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Archive for August, 2015

Understand, I was only a girl

living the days as they came.

I did not know I would leave.

though I had a secret

I did not tell and will not ever,

I did not know I would leave.

(From “Translation of my Life,” by Elizabeth Spires)

“You can’t go home again,” my husband said.  We were enjoying a dinner in one of Toronto’s many restaurants three weeks ago, sitting outdoors in a vine-covered patio and enjoying the long summer’s evening.   We’d come to our former home city to visit family and consider options for retirement.  I was, as I had been many times over the two-week stay, saying how I wished we’d never left.  We’d seen old friends and found the conversation as lively and comfortable as if no time had passed between us.  Daily, we’d taken long walks around the city whose lush, tree-lined neighborhoods and streets, felt as familiar as they had twenty years ago.  I was suffering from a little bout of homesickness.

Toronto remains a city I love, one where after years of marital struggle and loneliness, I felt like I’d finally found myself. At the height of the Vietnam war,  I’d left the U.S. for Canada with my first husband, living first in Ottawa before moving to Nova Scotia, where, a few years later, he died suddenly in a drowning accident.  I left Halifax and moved with daughters to Toronto to return to graduate school.  There, I discovered a city that “fit” like no other had.  Yet the remembrance of the California I had grown up in lingered, and my desire to return to the West crystallized when I read Wallace Stegner’s 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Angle of Repose.  A multi-layered story of marriage, the narrator, confined by a wheelchair and abandoned by his wife, intends to turn his grandmother’s papers into a novel about her life, but instead, examines the difficult marriage between his grandparents , leading him into the shadows of his own life..  In a passage I’ve never forgotten, his east coast grandmother, a New York writer and artist, marries a mining engineer, who, she reluctantly admits, was “infected with the incurable Western disease.  He had his crosshairs set on the snow peaks of a vision.”

Stegner’s words lingered like a magnet, pulling me back west.  Perhaps it was because I’d followed my first husband to Canada, suffered through our separation and his drowning in Nova Scotia, and still dreamt, despite the many years in Canada, of my childhood and California home.  I longed to reclaim the sense of place I once knew.

Twenty-three years later, remarried to another native Californian, I returned full of hopes and expectations.  But like the protagonist in Thomas Wolfe’s novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, my homecoming was laced with disappointment.

You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood,  …back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.  (From: You Can’t Go Home Again)

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.  The things that drew me back to the West were now elusive.

In color photographs, my childhood house looks

fresh as an uncut sheet cake—

pale yellow buttercream, ribbons of white trim…

 Half a century later, I barely recognize it

when I search the address on Google Maps

and, via “Street view,” find myself face to face—

 foliage overgrown, facade remodeled and painted

a drab brown. ..

(From “9773 Comanche Ave.,” by David Trinidad)

The irony is, of course, that all the years I lived in Canada, I refused to think of it as “home.”  I clung tenaciously to my golden dream of California, whose luster intensified in my imagination.  Yet all the while, Canada had quietly wrapped itself around my heart.  There, I grew into adulthood.  I became a wife, mother and widow.  I discovered friendships whose bonds were forged out of the steel of years of struggle and hardship, friendships that have endured despite time and distance. Canada became a part of me as surely as the California of my youth. But it took leaving it to realize how much my Canadian years had defined me.  It took leaving it and returning to the place I once called home.

We’ve now lived in California for as long as we lived in Canada.  The irony is that I never re-discovered that same sense of place and belonging I once took for granted.  We talk now of perhaps returning to Canada, at least for part of our time, but I wonder, can I rediscover that sense of belonging as I once did?  “Home is where the heart is,” Gaius Plinius Secundas, wrote nearly two thousand years ago.   Countless authors, writing about home, have echoed it since.

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”)

I guess it comes down to change– in a place and in ourselves.  Even if we’ve never left a place, the events of our lives can make us feel as if we’ve suddenly become strangers to it.   Cancer, loss, or trauma can have that same effect.   We feel as if we’ve crossed the border into some strange, new territory, where the customs and nuances are unfamiliar.   You long for home, the place you once knew by heart, but you discover that you can never, as Wolfe suggested, be at home as you once were.

What does it mean to be “at home?”  Have you returned to a once familiar place to find that you are no longer part of it as you once were?  What did you learn?  Has an experience like cancer, loss, or other life challenges made it difficult to regain the sense of belonging to a place and its people—or cemented it?  How has “home” changed for you over the years? Write about home, leaving, returning or finding it.

 

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I’ve been thinking about change:  how life can change in an instant or slowly and gradually, yet how the reality of change seems to descend all at once.  That’s the kind of change I’m currently experiencing.    My husband retires at the end of the month, something that has been long in coming.  It signals a new chapter for him, but also a new chapter for both of us and our life together.  I’ve entered that phase that author Bill Bridges once defined as “the neutral zone” in  Managing Transitions, his book about corporate and personal transitions (1991).  I always resisted the term, as I am doing now, because transition is anything but neutral, although Bridges defined it as a state of limbo or in-between time, where it can sometimes feel as if there is nothing to hold onto.

For me, it’s like riding on a virtual elevator, one that moves between different floors or parts of my life, stopping suddenly and without warning.  One moment, I’m preparing a course for the fall; the next I’m talking retirement budgeting with my husband, and just as quickly, thrust into the wilderness of “what’s next in our lives?”  My life continues, in some ways, as it has before.  In others, it’s riddled with questions and an undercurrent of anxiety—a need to have the answers now, now.

Human beings are complex.  Unlike other members of the animal kingdom, our lives involve much more than basic need.  We have the unique capacity to live more than one life at a time.  As Patrice Vecchione describes in her book, Writing and the Spiritual Life, we live our lives on more than one plane.  Our inner and outer lives interact; they affect and inform each other as we move between our different worlds throughout each day, each involving particular aspects of ourselves.

“I know I walk in and out of several worlds every day,” poet Joy Harjo wrote in her essay, “Ordinary Spirit.”  Although Harjo is referring to her mixed race, in part, and the struggle to “unify” her different worlds, we all, in many ways, seek to “unify” the different worlds we inhabit each day.  Yet we sometimes move between our different worlds as if they are separate, assuming—without even thinking about it–different roles as other aspects of ourselves come into play.

It’s a bit like being on an elevator, one that is constantly in motion, traveling between floors.  Push a button, elevator moves up or down, then comes to a stop.  The doors open. “Second floor, family life.”  Push another, “Third floor, workplace,” and another, “Fourth floor, Exercise and Fitness.”  On another floor, perhaps we step into a world of friendships or even a classroom, where for an hour or two each week, we become students again.   Another floor might open to our spiritual worlds:  quiet, meditation and solitude.  In our busy lives, we move between our worlds without much thought, and one can seem far removed from the other.

Add a significant life change, whether cancer, hardship or even something called “retirement” to the daily worlds we inhabit, and the boundaries between our inner and outer lives, the several “worlds” we inhabit daily, blur.  As Harjo expressed, we begin to realize that it is “only an illusion that any of the worlds we inhabit are separate.”  This “new” world, the one where we suddenly wear labels like “patient, “survivor,” “widow,” or “retiree,” affects all the others.  The predictability or routine of our daily life is thrown asunder.  While we might have felt some control over the course of our lives, we’re thrust into free fall, overwhelmed and confused, riding s in a wayward elevator moving randomly between floors.

Everything in our lives is affected by the triggering event, whether illness, loss or awakening to the reality that yes, we are moving toward “elderhood.”  All that we have thought ourselves to be–mind, body, and spirit–is thrust into a state of upheaval.  It’s life, which is never static, but certain events, like debilitating illness, loss of a job or loved one, even this chapter labeled “retirement” demands we enter a new normal.  So we stumble out of that elevator and try to make sense of where we’ve landed and how we want to live from this point forward.

When I look back over my life and all the changes—painful, scary, and difficult– I’ve experienced, ones I never anticipated but managed to adjust my life to them, I scratch my head in puzzlement.  Why is this change, this impending stage of “retirement” so confounding to me?  Is it that I’m facing a new stage of life that also signals the reality of aging and my mortality?  I don’t have the answers yet, but I am trying–once again– to practice Rilke’s wisdom in the advice he gave so many years ago to a young poet:

…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves … Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday …, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.  (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1903)

 Suggestions for Writing:  How many worlds do you occupy in your life?  When has an unexpected event thrust you into a significant period of change and a “new normal?”  How have you managed the transition?  What questions did you have?  How did you “live” your way into the answers you sought?  Looking back, what did you learn from the experience?

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Hello again, Readers!  After short hiatus while we visited friends and family in Canada,  “Writing Through Cancer” begins its weekly posts/writing prompts today.

______________________________

Cancer:

You entered my life without my permission. You tried to turn my body against me, leaving pain and uncertainty in your wake…  Because of you I wondered if I would see my children grow up… You made me feel like less of a woman …You took my hair and scarred my body. You made me cringe at my own reflection in the mirror. Others see a warrior. I see someone wounded – broken by the battle…(2013 “Writing Through Cancer” workshop participant)

Writing during the experience of cancer or other life difficulties can make us feel better.  It offers us the freedom to dive beneath the water line and express difficult emotions, something that helps to relieve stress, often a culprit in illness and health problems.

Of course, the most healing kind of writing is honest, the kind that acknowledges our emotions openly.  Our ability to feel and name both positive and negative emotions is critical to our healing.  Sometimes, we might be reluctant to write honestly, worried that we’ll feel worse or even guilty, especially when what we want really want to say might feel like a confessional:  feelings about things or others that we’ve never fully expressed.

Psychologist James Pennebaker explained it this way:  writing honestly and openly about how you feel can be a bit like the experience of seeing a sad movie.  You come out of the theatre feeling bad; maybe you even cried during the film.  But you’re wiser.  You understand the character’s issues and struggles in a way, perhaps that you didn’t when the movie began.  It is in the expression of those feelings of sorrow or anger that we are able to stand back, re-read and examine what we’ve written, and that’s when we begin to understand ourselves and the sources of our pain better than we did before.  There is relief in that realization.  And there is the possibility for insight.

Writing offers us the opportunity to “think to” another, whether it is yourself, your body, or someone with whom you have unresolved issues.  Imagining another and addressing your writing to that person encourages you to write naturally.  Even if you never show it or send it to anyone, writing to an imagined other has the effect of making your words more powerfully felt. What’s more, you can say what you really want to say.

In poetic terms, there’s a figure of speech called an “apostrophe,” in which someone absent or dead, or even an object or abstract idea, is addressed directly.  Examples can be found in Walt Whitman’s poem to the dead Abraham Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!,” in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, “God’s World,” which begins “O World, I cannot hold thee close enough…”

Unsent letters are a more common form of saying what we really want to say.  Whether during cancer or at other times in our lives, we all have the need to release the unspoken, to cleanse or reach out to another, whether living or dead, person or thing.  An unsent letter can be a tool to help express difficult or complicated feelings that might otherwise not be expressed.

In his essay, “Letter, Much Too Late,” Pulitzer Prize winning author Wallace Stegner addressed his dead mother.  Stegner was close to his mother, who always tried to protect him from his father, even though she was rendered helpless in the face of her husband’s abusive personality.  While he was a graduate student, his beloved mother died from breast cancer.  He nursed her in her final days and sat at her side as she took her last breath. “Letter, Much Too Late” was written fifty-five years after her death.   In it, he remembers her, asks for forgiveness and remembers her as a mother with enduring love for her son.  He writes:

 “In the more than fifty years I have been writing books and stories, I have tried several times to do you justice, and have never been satisfied with what I did. . . .I am afraid I let your selfish and violent husband, my father, steal the scene from you and push you into the background in the novels as he did in life. Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to.” (In:  Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, by Wallace Stegner, 1992)

I have used the “unsent letter” exercise many times in my workshops, but one time in particular stands out.  A few years ago, G., who had only just received the news earlier that week that her cancer had spread and was terminal, used the unsent letter exercise to write to her doctor, who had cared for her throughout her ten-year cancer journey.  Afterward, she shared her letter aloud with us.  It was strong and beautifully written, and expressed her feelings clearly. In it, she explained how hurt she’d felt when her doctor couldn’t look her in the eyes as he conveyed her recent test results.  After she’d read, she said,  “I feel better.  It’s helped just to write down what I felt, even if I’m not going to send it to him.”

That’s the beauty of the form of the unsent letter.  It allows us to express difficult emotions on paper, safely, and get them out of our minds and bodies.  In re-reading them, we can learn from what we’ve written—new insights, greater clarity or understanding—all without the need to send it on to the person to whom we’ve written.  Unlike most times I’ve offered the exercise, however, G. took the letter one step further.

At the next group meeting, she shared that she had taken her “unsent” letter with her to her appointment and read it aloud to her doctor.  She described how visibly moved he became, confessing that he had struggled to tell her the news, not trusting he could keep his composure as he did.  He apologized to G. and thanked her for having the courage to share her letter with him.  It took courage on her part, but it was an important moment between doctor and patient.

This week, try your own hand at writing an unsent letter.  You might write to a loved one, a physician, a higher power, your body or even, cancer.  Write with the assurance that you can say what is honestly in your heart and mind, that no one ever needs to see or hear what you have written.  What do you really want to say?

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