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For the Week of May 1, 2016: , The Changing Body: Grit, Grace and Grey

May 1, 2016 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

Which body part will be the next
To make you think that you’re a wreck
That you’ve gone so far over the hill
All you can do is take a pill

(From: Body Parts: A Collection of Poems about Aging, by Janet Cameron Hoult, 2010

Aging gracefully is no mean feat.  Whether the process of growing older or the bodily changes forced on us by cancer and other diseases, our relationship with our bodies, as Jane Kenyon once described, is sometimes a struggle, a “difficult friendship” (“Cages,” Otherwise, New and Selected Poems, 1996).

For the past several days, my body has been in protest.  I didn’t intend to offend it.  It was just a catch of my shoe on the front steps, an accident, and I took flight in an awkward plummet of arms and legs, landing hard on my right knee, hearing the solid “thwack” of it against the concrete before I skidded to a stop, scraping my palms on the gravel path nearby.  I re-discovered, in that moment, a full range of every swear word in my vocabulary before limping up the stairs and calling for my husband to get the ice packs from the freezer.

It might not have been so bad, but for weeks, I’ve been adjusting to the inevitability of an aging body, its stiffness in the morning, the arthritis settling into my knee from an old accident suffered while running many years ago, when I was hit by a car making a right turn and thrown on the hood.  My eyes met those of the shocked driver who quickly braked, sending me flying off and landing hard on my knee.  “You’ll have arthritis in that knee one of these days,” the emergency physician warned.  I nodded politely, but I didn’t believe him.  I was, after all, a young woman—strong, athletic, and– in my mind at least– able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.  That was many years ago.  The doctor’s words have since come back to haunt me.

As I age, arthritis is just the tip of the iceberg.  There’s the gray hair, the need for eyeglasses, the lines and occasional age spots that appear in my magnifying mirror, the defibrillator that makes a lump just below my collarbone, forcing me to discard any scoop neck tee shirts from my wardrobe…my list of complaints grows longer; my irritability increases.  The thing is, my sense of self is being challenged mightily by my bodily changes.  Some days I take it in stride.  Other days, I refuse to accept the inevitability of growing older, but my body says otherwise.

It’s part of life.  Sooner or later, our body changes, betrays or fails us.  When it does, it’s difficult to admit  we’ve taken our physical health for granted—even denied its inevitable aging.  The body, in illness or decline, is often the subject of poetry:  Jane Kenyon’s “Cages,” or  Marilyn Hacker’s, “Cancer Winter,” where  she referred to her body as “self-betraying.”  But it is May Swenson’s poem, “Question,” that lingers in my mind this morning.  Swenson addresses her body as “my horse, my hound,” the faithful one which has carried her through life, but she has realized she can no longer take it for granted:

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick…

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

(From: New & Selected Things Taking Place, 1978)

What I’m working on now is a little shift in my perception about growing older.  I’m determined to keep on, keepin’ on with as much spunk and energy as I can.  My husband patted my back this morning and remarked, “you have grit.”  He’d been listening to NPR and a discussion on “The Power and Problem of Grit.” Gritty people, according to psychologist Angela Duckworth, have hope. They’re optimistic about the future and their ability to improve and affect change.  Well, my optimism and hope vary from time to time, I’ll admit it, especially when I find myself sprawled on the concrete with a bleeding knee, or I catch a glimpse of those fine lines emerging around my eyes and lips, reflected back at me from the mirror.  All I can do is load up on the sunscreen, put on the knee brace, and take my dog out for a brisk morning walk, ignoring the discomfort in my knee.  I can’t change the fact of an arthritic knee or a heart that requires a defibrillator, but I can keep moving and find ways to laugh at myself, and embrace this aging body as best I can.  I don’t know if that qualifies as grit or even graceful aging, but it’s all I can do.

A month ago, I was leading an all-day writing workshop for the Stanford Medical School, and toward the end of the day, I turned the group’s attention to color.  They each chose a color from a pile of paint chips, then took a ten minute walk to find as many shades and images of their color as possible.  Once inside, they began with their observations on a color and wrote for twenty minutes.  All were captivating and unique, but it was the one from Sarah, a third year medical student and a gifted writer, that delighted us all.  She’d chosen grey.  Grey, the color that we older women do our best to avoid for as long as we can.  Grey, in my mind, is synonymous with aging and all the unwanted bodily changes accompanying it.  Not so for Sarah:

… Grey is the color of “yes, life has been here,”

and “don’t you know I have a story to tell?”

Grey is the color of pregnant clouds,

waiting to gift us with all they’ve held up inside…

 

Grey is the color of tree bark,

weathered into cracks, a kaleidoscope of “not white, not black,”

the many in-betweens that show how growth is random –

it’s dirty and imperfect, but up

and a bumpy canvas for green shoots,

for shocking white buds waiting to gain the wisdom of grey

 

White is before, but give me the after

Give me the ninety-year-old under her old grey comforter.

Has she lived? Well, tell me the color of her soul.

Show me the spots of grey, and tell me how you’ve lived,

the story printed dark and true in the deepest, most imperfect,

ugliest and sweetest shade.

(From “Grey,” by Sarah Schlegel, April 2, 2016)

Thank you, Sarah, for helping those of us graying with age to see ourselves and our lives in richer hues.

Writing Suggestions:

Whether you’re wrestling with bodily changes due to illness, accident or aging, write about your body.  Pay tribute or complaint.  Write about its aches or pains or how  your body has betrayed you.  Have you come to terms with a “new” normal?  Have you made peace with your altered or changing body?  How or why not?  What can make your relationship with your body a “difficult friendship?”

 

 

 

 

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, life writing, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing humor, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal | Leave a Comment »

For the Week of April 24, 2016: In the Garden: Nature’s Restorative Power

April 24, 2016 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

I like the dirt
under my fingernails,
the roughness that comes
from pulling weeds,
churning the soil for new beds.

(From:  “The Garden,” by Lee Robinson, in Hearsay, 2004)

My body is complaining this morning, the cost of an afternoon spent re-potting several plants on our deck, lugging pots, bags of soil, lifting root bound plants from their old pots to larger ones, replenishing the soil and moving them back in their respective places.  My husband helped, of course, but as he and I grow older, even the simplest tasks of gardening seem more physically demanding than they once did.  Still, there is something about being outdoors, digging in soil, tending to plants, and pulling up weeds that feeds the spirit.

I don’t possess a green thumb unlike some of my friends, or more accurately, I do not spend enough time in my garden to yield the results I would like.  Yet my garden forgives me year after year, understanding, perhaps that I need it more than it needs me.  The soil around our house tends to favor succulents and cacti, unlike the flowers blooming in the garden of my youth.  I tend to them as best I can; some survive and thrive.  Many have not.  Yet despite my haphazard efforts, sometimes I think my garden is actually tending to me.

“Even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness, like praise, from the pool of shade you have found beneath the everlasting” (Mary Oliver, from: “Just Lying on the Grass at Blackwater,” in Blue Iris, 2004).

Long before our neighborhood comes to life, I go outside to sit on the back deck in the early morning,  Our deck perches over one of San Diego’s many canyons, and the peacefulness of gazing out at the canyon, my dog curled at my feet, while serenaded with a riot of birdsong is kind of daily infusion of gratitude.  In recent weeks, the birds have become more active with the start of mating season.  The quiet is punctuated by choruses of call and response,  in particular, the who-whooing of a pair of doves, persistently calling to one another.

I noticed the same two doves began lingering on the deck railing morning after morning until one disappeared last week.  Yesterday, I unexpectedly found the missing dove, startling her as I began watering the plants on the front porch.  She, in turn, startled me as she frantically flapped her wings and flew from the  hanging planter on the far wall.  I stepped to the planter and peered in to find a nest, carefully hidden behind the succulents. Two pale eggs lay inside.  I moved back, making an immediate decision to forego the watering of those plants for as long as necessary and, as much as possible, to use the side door to the house so the mother dove is not frightened away.  I felt the same sense of awe and wonder as I did as a child.  What is it, I wondered, about these small signs of new life that ignite such reverence in us?

Yesterday afternoon, as I put away my trowel, the potting soil and broom, I was stiff and tired, but I felt a sense of lightness I hadn’t had for a while.  The garden, it seemed, had lifted my spirits.   I recalled one morning a few years ago when one of my Scripps writers arrived breathless and late to our  session, still wearing her gardening hat. She apologized for the tardiness but explained she simply had to go into her garden that morning because it helped her suspend the worry about her treatments.  I remembered another of my former cancer writers—a gifted poet—who had moved to a little cabin in the redwoods during the last years of her life.  Despite a terminal diagnosis, she lived several years longer than her physicians predicted.  She was healed, I believe, in ways only Mother Nature could provide.  All the while, her poetry deepened and flourished, and she seemed more radiant and peaceful than ever.

The simple act of reconnecting with the earth and witnessing its seasons can be healing.  Studies suggest that a walk in a garden or even seeing one from a window lowers blood pressure, reduces stress and pain. In a 2005 study, cardiac rehabilitation patients who visited gardens and worked with plants experienced an elevated mood and lower heart rate than those who attended a standard patient education class (USA Today, April 15, 2007).  Healing gardens have been developed and play a part in the care and treatment of the elderly, those with Alzheimer’s and AIDS, as well as cancer and cardiac patients.  Even in medieval Europe, healing gardens were used in hospices for the dying.  Vincent Van Gogh, writing during the period he spent in a French asylum wrote, “For one’s health it is necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.”  As recognition increased that we need more than sophisticated drugs and treatments to heal us, landscape architects gathered in 1999 to form the Therapeutic Landscapes Network, “a knowledge base and gathering space about healing gardens, restorative landscapes and other green spaces that promote health and well-being”  (www.healinglandscapes.org).

In recent years, many hospitals and cancer centers have worked to create environments to heal the body and nurture the spirit.  “Nature heals the heart and soul, and those are things the doctors can’t help.”  These are the words of San Francisco landscape architect, Topher Delaney, also a breast cancer survivor, writing for the American Cancer Society in 2002. After a mastectomy at age 39, Delaney went into menopause and lost her sense of smell.  The grim surroundings she experienced during her hospitalization inspired a change in her work.

“I had my pact with God,” she said.  “Oh, God, if I get through this, then I’ll do healing gardens. You keep me alive, I’ll keep doing gardens.”  She wanted to give other patients the kind of retreat she wished she’d had during treatment.  “That’s what this [healing] garden is all about — healing the parts of yourself that the doctors can’t.  The garden really gives hope because people see flowers bloom and others enjoying life,” she said. “It’s a garden full of change and metaphor” (“Healing Gardens Nurture the Spirit While Patients Get Treatment, American Cancer Society, July 24, 2002).  Delaney has since designed healing gardens for the Marin Cancer Center and the San Diego Children’s Hospital, among others.

Mary Oliver, whose poetry is so much inspired by the natural world, reminds us that inspiration is found in nature—and being in it opens up our hearts.

“I walked, all one spring day, upstream, sometimes in the midst of the ripples, sometimes along the shore. My company were violets, Dutchman’s breeches, spring beauties, trilliums, bloodroot, ferns rising so curled one could feel the upward push of the delicate hairs on their bodies. … The beech leaves were just slipping their copper coats. Pale green and quivering they arrived into the year. My heart opened, and opened again. The water pushed against my effort, then its glassy permission to step ahead touched my ankles” (from “Upstream,” in Blue Iris, 2004).

Writing Suggestions:

Has Nature been healing for you?  How?  Do you remember a garden that you loved from another time in your life?  What memories does it inspire?  If you have a garden, what do you love most about it?  What do you feel after you’ve allowed yourself the quiet of simply sitting in nature?  Grab your notebook and take a walk in a garden, the hills or near the ocean.  Notice what captures your attention.  Make a few notes, describing in as much detail as you can, what you see.   Use those notes to write, describing what you’ve observed and felt, and keep writing for another 20 minutes.  See where it leads you.

 

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, writing and nature, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal | 5 Comments »

For the Week of April 17, 2016: Looking for Home (again)

April 17, 2016 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

“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’ve been living in that ill-defined “neutral” zone of transition for several months now, triggered by entering the life of so-called “retirement” with my husband.  Long before his official retirement date last fall, I often talked or wrote about my lack of connection with San Diego and Southern California, the place we’ve lived for the past ten years, and my desire to return to Canada.  I admit that the politics that have dominated this country for the past several years has fueled my restlessness, not as intensely as the political upheaval of the sixties, when my first husband and I embarked on a self-imposed exile to Canada, in protest of the Vietnam war that mobilized so many in my generation.  We were young and idealistic, never imagining how our sense of home would be altered and our lives changed, but twenty-three years later I returned like a homing pigeon flying west, back to California, my birthplace and where I’d lived throughout my childhood.   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, and the very things that drew me back to this country and the West seemed elusive.  Despite living in California again for three decades, I’ve never regained that sense of belonging and place, the essence of what we call “home.”

My imagination was shaped by the exotic nature of water in a dry southern California valley; by the sound of wind in the crowns of eucalyptus trees; by the tactile sensation of sheened earth, turned in furrows by a gang plow; by banks of saffron, mahogany and scarlet cloud piled above a field of alfalfa at dusk; by encountering the musk from orange blossoms at the edge of an orchard; by the aftermath of a Pacific storm crashing a hot, flat beach…

I became intimate with the elements of that particular universe. They fashioned me. I return to them regularly in essays and stories in order to clarify or explain abstractions or to strike contrasts. I find the myriad relationships in that universe comforting. They form a “coherence” of which I once was a part.–(Barry Lopez, “A Literature of Place,” Portland Magazine, Summer 1997)

For all the years I lived in Canada, I clung tenaciously to a golden dream of California, the one harbored in my imagination; I didn’t notice how Canada had quietly wrapped itself around my heart.  The people, culture, and experiences of the twenty-three years I lived there had defined me in ways that made Canada a part of me just as California had been for the first twenty-three years of my life.  I just hadn’t realized how much until I’d left it.

As we wrestle with a new set of life decisions foisted on us by retirement, I wonder if I can find the sense of belonging and place I long to reclaim.  Thomas Wolfe’s words echo in my mind.  “You can’t go home again.”  I know too well the truth of his words, experienced in our return to California so many years ago.  Even if you’ve never left a familiar place, the events of your life sometimes make you feel as if you no longer “at home” as you once were.  Cancer can have that effect, so can job loss, divorce, the death of a loved one, or other unexpected and difficult life events.  It’s as if you cross an invisible boundary into some new territory where what you took for granted no longer exists.  Not only have you changed, but so has the place; even people you once knew and loved may have changed too. You begin the necessary work of relearning how to navigate much of what was once familiar.  Or, perhaps you, like me, cling to a dream of “home” but perhaps the dream prevents you from “being” at home the place you live.

The idea of “home,” of losing it and never finding it again, has dominated my thoughts and writing for decades.  Now I wonder if “home” is forever relegated to my memory or if I can rediscover a sense of place and belonging somewhere else.  But recently, I’ve been challenging myself with another, more sobering thought:  is home about a place or the way I interact with it?

You want to get a good look at yourself.  You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly.  The outer clothing falls from you.  You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet.  You remove your underwear.  At a loss, you examine the mirror.  There you are, you are not there.–(Mark Strand, “In the Privacy of the Home,” In: Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, 2003)

“There you are, you are not there.”  That’s how I feel sometimes.  I’m here.  I go through the motions.  Yet, I’m not here in the sense that being “at home” in a place demands.  Our questions, the pros and cons of staying here or going somewhere else,  seem to elude resolution.  Despite Rilke’s advice to the young poet, I have not yet lived my questions to discover the answers, rather, they pummel my mind daily.  Yet it has occurred to me that it’s possible that I haven’t found “home” here in Southern California because my eyes have been focused on the northern horizon since I first arrived.  I definitely have one foot here in good friends and work I love, but my other foot constantly twitches, ready to jump ship at a moment’s notice.  When my defenses are down,  I  sometimes wonder if  I might be looking for home in the wrong places.  I pause briefly from writing this post to glance again at the Lopez essay.  That’s when I read these words:

The key, I think, is to become vulnerable to a place. If you open yourself up, you can build intimacy. Out of such intimacy may come a sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe.—

Perhaps I have stumbled, quite unexpectedly, upon an answer to the question that has consumed me: “the key…is to become vulnerable to a place…”  I have more to think about.

Writing Suggestions:

Write about home:  what makes a place a home or having it or losing it.  Use Thomas Wolfe’s “You can’t go home again,” as a prompt for an essay or poem.  Think of how a place shaped you—and your imagination.  Describe it.  Or explore the idea of “home is where the heart is” and see where your thoughts take you.  Have you ever lost a home but rediscovered it somewhere else?  Write about the experience.

 

 

 

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, life writing, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal | 4 Comments »

For the Week of April 10, 2016: For the Love of a Pet

April 10, 2016 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

 

The way the dog trots out the front door

every morning

without a hat or an umbrella

without any money

or the keys to her doghouse

never fails to fill the saucer of my heart

with milky admiration…

From:  “Dharma,” by Billy Collins, in Sailing Around the Room, Random House, 2002

My mornings are incomplete without her.  Somewhere between 4:30 and 5 a.m., as I begin the slow process of waking, our ritual begins.  I hear her rise from her bed on the floor, shake herself awake, then two, perhaps three, seconds past before she springs up from the floor and onto the bed, choosing to nestle her back against mind.  As small as she is, she is like a block of cement then, a guarantee that by six a.m., my feet will touch the floor, and my morning will begin.  I’m first to rise; she prefers another ten or fifteen minutes of dozing, but as I grind the coffee beans and spoon them into the paper filter, she pads into the kitchen, stretches and patiently waits for her breakfast.  Coffee ready and kibble consumed, the two of us go down the single step into the living room, where she curls her body on the footstool next to my feet and sleeps while, for the next hour, I write.  When I shut my notebook, she jumps off the footstool, ready for her morning walk.  It’s a routine we have shared since I adopted her nearly two years ago.  She is Maggie, my faithful companion, this small dog, but perhaps she is more: comforter, guardian, playmate, nonjudgmental friend, even, perhaps, my muse.

And Perdita makes me smile every day. She runs to greet me when I come home, and she flops at my feet in the morning to be petted. She loves boxes and balled-up pages of the Nation. She is afraid of vacuum cleaners and tornado sirens. She lies on her back in squares of sunshine with her paws in the air and looks perfectly ridiculous and content. My friend Kristen tells her cat Mouse each morning that he’s her best friend, which is the sort of behavior that makes non-cat-people roll their eyes. But there’s something to it. Perdita and I don’t discuss novels or anything, but we really are friends.  (From:  “Perdita, Why Cats are Better than People” by Michael Robbins, Poetry Magazine, July 2012).  

Pets are frequently the subject of poetry and essays.  They’ve also been major characters in novels, even heroes in films.  Anthropomorphism aside, we human beings have strong emotional connections with our pets, whether canine, feline, equine or other kinds.  As companions, they are ever appreciative of our attention; they are sources of comfort when we’re feeling blue or under the weather.  They rarely pass up a chance to play and they often protect us as surely as if we are their children.  They are healers too.  Pets, as , the pioneer of modern nursing, observed over a century ago, are “excellent companion (s) for the sick…”

There are many stories of animals helping their human companions.  One marine dog’s heroism during wartime is documented in the book, Top Dog:  The Story of Marine Hero Lucca.  The German Shepard, a bomb-sniffing dog whose actions saved many lives, lost a leg in battle and was later awarded a purple heart for her bravery.  But it’s not only war-time where animals’ impact on human lives is so important.  Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT) is a widely practiced approach that is used to achieve therapeutic goals through interactions between patients and trained animals.  AAT provides comfort, assistance, and companionship for people suffering from chronic or grave illnesses, grief, depression or disability.  It’s an approach that is widely used in a variety of settings– hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, mental institutions, as well as homes. According to the American Humane Society, AAT has helped children who’ve experienced abuse or neglect, patients undergoing chemotherapy and other difficult medical treatments, and veterans and their families struggling with the effects of wartime military service.

Before Maggie came into our lives, we owned Winston, a West Highland terrier who died in 2008 at age seventeen.  Calm, steady and loyal, his temperament made him an excellent candidate for therapy dog training.  Once trained, he accompanied my husband to visit young hospital patients.  Winston was happy to lie quietly by a sick child, have his ears rubbed or back stroked, seemingly unaware to the happy smile his presence produced on a child’s face.  He was dutiful throughout.  When it was time to move to the next child, he obediently followed my husband to the patient’s bed, tail erect, and patiently repeated the process again and again.

He puts his cheek against mine

and makes small expressive sounds…

 

he turns upside-down, his four paws

in the air

and his eyes dark and fervent.

 

(From:  “Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night,” in Dog Songs, Poems by Mary Oliver,2013)

Is it any wonder we become so attached to our pets?  Or that they offer us solace and comfort in difficult times?  Or that poets and essayists alike have so frequently written about their pets with such affection?  Consider Mary Oliver’s love of her dogs:

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit…  Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world…

And we are caught by the old affinity, a joyfulness—his great and seemly pleasure in the physical world.  Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased.  it is no small gift.  …What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass?  What would this world be like without dogs?  –-(From Dog Songs: Poems, by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press, 2013).

Writing Suggestion

Although my experiences with pets has been predominately canine, I have had friends whose affection for a cat, horse or, as was the case for my daughter many years ago, a hamster named “Joe,” was as strongly felt as mine for Maggie.  Take time, this week, to remember and write about a pet, whether from your childhood or the present.  How did the animal endear itself to you?  Have there been particular times when a pet has been a source of comfort to you or to someone in your family during difficult times?  How has a pet played a healing role in your life or of someone you know?  What stories about a pet’s uniqueness come to mind?

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, life writing, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal | Leave a Comment »

For the Week of April 3, 2016: In the Moments Just Before…

April 3, 2016 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

 

He opens the door

            and walks in,

his face and white coat

stiff with starch,

 

holds my hand, and

he says,

“I’m afraid.

 

I am afraid

you have cancer…”

From: “Diagnosis,” by Majid Mohiuddin, in The Cancer Poetry Project, Vol. 1, 2001)

“Write about the moment when the doctor said, “Cancer.”  It’s usually one of the first prompts I offer in each new series of my “Writing through Cancer” workshops.  That moment of confirmation, the seconds in which a physician delivers the words that will change your life in an instant, is an experience shared by each person in the group, and, as it is described and written about, one that evokes strong emotions.

Writing that is most healing has some particular characteristics, as psychologist James Pennebaker and his colleagues have noted, among them, writing that is concrete, vivid, and gives detailed descriptions of trauma, distress and emotion.  When I ask survivors to return to that first moment they heard the word, “cancer,” no one responds in generalities.  The writing is detailed, descriptive and when shared aloud, often accompanied by tears.

While the words, “you have cancer,” may be new and terrifying to those of us who first hear them from our doctor, yet for the physicians, they are words they have had to repeat many times to many patients.  What might your doctor have felt in the moments before he or she delivered a cancer diagnosis to you?   David Huffman, MD, describes those feelings in his poem, “The Door:”

The door seems impenetrable.

Today is arduous.

I have seen patients with cancers of pancreas,

Gastric, cervix, colon—all unresectable…

Why is it so difficult to enter this room?

(In: The Cancer Poetry Project, Vol. 1, 2001)

 

This past Saturday, I spent the day leading a bi-annual creative writing workshop for faculty, alumni and students of the Stanford University Medical School, something I’ve been doing since 2005.  During the morning half, I offered an exercise that required the attendees to write about the same moment, but from two different points of view:  one, as the person delivering bad news to a patient or loved one, and two, as the person receiving the news.  I’d been inspired by a touching and eloquent essay written by Jennifer Frank, MD, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  Entitled “The Before,” Frank offers her readers a rare—and poignant–glimpse into the doctor’s mind as she prepares to call a patient to tell her she has cancer.

This is the before.  A moment suspended like a bubble floating on a warm summer breeze gently but inevitably toward the ground.  I feel the pop coming, an implosion of the very center of your life.  Anticipating what this moment would hold, I nevertheless hoped for something different.  To be able to eagerly dial your number and shout out the good news to you in a breathless rush.  “It’s not what we thought.  It’s not cancer.”

Instead I take a deep breath, pressing each number slowly, cautiously, drawing out the moment before the burst.  The burst of your plans and your dreams and your future.  I stall for time, asking if this is a good time, are you alone, do you have a pen and paper? …

I want to be straightforward but not blunt.  I want to be compassionate but remain professional.  I slow myself down, remind myself that the words I’m about to say are ones that I’ve said before, many times, but that the words I’m about to say are also ones you’ve never heard before… (In:  “A Piece of My Mind,” JAMA, March 7, 2012, v.307. no.9).

When we are the patients, the ones receiving bad news, it’s unlikely we comprehend what the person delivering the diagnosis is feeling.  We may never really know, because what’s most important is that we have a medical professional with practiced and steadfast hand who can guide us through the upheaval, help us find our way through the myriad of treatments, and inspire trust. “All I can offer is my hand,” Frank concludes, “…to hold you up, prevent you from going under until the sea calms and the path clears.”

During the workshop, I instructed the group to write about the moments before they had to give a patient or a loved one difficult news, whether a cancer diagnosis or a death.  “What did you feel?  What was going through your mind”  After twenty minutes, I asked them to write again, only this time, to put themselves in the shoes of the other—the one receiving the bad news.  When the time came to read aloud, the feelings expressed in each person’s narrative were no less powerful than those of their patients.  They expressed fear, heartache, compassion and caring, and the weight of responsibility for another’s life and well-being.  It was an honest and touching glimpse of what’s behind the mask; a reminder of what it is to be human, to care and to feel, whether patient or physician.  As Huffman expresses in “The Door,”

…I can only be forthright and compassionate.

 

Why is it so difficult to enter this room?

Maybe someday I will be in that bed.

 

I hope that if that time comes

My doctor will be as truthful and considerate.

 

But if she hesitates at the door…

I will understand.

Writing Suggestion:

Recall, if you can, the moment you heard the words, “you have cancer.”  Describe it in as much detail as you can, for example, what you were feeling, where you were sitting or standing, your doctor’s voice, eyes, or face.  Once you’ve described that moment, turn to a fresh page, and write about that moment once more, only this time, write from your doctor’s perspective.  Become the one who must deliver the news, the diagnosis, to you.  What the doctor might have seen as she or he looked at you or heard when you came to the telephone?  What might she or he have felt?  Write in as much detail as you can.  When you finish, compare both.  Did anything change in the way you think about that moment? Did you stumble upon any new insights or understanding?  What was it like to write from the doctor’s point of view?

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal | 3 Comments »

For the Week of March 27, 2016: “First, take some flour…”

March 27, 2016 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

We’re invited to an annual Easter dinner at our friends’ home later today, and I know the table will be laden with traditional Easter fare—food I’ve long since abandoned in favor of fresh vegetables, fish and occasional poultry.  And as my mother did  many years ago, I’ll be preparing an accompaniment for the meal, just she and my aunts did year after year every Easter.  Although I don’t eat ham any longer, the mere smell of it baking will trigger memories of Easter celebrations past.

The Bray family, roughly sixty aunts, uncles and cousins, celebrated Easter together every year, and always in the same way.  We met at an aunt and uncle’s house in Hornbrook, just a few miles south of the Oregon border after the church services we all attended.  As everyone arrived, the kitchen counter was soon crowded with vegetable casseroles, jellied salads, desserts, scalloped potatoes and baked hams with a pineapple and brown sugar glaze.  Easter was my father’s favorite holiday, as eagerly anticipated as Christmas because of the annual egg hunt, which followed the meal.  Each family contributed three or four dozen colored eggs to be hidden by three of the adults in the hillsides near our uncle’s ranch. They organized the hunt into an adult section and a youth section, and we excitedly combed the grasses and tree branches to find as many as we could to fill our baskets.  There were prizes of course for those with the most eggs, an assortment of solid chocolate bunnies, large for the adults and smaller for the children.  But no one went home without some chocolate and at least two or three dozen colored eggs, the only downside being  the boiled eggs that kept appearing in my lunchbox days afterward.

Easter is a quieter day for us now; the excitement belongs to the children.  We’ve chatted with our grandchildren on Skype this morning and “oooohed” and “aaaahed” over the colored eggs and chocolate bunnies they discovered in their baskets.  They will each share an Easter dinner with family or friends later in the day, and will, as I am, contribute to the festivities with a favorite dish, one possibly remembered from childhood from recipes passed from mothers to daughters’ generation after generation.

Take some flour. Oh, I don’t know,
like two-three cups, and you cut
in the butter. Now some women
they make it with shortening,
but I say butter, even though
that means you had to have fish, see?

You cut up some apples. Not those
stupid sweet ones. Apples for the cake,
they have to have some bite, you know?
A little sour in the sweet, like love.
You slice them into little moons.

(From:  “My Mother Gives Me her Recipe,” by Marge Piercy, Colors Passing Through Us, 2004).

But back to our Easter invitation for this afternoon…  I decided to make some spoon bread to contribute, a dish I used to serve with ham decades ago.  I no longer have a recipe for it and had to send an email cry for help to  my friend Sarah in hopes she had it.  Sarah and I were young mothers and pre-school teachers together in Nova Scotia many years ago.  Her Indiana heritage showed up in the delicious meals she prepared—ones that reminded me of my mother-in-law’s cooking, also an Indiana native.  Whether the spoon bread recipe  was originally Sarah’s or my mother-in-law’s, I no longer remember, but although Sarah no longer eats these calorie and carbohydrate laded dishes either, she found her recipe and emailed back to me.

The recipe hearkens back to a time of practical, easy meal preparation when main dishes were often served as casseroles.  High in fat, calories and carbohydrates, the recipes often included things like a muffin mix (like the spoon bread I’ll make today) or a can of Campbell’s mushroom soup as a common ingredient.  It’s a far cry from the kind of cooking I do now, but the old  recipes trigger a multitude of  memories of holidays past, of family and friends, of who I was then.

It’s true for all of us.  Foods lovingly prepared and served at family celebrations triggers memory; stories are rediscovered as we take that first bite of a dish we remember from our childhood or those early years of marriage, when we tried to duplicate a favorite dish from our mother’s recipes.  I still think of my grandmother Lola every time I sneak in for an oatmeal-raisin cookie from Starbucks, remembering the smell of freshly baked cookies waiting with a glass of milk in her kitchen every day after kindergarten class ended.

“Recipes can help bridge generations, reveal unexpected characteristics of a culture, or simply fill an afternoon.”  These words from the introduction to a writing prompt I saved from The Time is Now newsletter published monthly by Poets & Writers’ Magazine.  Food enlivens our senses, so it’s little wonder that a well-loved meal can stimulates so many memories.  I sometimes use recipes as writing prompts in my workshops, inviting the participants to recall one from their youth, and as they do, continue writing the stories ignited by the food remembered.

Writing Suggestion:

This week, think about food and the recipes that have been a part of your family traditions.  Or alternatively, write about the first time you tried to follow a recipe, one familiar or new to you.  Write about the memory of a meal, of life around the dinner table, of the smells and objects in a grandmother’s kitchen.    Sometimes, even food we love can become unpleasant to us later in life because of the associations we have with it.  Begin writing whatever you can remember of a recipe from an earlier time in your life.  As memories emerge, keep writing.  There may be a story or a poem waiting to be found.

In the yellow kitchen her pink hands
play with creamy dough. Squares of sun frame
things that shine; spoons, cups, hair…

She boils water, opens wine, puts vegetable in pots.
Lights click. Smells blossom.

Everything feels suddenly invited.

(From “Pasta,” by Kate Scott, Stitches, 2003)

As for me, I’m heading to the kitchen right now to don my apron and hope that the spoon bread I remembered will be the spoon bread I take to our friends’ holiday dinner!

Posted in expressive writing, life writing, writing humor, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal | 4 Comments »

For the Week of March 20, 2016: It’s Spring, Sweet Spring

March 20, 2016 by Sharon A. Bray, EdD

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(e.e. cummings, “i thank You God for this most amazing,”100 Selected Poems, 1994)

“It’s the first day of spring,” my granddaughter announced in an early morning telephone call. I smiled at the excitement in her voice, remembering my childhood excitement when springtime appeared in Northern California.  Unlike the Southern California home I now inhabit, the seasons, much like those in my granddaughter’s Canadian home, were more distinct, calendar dates celebrated with art activities and science discussions in school classes,  trees, barren during the winter months, beginning to bud.  Crocuses poked their heads through the soil, promising the advent of tulips and daffodils in the following weeks.  The air was crisp and fresh; We took our afterschool play outdoors, tromping through muddy fields and hillsides, jumping rope and drawing hopscotch squares on sidewalks for play.   The air was alive with promise and new beginnings.  We were possessed with a sense of newness, of life beginning, the excitement so wonderfully described in e.e. cumming’s “Chansons Innocentes I”:

in Just-

spring       when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles       far       and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

… bettyandisbel come dancing

 from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring…

(From:  [in-Just], Complete Poems, 1904-1962)

I was cheered by my chat with my second granddaughter.  Her mother and I have been worried about her aunt, my younger daughter and her family, returning to Florida, where her husband is stationed, after five years living in Okinawa. It has been an emotional leave-taking for them.  They loved the island, the culture, and made many friends among the Okinawans.  Her sister and I have felt Claire’s sorrow, and my heart aches for them, knowing too well the pain of leaving a place one loves deeply.  Yet I felt hope this morning as I remembered it is the first day of spring, a time of new beginnings.  Perhaps it can be a metaphor for their transition and return to Florida, however sad the mandated return feels right now.  Springtime is also a season of hope.

Seasons provide apt metaphors for our life journeys.  The similarities of human development to the seasons of nature are powerful attractions for our imaginations.  Throughout human history, our ancestors have celebrated the seasons and used them to define life’s stages: childhood was spring; youth became summer; autumn described adulthood, and winter was synonymous for old age.

Nature’s four seasons have provided description and metaphors, in medical literature and poetry, for the cancer experience.  Writing in a 2009 article in Cure Today, Kenneth Miller, MD outlined four distinct “seasons” of survivorship:

  1. Acute survivorship: a person is diagnosed and treated.
  2. Transitional survivorship: celebration is blended with worry and loss as a patient pulls away from the treatment team.
  3. Extended survivorship: includes those who are living with cancer as a chronic disease and individuals in remission and ongoing treatment.
  4. Permanent survivorship: people who are in remission and asymptomatic, or, cancer-free but not free of cancer because of chronic late and long-term health or psychosocial problems. Secondary cancers related to treatment or those not related to the first cancer or treatment may also develop.

His observations were informed by his patients’ experiences and of his wife’s, treated for acute leukemia and later, breast cancer.  As Miller reflected on the experience, he compared her stages of cancer and recovery to seasons in nature:

I have learned just as much about cancer and the seasons of survivorship in my work as a medical oncologist as I have alongside my wife, Joan, he wrote, who was treated 10 years ago for acute leukemia and more recently for breast cancer. Her diagnosis was certainly like the cold, bleak winter, and transition like the rebirth of spring. And while each season was different than the others, each was beautiful in its own way.

Whether the life cycle or of illness, the four seasons are powerful metaphors for what we experience.   For example, Marilyn Hacker’s 1994 collection of poetry, Winter Numbers, invokes the darkness and cold of winter as she details the loss of many of her friends to AIDS or cancer and explores her struggle with breast cancer.  Dan Matthews chronicled the journey of his wife’s terminal breast cancer in a poetry collection, Rain, Heavy at Times: Life in the Cancer Months (2007).  John Sokol’s cancer experience is described in his poetry collection, In the Summer of Cancer (2003).  But it’s spring, sweet spring, this 20th day of March, and I turn to Barbara Crooker’s poem,  “For a Friend Lying in Intensive Care Waiting For Her White Blood Cells to Rejuvenate After a Bone Marrow Transplant,” a poem of hope that uses springtime, the season of renewal and rejuvenation as its metaphor:

The jonquils. They come back. They split the earth with

their green swords, bearing cups of light. ‘

The forsythia comes back, spraying its thin whips with

blossom, one loud yellow shout.

The robins. They come back. They pull the sun on the

silver thread of their song.

The iris come back. They dance in the soft air in silken

gowns of midnight blue.

The lilacs come back. They trail their perfume like a scarf

of violet chiffon.

And the leaves come back, on every tree and bush, millions

and millions of small green hands applauding your return.

(in:  Selected Poems, 2015)

 

As I write, I think again of the excitement in my granddaughter’s voice.  “It’s the first day of Spring today!”  My thoughts turn to a children’s book, pages dog-eared, and the cover faded, that sits on my bookshelves.  I’ve read it aloud to my daughters as children, to preschoolers and to adults in my writing classes.  Frederick, by Leo Lionni, is the story of a family of field mice, preparing for winter.  They’re busy storing nuts and straw in their burrow, preparing for the cold and dark of the winter months.  That is, everyone but Frederick, who seems to doze throughout the preparations.  They chide him, but he responds that he is collecting sun rays and colors—his contributions to the winter supplies, for the winter months are cold and dark.  They laugh at him until, when supplies are low and no one is feeling very happy, they ask, “What about your supplies, Frederick?”  He surprises them with a poem about the four seasons, then asks,

Aren’t we lucky the seasons are four?

Think of a year with one less…or one more!

(From: Frederick, by Leo Lionni, 1967)

Writing Suggestion:

This week, consider the season.  Go outdoors or look out your window.  What are the signs of spring you see?  Can you find a metaphor lurking in this new season or any of the other three that describe some experience in your life?  Do you have a favorite season?  Which one?  Let Mother Nature be your inspiration this week.  Pay attention, notice, go outside.  You might even find a poem waiting for you to find it.

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, life writing, writing and nature, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal | Leave a Comment »

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