Writing Through Cancer

The garage has not been allowed to breathe
for months now. The smell of moving,
uprooting, cures in the arid Texas heat—
scents that cannot be romanticized, but must be
handled carefully so that no boxes topple.
We are looking for “The Middle Passage,”
first we must clear a walking path…

This is how we will find him:
on our hands and knees
combing over flailed books—sea shells
beneath a forgotten tide.
Occasionally we’ll wrench something up,
not what we are looking for, and read it anyway.

(From:  “Search for Robert Hayden,”for Charles Rowell, In:  The Listening, by Kyle G. Dargan, 2004)

Each spring, I begin cleaning out closets and the accumulated items we “store” in our garage.  It’s an onerous task.  Somehow, despite our good intentions, the order and labeling I meticulously execute each year dissolves into clutter—things intended for donation, assorted pillows, folding beds and blankets still piled in a corner, placed there in January after one family member’s visit, old journals, keepsakes, clothing intended for colder climates we occasionally visit…

Invariably, as I did yesterday, I stand in the center of the garage feeling completely overwhelmed, wondering how in the world we managed to create disorder out of what was so carefully ordered a year ago.  Good intentions aside, my plan for cleaning out garage shelves quickly fell apart as I shifted boxes around, opening a few to examine the contents before deciding what needed to be available for access, what didn’t, and what could be donated to Am Vets or another nonprofit organization.

I didn’t make much progress.  Some of the boxes, when opened, yielded evidence of our past lives:  keepsakes collected on international trips, a misplaced journal filled with my writing and a few comic sketches from my final year in the corporate world, drawings from grandchildren—well, more like scribbles—executed as they were first learning to hold a crayon, a few old photographs, misplaced among the many black and white postcards of images I use in my writing groups, a luggage tag in my father’s handwriting, something of his I found after his death.  The garage never did get cleaned yesterday.  I managed only to move a few boxes around, lost in the memories contained in those few I opened.  Before I knew it, the day had passed.

In his 2009 memoir, Unpacking the Boxes:  A Memoir of a Life in Poetry, former U.S. poet laureate, Donald Hall begins his story as he unpacks seventy or eighty boxes, stored in his home and cottage since 1994, shortly after his mother’s death and a year before his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, died from leukemia.

For a longtime, I could not open them… From [the] … boxes my childhood rose like a smoke of moths–a 78 of Connee Boswell singing “The Kerry Dance”; all the letters I ever wrote my father and mother; photographs of my young parents on the boardwalk at Atlantic City; my father’s colorless Kodachromes of Long Island Sound, snapshots of cats dead for fifty years; model airplanes and toy cars and a Boy Scout manual, a baseball, and a baseball glove with its oiled pocket chewed by mice.  I felt the shock and exultation of exhumation… Remembered scenes flashed like film clips… (pp. 2, 3, 10)

Whether stacked in a garage or closet, tucked under the bed, or stored in our minds, we all have boxes filled with fragments and memories of our pasts. We turn to them sometimes, remembering feelings, smiles, nostalgia, even heartache, all reminding us of who we were then.  But there are other boxes, those virtual ones, tucked into the far corners of our mind, taped shut, yet always carried.  These are the ones we are reluctant to open, fearing what we might find.

Author Sue Diaz, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, opens her 2010 memoir, with a reference to those boxes:

This is a story about boxes. Mine contains news clippings about that day in Iraq — what led up to it and what came after. It’s a brown leather box where I’ve also stored notebooks, journal entries, essays published with my byline, photos, letters, and printouts of online conversations. A scrapbox of sorts, filled with bits-and-pieces connected mostly to Roman and to the past few years.

My son has his box, too. It is the one that soldiers returning from war carry within themselves, the box that holds everything a combat vet has seen and felt and heard and done in the line of duty.

As the daughter of a World War II veteran, I know it’s not uncommon for vets to want to keep the lid on their memories. Opening up can take some time. Years, for some. Decades, for others. Many never do.

But it’s important to try. …

Sue’s memoir is a touching portrayal of a mother’s experience of a son fighting in a distant and dangerous war.  That experience led her to lead writing groups for war veterans, and not infrequently, the stories written in her groups, were ones never shared before, even though it had been years, even decades, since several veterans’ war experience.

What they’ve written in their spiral notebooks on those Wednesdays has given me a glimpse into the boxes they have carried with them from places like Danang and Fallujah, Saigon and Sadr City. 

The words “Open at Your Own Risk” are stamped all over their boxes, because what’s inside can be scary as hell.

Scary as hell. Those are the boxes that contain memories of the difficult chapters of our lives, whether  trauma endured as a child or an adult, whether war, horrific events like 9/11, the bombing in Oklahoma City or the shock of hearing, “I’m sorry…  It’s cancer.”  We also know that there are real costs to health when traumatic, painful memories remain locked inside of us.  Healing takes time, often in small steps, but to begin, we have to summon the courage to open those boxes.  It’s important to try.

Remember Pandora and the box she was warned never to open? How curiosity got the better of her, and as she lifted the lid, evil escaped and spread over the earth?  It’s a good metaphor for the boxes filled with painful or frightening memories we sometimes hesitate to pry open ourselves, because remember too, that after the evil escaped, Pandora discovered one last thing left lying at the bottom of the forbidden box:  Hope.

This week, explore your boxes, whether real and tucked into a corner in your attic or garage, or one pushed back into a far corner of your mind. Take one out. Open the lid. Explore the contents:  the memories—sights, sounds, smells—and the emotions they evoke. Write the memories, the stories, evoked by the contents of your box.