Writing Through Cancer

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

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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?