When we are dying from cancer and facing the end of our life, our senses sharpen and words distill into images and metaphors of poetry.
Not all of us are poets, of course, and not all of us would take time away from living our last months to look for the words to express what we are feeling and thinking. Rather than write, we may want to complete items from our bucket list that we’ve kept putting off, or focus on sharing everything we’ve learned about life with our children. Maybe we want to stop trying to achieve goals and simply enjoy each day free of outside expectations.
Do normal days ever exist again after a doctor says you have cancer?
Two poets who did spend time finding the words came to my attention because of nonfiction writers I know who were their friends—Suzanne Roberts with the poet Ilyse Kusnetz, who wrote Angel Bones, and Wendy Fontane with the poet Julie Hungiville Lemay, who wrote The Echo of Ice Letting Go. Both are superb books.
Both poets write about their fears for the reality facing them. They speak about the unknowns, the what ifs, the maybes and perhaps, and try to make sense of them because they want to understand, and words help them do this. They explore the back rooms and dark corridors of diagnosis and treatment as they try to live each day to the fullest without thinking about how many more days they might have. Their books are honest and draw on images from nature.
Most of us go through life with the illusion of endless time. If we don’t feel like doing something today, we figure we always have tomorrow, next week, or twenty years in the future. Yet Kusnetz and Lemay were not old when they died—they were 50 and 64. One died of breast cancer and the other of ovarian cancer.
Ilyse Kusnetz believed that for grief to be more than suffering and be transformative, it needed to be shared. She says, “Poetry is the closest grief has to expression in language.”
Paraphrasing her—Even if sorrow lives like a seed inside beauty, we know it cannot last. May beauty fill the unexpected vistas of your life, and may you be opened by it to the world and to each other. (3) “The river is a green heaven, the body / a refuge, the current a blessing.” (52) And, in her parting words in the book, she wanted her family and friends to know that after she was physically gone, she would still be transmitting. (77)
Writing allowed Julie Hungiville Lemay to understand her life before diagnosis, and helped her accept her new path. She saw the truth of life with clarity, like the view of the mountain in the distance on an utterly clear day. Cancer’s removal of long-term goals helped Lemay live in this moment more attuned to the particulars around her, and spurred her to be open and honest with others. As she dealt with the reality of her approaching death, she listened to the Alaskan wilderness in her hours of solitude, saw how death was a natural part of life, and found the reassurance and solace she needed.
Many of her lines of poetry made me pause: “She wants you to know / this place of her. She holds / the dark fragrance in her bright palm, / leaves as small and infinite as stars.” (30) “In the distance, / the glacier calves / … / I listen to the sound of the water, / the echo of letting go.” (42) “There is loneliness in not knowing, in being / unable to read the secret / of open skies …” (93) “Bury me to the sky. / Let my bones be alms / for the birds.” (94)
May each of us face our own cancer honestly, with hope and with courage.
(This post first appeared on my grief blog in 2020.)
No comments:
Post a Comment