When we get cancer, we think we have to act like the cancer patients in the movies. People who have no experience with cancer also expect us to act like these stereotyped, sanitized, devoid-of-personality presentations. Don’t act when you have cancer. Let yourself experience what you are feeling and thinking.
When the radio said that Susan Sontag died on this day in 2004, I wrote her death date on my calendar so that every year I could remember her, as I do with other dead people who’ve influenced my life. Her birth date was also given, but I didn’t write that down. This struck me as curious. Would I rather grieve her loss or celebrate her birth and coming alive in her writings? One date affirms the beginnings of her creativity; the other boards her in with nails of sorrow.
Suzanne Strempek Shea, breast cancer
It’s in the quiet places that you can hear yourself breathe, places without time or expectations that hold you, where you feel the terror of cancer and find the resolve to live.
When Anne Pinkerton suggested I read Suzanne Shea’s book, Songs from a Lead-Lined Room, I thought it would be a short read because nothing much happened when I spent five weeks in the radiation chamber. You come in, lie down, try not to think about how much radiation is being beamed into your body, get radiated, and go home. Come back the next day, and do it again. Diagnosed at age 41 with breast cancer, Suzanne had surgery and radiation. I finally found a companion to my experience.
I’ve called my experiences with cancer by a number of names, and different ones for each step from diagnosis through two kinds of radiation and a year of anti-hormone therapy as I encountered fear, trauma, and loneliness, to where I am now, in surveillance, with post-treatment uncertainty as to whether the cancer is gone. I continue to deal with a number of side-effects that stubbornly don’t want to fade away, and I’ve had to make adjustments in my life to accommodate them. In the coming weeks, I will see a urologist and a cancer dietician looking for solutions.
I’d love to hear how you describe your experiences with cancer, and I’ll post what I hear back.
Tony Hoagland died of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer on October 23, 2018. He knew he had the cancer for only two years because this kind is hard to diagnose before it becomes terminal. Pancreatic cancer is potentially curable if the cancer is caught early, is on the head of the pancreas, and it hasn’t spread, then it can be surgically removed, followed by a course of chemotherapy.
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.
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.
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.
