I’ve read a couple of interviews that Barry gave after his diagnosis where he talked briefly about cancer, but the only writing I’ve found is three pages in his “Deterioration” essay that was published after his death in Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World.
It can be really hard to feel joy during the winter holidays when you have cancer or any serious medical problem. If we try, we can hold our fears back enough to feel smatterings of happiness and moments of mirth. The uncertainty about what the coming year will bring can make it feel like a blue Christmas, a blue Hannukah. We are so not bubbling over with festive joy.
The holidays are traditionally a time when we renew our faith in people and in matters unseen, and we try to pile up enough hope to get us through the coming year.
She realized there was a problem when that the itching on her legs wouldn’t go away. This got worse, then she was exhausted all day. It took a year of going to different doctors before she found a doctor who knew what was going on.
In her book, Between Two Kingdoms, Suleika describes how draining it was to deal with cancer and fear of dying every day for four years as she went through multiple rounds of chemo, radiation therapy, and a bone marrow transplant before she was declared to be cancer-free. Feeling good enough to travel, she went on a three-month road trip to meet some of the people who wrote to her with support or asked questions from their own situations of grief or confinement.
The language we use to describe cancer matters because it speaks of how we are choosing to deal with our cancer.
Some people describe their experiences with cancer as a journey. It’s definitely not a sprint because it goes on for far longer than we expected. Some describe it as a wilderness trek, like hiking the Appalachian Trail, because so much is unknown about what we will encounter along the way. There will be times when we’re exhausted and can’t take another step. There will be storms that batter us around, trails that end and force us to backtrack and find a new route, and large wild and hairy animals show up — a lot of metaphorical, Joseph Campbell stuff.
Today I want to talk about Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer. Babine’s mother was diagnosed with a rare and deadly form of soft tissue cancer (embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma), and Babine copes with her anxiety by cooking. The book is accessible to everyone who is caring for a loved one who has cancer because we still have to eat to keep us healthy enough to care for them.
A friend was recently diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I wanted to tell her that everything would be okay, but I didn’t know this. No one did. I wanted to say something that would help, but from my time with people dealing with grief, I knew that my friend didn’t need platitudes. Words are no help right after someone receives the news that they have cancer. What she needed was someone to sit beside her for a time as the cold shadows of her fears drew near.
Mark Shanahan interviewed Fry for his video series for The Boston Globe that first aired in 2020 and was updated in 2025. It’s a six-part series that is informative, hugely funny, and quite personal. The interviews with leading cancer doctors, including Dr. Drew Pinsky, are filled with details about how treatments have greatly improved since the 1980s.
Hope definitely doesn’t have FEATHERS, all fluttery and light, although it might if a circus clown like Emmett Kelly is trying to sweep up a spotlight with a feather, making us feel sad at his seemingly impossible task. I want something solid.
Hope is a great stone mountain that doesn’t move. It’s the bright North Star in the night sky that I know will always be there, even if I can’t see it because of the clouds.
Reading the poetry of Andrea Gibson is like coming out of a thick, brambled forest and seeing the beauty of the mountains rising all around you.
Andrea Gibson (they/them) died in July 2025 at age 49 after four years of dealing with ovarian cancer, but cancer will never be Andrea’s story. Before this, Andrea struggled with the serious side effects of Lyme disease and this ushered in a deeper understanding of the suffering that others go through because of chronic illnesses and disabilities.
