Music, Cancer, and Creativity

 

Franz Liszt and grief

As we get older, more of our friends and family pass away. And while we expect this, it’s still a shock. Some die from cancer, some from old age or accidents. Too many die young, we think, before their time. Yet a life of attention and service to others is not diminished by the shortness of time, nor does the length of a life bestow any particular honor.

Not realizing how fragile life is, and how quickly death can come, we can be so unnerved by an unexpected death that we wake up every morning fearing that someone else we love has died. And every strange ache, every cough and tick of our body, can make us fear that something is seriously wrong with us and we’re next to go. 

Continuing To Live While Dying

 In her book, The Bright Hour, Nina Riggs talks to us as a friend, keeping us up to date with what’s going on in her life and with her triple negative breast cancer. We don’t have to the building tension of wondering if she is going to survive or not because she lets us know in the prologue that she has eighteen to thirty-six months to live. This allows us to relax and be with her in her day-to-day life. She shares how she continues to live her life in between cancer treatments as she raises two young boys with her husband John. The writing is presented in snapshot moments. 

After Writing About Cancer, Then What?

 

Cancer books and their authors.

If you know of other books written by people with cancer that you think are great, please drop me a note. I’ve noted below when I wrote about the following authors and the kind of cancer they had.

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What do cancer patients who have written about their experiences write about after their cancer is gone? Many write one book on cancer and they’re done. 

Not the End

 

This is not the end. Or even the beginning of the end. This is just the end of the beginning. - Paul Kalanithi

I have two cancer books next to each other on my reading stack — by Paul Kalanithi and Nina Riggs. More on this later.

Paul Kalanithi died in 2015 at age 37. He was diagnosed twenty-two months earlier with EGFR lung cancer. First line chemo worked for a time and he went into remission, resumed his work as a skilled brain surgeon, until the cancer began growing again and no treatment existed a decade ago that could stop it. There are options today because of ongoing cancer research.

Broken Like Pottery

 When we have cancer, we want to return to something resembling a normal life. This desire motivates us to keep working on getting better. The treatments put stress on our bodies and minds. And after treatments are done, we may not be able to return to work right away because recovery takes time, especially from surgery, and health insurance doesn’t cover this. This creates additional financial stress, especially if we are at risk of losing our jobs or our homes. Health care should not bankrupt us.

Never Give Up

 Sylvia McNair, breast cancer

At a benefit for breast cancer in East Peoria, world-famous Sylvia McNair sang music from Broadway and opera. Between songs she spoke of being diagnosed with aggressive Stage 3 breast cancer in 2006 and how crucial her community of close friends had been to her recovery. Her diagnosis came out of the blue because she had no family history of the disease, ate a healthy diet, was active, and her mammogram was clear six months before the diagnosis.

The Woods at Dusk

 

It’s dusk in late December and the woods are quiet. I stand on my backyard deck lost in the mystery of nature. Two squirrels chase each other through the snow and deepening shadows. I listen to the stiff maple trees creak in the breeze, and hear the soft click, click, click of empty sunflower shells landing on each other, dropped by wrens and finches at the feeder. The magenta of the sunset flows across the sky, then shifts to violet. 

Do As Well As You Can

 

Barry Lopez died of prostate cancer on December 25, 2020. He didn’t share many details about it. I think he regarded his cancer as a private matter and felt there were more important topics to write about. His impact on environmental writing and awareness of nature is enormous.

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. 

Feeling Joy When Feeling Blue

The Worth of Mirth

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.

The First Day

 

In 2010, at the age of 22, Suleika Jaouad was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. The five-year survival rate for adults with this cancer was 33%.

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.