Writing Through Cancer

We had a heat wave this past week in Southern California.  Each day the temperature climbed, and the nights remained warm.  As someone who has never tolerated heat well, I grew crankier by the day, stuck indoors close to the air conditioner and as the week progressed, increasingly sleep deprived.  I was—and am—more than ready for summer to move aside and make way for cooler weather.

This morning, I awakened much too early, but with seasons and writing on my mind.  I remembered a different season from the past, when storms lashed the Nova Scotia coast and my emotional life.  It was—or seemed–never-ending.  For several years, my life was as unsettled as the Atlantic winters.  I was in the midst of a personal crisis:  an unhappy marriage, the death of my husband, and fearful of the impact on my two young daughters.  For the next decade, my life was in turmoil, dominated by themes of loss, betrayal and illness—my parents’ and my own.  It seemed I lived in the midst of a never-ending storm.

What helped me navigate those rough waters was writing.  I became a crisis writer, filling dozens and dozens of journals, pouring out my angst onto the page.  Despite all that happened in that period of my life, I felt the root of all my suffering lay in those early years of marriage, betrayal and sudden loss.  I decided to write a memoir of that time.  What I didn’t notice that in making that decision, my writing took a significant turn toward writing that could help me heal.  Instead of venting, rumination, and emotional outpourings on the page, I began to shape my experience into a story.  I signed up for memoir classes, worked under the guidance of three different teachers, before deciding to fictionalize my personal story into a novel.  Now I sought out other writers I admired and began my novel.  Three years and 400 pages later, I was stalled.  Stuck in a story that had turned into something I no longer recognized as mine; one I was weary of; one that seemed less and less compelling.  I announced to my writing buddies that I was putting the novel aside and letting the story lie fallow for a time hoping I might return to the draft invigorated.  I didn’t.  Instead, I realized it was high time to move on from the old painful narrative I’d carried with me for years.

Writing out of crisis, pain or suffering is often the inspiration for many great works of literature.  As Louise DeSalvo states in her book, (2000), many of our greatest cultural creations were created out of pain, crisis and loss.   Novelists and poets have often described writing as a form of therapy, helping them  to express and gain insight from traumatic life events, just as I was trying to do.  Authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene or William Styron wrote with powerful—and personal—themes of alienation or suffering in their work.  Fitzgerald described his battle with alcohol in The Crack-Up, Greene wrote of his manic-depression in A Sort of Life, and Styron examined his suicidal depression in Darkness Visible. Creativity, as so many writers have shown us, is often fueled by our life crises, trauma or suffering.

But turning life into art is no easy matter.  And not every personal experience of suffering and illness warrants publication, yet those events do need to be expressed, whether in art, writing or traditional “talk” therapy.  Why?  Because writing can help us heal from those traumatic and painful life events.  But healing also implies we move on from those old, painful stories and find new inspiration in the present.

A cancer diagnosis is a life crisis that often triggers intense and abundant writing.  It’s important to have the freedom and safety to express those raw emotions, and creating that safety is an important element of the workshops I offer to cancer patients.  In a supportive environment, people come together to write and make sense of the upheaval which accompanies cancer.  I intentionally titled  the series Writing Through Cancer, because I knew that healing implies movement, not staying stuck in the cancer narrative.  I recalled reading Barbara Abercrombie’s memoir of breast cancer, , several years ago, and thinking how powerful a metaphor her book title was, capturing the emotional intensity that defines cancer.  Writing becomes the calm, the eye of a hurricane, a kind of refuge while the storm howls around you.  You may write desperately and furiously, revealing your anguish on the pages of your journals, but it offers you release, a chance to begin to see your way through the shock, rage and grief, to recovery and a new normal.

In my expressive writing workshops, people move at their own pace.  It’s not uncommon that those with chronic cancer conditions or a terminal diagnosis will return to write for several series, but their writing usually shifts to poetry or story instead of the raw, emotional writing that is typical of those in the midst of treatment and surgeries for the first time.  But it’s when people return to the workshop well beyond the point of “no evidence of disease” to continue to write about their cancer experience that concerns me as a group leader.  I remember the years I re-hashed my own sorrowful story, and doing so kept me with one foot in the past, kept me from being fully present to the life I was living.  It kept me from healing.

In less than a week, I’ll begin leading another series of “Writing Through Cancer” workshops at two different cancer centers.  The participants will be a mix of those newly diagnosed to those further along in their treatment and recovery.  A few of my most beloved writers will not be part of the group.  They are the ones beyond recovery and with “no evidence of disease,”  but there are others, though living with terminal diagnoses,  determined to focus their time on the present and living fully.  They all have, in one way or another, moved beyond the storm into healing and acceptance.  They still write, but cancer rarely makes its way onto the page.

I used to be a crisis writer, but my writing changed as I found healing.  I know the real work of writing is to write under any sky,  stormy or clear.  In that way, we capture the intricacy, the poetry, and stories our whole lives encompass. Perhaps you’ve been writing out of the storm called cancer, but as the sky clears, where will you look for the inspiration and motivation to continue writing?

That’s the work for every writer—and, perhaps, the work of healing–to move beyond the crisis, the storm, and see the world with new eyes.  I recall when Billy Collins, answering questions posed by the audience at a local Writers’ Symposium, said he finds inspiration by simply looking out the window.  Even the ordinary can contain the seed of a poem or a story.  His words inspired me to return to my writing after that lengthy post-novel drought.   The following morning I opened my notebook and began with a line “I wish I could write a poem like Billy Collins…”  The words flowed freely along with some laughter.  I had my eyes on the present.  I didn’t have to write about the old sorrows and suffering.  I was more than ready to move on and find new inspiration for my writing.

In “Dawn Revisited,”  Rita Dove offers us an invitation to awaken ourselves to the world around us and write.

The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page.

(In: On the Bus with Rosa Parks, © 1999)

It’s a great image, isn’t it?  Sunshine or storm clouds, all we need to do is a look out the window and notice how  the world offers us new possibilities every day.  Write about the sky above you, whether it’s stormy or sunny, gray or blue.  Write out of a storm, or write of calm.  Write out of pain or write about what’s in front of you.  It doesn’t matter.  The whole sky is yours, whatever it holds.  What matters is that you write—and when you’ve ready to let go of the old, painful stories, there’s so much more just waiting for you to notice.  The whole sky is yours to write on…  Why not write something today?

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I wrote a dear friend in Gig Harbor, Washington this week to let him and his wife know that we’ve postponed our plans to visit them this month.  My husband, now an official retiree as of  this past Tuesday, has busily turned his attention to the myriad of small household repairs that have been, like our trip, postponed dozens of times.  Not only that, but we realized that after our trip to Toronto last month, we were tired of travel.  With our impending trip to Japan in November, neither of us was eager to step on an airplane again quite so soon.  “I’m really tired of being a tourist,” I complained.  “Besides, air travel just isn’t any fun anymore.”  But neither did I welcome a long road trip.  We’d taken one to Sedona and Flagstaff at the beginning of summer, and as pleasant as it was, we were both happy to return home and sleep in our own beds.

After leaving my small Northern California town for The Netherlands as a high school exchange student, I was never content to stay put for very long.  I dreamed of travel, the excitement of visiting far-away places, of flying over the oceans to visit places I’d only read about.  When my first husband decided to go to graduate school in Ottawa, Canada, I never hesitated.  It was an adventure, and flying back to California seemed simple enough: buy a ticket, pack my bags, board the airplane and fly across the country.  When reality set in:  loneliness, winters that seemed to last forever, and the cost of travel on our meager income, the adventure began to sour.

Years later, I became a corporate executive, living in New York City.  Exciting at first, my eagerness for travel diminished greatly in the years I found myself flying back and forth between coasts and New York and Europe several times a month.  I grew weary of living out of suitcases, eating airline meals, and contending with what seemed to be a state of constant jet-lag.   Still, we spent our vacations traveling overseas:  Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, something we haven’t done for the past five years.  Not only are our trips now relegated to see our daughters and grandchildren (living in Toronto and Okinawa), despite our technological advances, travel is more difficult, crowded, expensive, and frankly, nerve-racking, which no doubt accounts for the endless lists of travel tips and guidebooks.

As someone who routinely travels back and forth between Southern and Northern California and has a defibrillator implanted in her chest, I am well acquainted with the TSA security checkpoint processes.  Even the TSA offers travel tips on their website to make your security screening process more “checkpoint friendly,” including tips such as how to dress and how to pack.  Despite the travel tips and advice travel is rarely a “no hassle” process, no matter what airline I might be flying.

Airplane travels aside, we each encounter many different journeys during our lives.  I think back to some of mine, and how much I wish I’d had a few roadmaps for events like single parenting, widowhood, illness or even this new journey called “retirement.”  I am now preparing to lead two “Writing Through Cancer” programs in less than two weeks, and I think of the men and women who’ve attended.  Part of the strength of the community that forms isn’t just about writing together, but about helping one another navigate through the cancer experience.  And although I am the group “leader,” the men and women who are living with cancer are teachers to me:  on illness, approaching death, or simply, living with gratitude.

In a discussion of the use of metaphors in cancer, authors Gary Reisfield and George Wilson discuss the “journey” metaphor as one that encompasses possibility: for exploration, struggle, hope, discovery, and change… The roads may be bumpy and poorly illuminated at times, and one may encounter forks, crossroads, roadblocks, U-turns, and detours. The pace, route and destinations of the journey may change, sometimes repeatedly. …the journey… may ultimately imbue them … with a vision of a deeper meaning in life. (J. of Clinical Oncology, October, 2004)

Like anything, google “retirement” or “cancer,” and you’ll find dozens of sites with advice and tips.  All good, and yet, the amount of information can sometimes be overwhelming. Any of the sites may be helpful for the newly diagnosed, the newly retired, or the first-time you travel to a foreign country.  But we need the support—and advice—of friends and colleagues who’ve experienced these different journeys.  I have cherished the support and advice of so many friends who’ve traveled ahead of me in life.  They are invaluable resources to help us prepare and guide us through this unknown territory.

This week, extend the travel metaphor into your life.  Here are some questions to consider as you write:

• What is it like to travel along this road named “cancer”? Or elderhood?  Job loss?  Retirement?
• How do you move through the questions, confusion and potential roadblocks to the “new normal” of life and rediscover how to live fully?
• What helpful hints, experiences and impressions might you offer the inexperienced traveler?
• What is the most important piece of advice you’d give to someone who is just beginning their own journey defined by illness, loss, or new life stage?
• What has been the single most important piece of advice someone gave you? Why?

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