writing programs for men and women living with cancer, you’ll often hear the sounds of laughter.  That’s right, even though we’re writing about the emotional impact accompanying a cancer diagnosis, laughter is no less frequent than tears.  Counterintuitive perhaps, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that laughter, like Norman Cousins told us in 1979 when he wrote Anatomy of an Illness, is good medicine.  Even before Cousins’ insights, Mark Twain advocated for the power of laughter:  “The human race has only one really effective weapon and that’s laughter,” he said.  “The moment it arises, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.”

I love to laugh, and in part, because when I do, I feel better.  Life looks brighter; gray moods dissipate, and others share in the smiles, so I wasn’t surprised to discover, according to author Jeannette  Moninger,  writing in the Winter 2015 issue of CURE, many hospitals across America offer laughter programs for cancer patients.  Moninger describes a few:  At North Kansas City Hospital, patients can watch funny movies…Duke Medicine offers a Laugh Mobile, a rolling cart from which adult patients in oncology wards can check out humorous books and silly items like whoopee cushions and rubber chickens.  And the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Program sends…clowns to 16 children’s hospitals nationwide to help put smiles on the faces of ill children… (pp. 26 – 29).

Even as far back as the 13th century, surgeons used humor to distract patients from the agony of painful medical procedures!  It turns out they were onto something, and many research studies have borne that out.  Laugh, and not only the world laughs with you, but your body releases endorphins, the “feel good hormones that function as the body’s natural painkillers, ”Moninger writes, the same hormones that create the “runner’s high.”  Endorphins also decrease the body’s levels of cortisol, the hormone associated with chronic stress.  Cortisol has a number of negative effects on our bodies, compromising our immune system, tensing up our muscles, elevating blood pressure—all of which laughter helps to counteract.  I don’t know about you, but I’d like to bottle up some laughter and always have it at the ready to counteract the stresses our rush-rush world.

We all need a little laughter in our lives, no matter if we’re dealing with cancer, an over-busy or stressful life, the loss of loved ones, or simply sharing time with friends and family.  We need to laugh just as much as sometimes, we need to cry.

when you are raised with the gift of laughter, as I was, it can’t stay suppressed forever. It’s too powerful. Thank goodness for that. I eventually could see bits of “ha-ha” in my own life. Certainly not in the cancer, but in the mind-blowing circumstances that suddenly consumed my life. And laughing at parts of those experiences made me feel a little more alive.  The funniest part of it all was that the more I allowed myself to laugh, the more therapeutic my tears became.  

(Jim Higley, “Finding Humor in the Midst of Cancer,” Coping with Cancer Magazine, March/April 2012)

Smiling and laughter are simply contagious.  I think of Louis Armstrong, that familiar gravelly voice always enough to make me smile, but in particular, singing:

When you’re smilin’ keep on smilin’
The whole world smiles with you
And when you’re laughin’ oh when you’re laughin’
The sun comes shinin’ through

Try it.  Whether during cancer treatment or simply living a world be constantly dominated by hardship and struggle, it’s good to find something—even a small thing—to smile or laugh about.  Dig back into your memories this week—the fun times, a time you laughed so hard, tears ran down your cheeks.  Take a break from writing about cancer or those other painful topics of life.  Try on a little humor.  Perhaps you have a few memories of times that made you smile, even laugh aloud whenever you think about them.  Write one, that funny story, and let a little “ha, ha” brighten your day.  After all, as Charlie Chaplin said, “A day without laughter is a day wasted.”

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“I need an attitude adjustment,” I said to my husband.  We were driving downtown last night to share an evening of live jazz with friends.  He said little, a sure indication he agreed with my assessment, since I’d been less than jovial for much of the day.  “I’ll try to “right” myself,” I said.  “I don’t enjoy my crankiness any more than you do.”

It’d been an uneven week for me; my mood lopsided, leaning in the wrong direction despite my best efforts to right myself.  Whether fatigue at the end of teaching a time-consuming course, the continuing turbulence in the world, a sense of loss as my cancer writing workshops wind down in the next three weeks, or the impending decisions that come with my husband’s retirement in July and the life changes it signals for us, it’s difficult to say.  But the world was, it seemed, too much with me.

An evening of music helped soothe my troubled spirits, old familiar tunes from Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington, but the shared laughter and conversation with friends was especially good medicine.  By the time we returned home, my mood had lightened, and the fog of my spiritual malaise had dissipated, although none of the impending decisions have yet to be resolved.  But it was this morning as I shared the sunrise with my dog, sitting quietly on the deck, and the two of us serenaded by the community of birds calling and chirping to one another across the canyon.  I closed my eyes and remembered lines from a favorite poem by e.e. cummings:

may my heart always be open to little

birds who are the secrets of living

whatever they sing is better than to know

and if men should not hear them men are old

I bought a children’s book this week, a habit I acquired when my daughters were small but still persists, thanks to my three grandchildren.  It’s titled enormous SMALLNESSA story of E.E. Cummings, and written by Matthew Burgess.  I’d learned about from Maria Popova’s fine weekly newsletter, Brain Pickings Weekly.  Cummings’ ranks among my very favorite .  I’ve filled my volume of his complete poems with underlines, asterisks, and dog-eared pages.  Cummings, Burgess tells us, liked to “work and dream, peering out at the world above and the world below” from his third floor room.  While his poetry often broke the rules of rhythm and rhyme, which many found strange, they were fresh and thought-provoking.  Cummings’ poems, Burgess writes, “were his way of saying YES.  Yes to the heart and the roundness of the moon, to birds, elephants, trees and everything he loved.”

Yes.  Of course.  As cummings put it “yes is a pleasant country…”  It’s such a simple word, and yet, thinking about it seemed to open my mind to possibility instead of anxiety.  Yes.  Yes to life, to whatever changes ahead of us.  Yes to simply being alive and present in the world. His words echoed in my mind as I watched the sun creep across the canyon, listened to the birdsong and stroked the ears of my dog, peacefully curled in my lap.  Yes, I thought, and my heart opened, as e.e. cummings’ might have intended.  The poem continues:

may my mind stroll about hungry

and fearless and thirsty and supple

for even if it’s sunday may i be wrong

for whenever men are right they are not young…

(From:  “53” by E.E. Cummings, In  Complete Poems, 1904-1962, ©1994)

Maybe it’s the birds, the peace of early morning, the quiet that any of us need in the midst of this rush-rush world, but for me, his words, the riot of birdsong in the morning–it all reminds me to be grateful for the life I have, to let go of the trivial annoyances that sometimes grow beyond their size, to be grateful for each new day, the “twenty-four brand new hours” that Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of, and to always see the world with “new” eyes.  Yes.

yes is a pleasant country:
if’s wintry
(my lovely)
let’s open the year

both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear

love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april’s where we’re)

(e.e. cummings, “yes is a pleasant country… (XXXVIII),” In: Complete Poems, 1904-1962, ©1994)

As you write this week, consider these questions:  What helps pull you from the doldrums?  What opens your heart?  How might “yes” be a pleasant country for you?  Do you have a favorite poem or poet in whose words you find comfort and inspiration?

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She’s lived in my memory for sixty years.

Death steals everything except our stories.

These two final lines of Jim Harrison’s poem, “Larson’s Holstein Bull,” linger in my mind.  In the poem, the narrator remembers a young girl and her untimely death from being gored by a bull.  The poem is short, the descriptions lean and straightforward, but the impact of the final line is profound:  Death steals everything except our stories.

Stories were part of our evening last night, as we attended a Passover Seder at our friends’ home.  I had experienced a Passover meal once before, but it was a new experience for my husband, one we both enjoyed—not just for the traditions inherent in the Jewish holiday, but for the re-telling of the Jewish story that is part of the celebration.  As I listened, I thought of the Easter holidays my family celebrated throughout my childhood.  We had traditions too, rooted in Christian beliefs and in my father’s extended family’s love of family get-togethers.  Like the Seder meal we enjoyed last night, Easter Sunday was dominated by a traditional meal, many of the recipes handed down from my grandmother to her daughters.  Hers, my aunts said, were passed along from her mother-in-law when as a new bride, it was quickly apparent my grandmother had little experience in the kitchen!

What I remember most about our family celebrations, whether Easter, Christmas or Thanksgiving, was the life around the table.  Aunts, uncles, and cousins filled the room and sat at designated tables.  Since I was one of the older grandchildren, born in between three young adult cousins and a batch of younger cousins born a few years after World War II, it meant I “graduated” to the adult table earlier than most—a privilege I quietly cherished.  At the adult table, I learned about family history, stories told and re-told  by my uncles at every celebration.  Their stories were embellished each year as my uncles repeated the tales of my grandparents’ years as homesteaders and ranchers in Northern California, and I never tired of hearing them.  These were stories of our family’s inheritance and legacy, stories well told and much enjoyed.  They mattered  to me because of the laughter, the history, and the sense of belonging I felt hearing them.  They were instrumental in my understanding of who I was, where I was from.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on…

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers…

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks…

(From:  “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” in The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Joy Harjo. 1994

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun… Another table, another group of friends, is also on my mind this morning.  I’m working on a booklet today, a collection of the stories written and shared by the men and women in my “Writing through Cancer” group at Moores UCSD.  As writing series winds down, everyone submits pieces of writing done during our ten weeks together.  Their stories are about cancer, yes, but much more.  They are ones that represent a whole life, not one solely defined by illness.

Cancer, novelist Alice Hoffman wrote in a New York Times essay, need not be a person’s whole book, only a chapter… (August 14, 2000).  In the shock of a cancer diagnosis or the weeks of surgeries and treatments that follow, it’s easy to forget, for a time, we have more than cancer stories to tell.  We may be temporarily robbed of our voices, but as we write and share them with each other, we rediscover and honor our lives.

It’s cancer that brings people to my writing groups.  Cancer is the starting point, where we begin, but as the weeks progress, other stories emerge, ones of love, family, even childhood.  Writing and sharing our stories affirms our lives, our legacies.  Our stories say:  “This is my life.  This was important to me.  This is how I have become who I am.”

But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story—and there are so many, and so many—stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, and death…
–Virginia Woolf

 Our stories live long after our lives have ended.  Think of the stories you tell of your grandparents, parents or other loved ones who are no longer living.  It’s through story that we remember and honor them.  It’s through story that we say, This is who I am.  This is my life.  William Carlos Williams, physician and poet, offered important advice to a medical student:  Their stories, yours, mine—it’s what we carry with us on this trip we take…we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.

It’s each person’s stories I carry with me long after the writing workshop ends and long after some of the writers’ lives are lost to cancer.  Through their stories, I learn from them.  I remember them–their faces, words, and lives.  It’s why our stories matter.  We are our stories.  They shape us and act as the lens through which we see the world. Through story, we make sense of our lives, reclaim our voices, and learn that our stories have the power to touch others’ hearts.  Cancer may be what brings everyone to my writing groups, but it’s in our shared stories we discover the glue that binds us together.

Stories—the small personal ones that bring us close as well as those of the larger world—foster compassion.  In the telling of our personal lives, we’re reminded of our basic, human qualities—our vulnerabilities and strengths, foolishness and wisdom, who we are…, through the exchange of stories, [you] help heal each other’s spirits.

–Patrice Vecchione, Writing and the Spiritual Life, 2001

 Your stories matter.  Why not write them?

 

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