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Essays |
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Writing through Healing,
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Writing creates
a healing pathway through times of change. Here's how writing helped me
when I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
In a brilliant essay, "Sustained by Fiction While Facing Life's Facts," published in the August 14, 2000, New York Times, novelist Alice Hoffman writes about her recent bout with cancer and how--along with doctors and treatments--fiction saved her life. Receiving radiation or a bone scan, Hoffman would immerse herself in her characters' lives, "walking through snowstorms, moonlight, fields of roses." Writers write in order to make sense of their worlds. During the upheaval of hers, Hoffman turned to the thing she had always found most healing. Paradoxically, writing brings you closer, more face-to-face with illness. But there's a theory that I've experimented with in a writing class I teach to cancer survivors and others who have gone through a serious illness. I learned it in my own breast cancer experience: Writing is the means by which we heal. Most people, hearing a cancer diagnosis, run as fast as they can, faster than they've ever run. If we run fast enough, the wind's noise rushing past our ears will mask everything, especially thought. Because with a life-threatening disease, the mind is suddenly the worst enemy. It wakes you up when everyone else is sleeping, and it's running too. Platters of thoughts in its hands, it runs ahead of you and throws them in your way. Mine went like this:
Doctors tell you how to survive. Eat right, think right, visualize your cancer cells being attacked by Pac-Man cells. Run fast enough, you will win the race. You may never be cured, but you'll get to live. It was during my second month of chemotherapy that I read this: healing is not about what we're running from but what we're running toward. Like Hoffman, I decided to go back to the thing that had always healed me. Writing. It slowed my footsteps to a fast walk, then coaxed me to stand still long enough to breathe deeply. In the stillness I caught the first full lung-expanding breath since the cancer treatments began. I began to look around at the trees, the sunshine, the light on the surface of a Minnesota lake at dusk. Things I never fully saw, appeared breathtakingly new, beautiful like pearls. Where have I been? I wondered. As I began to reach toward all that is life-giving in my days, all that embraced me with hope, as I began to write, the healing started. For twenty-five years I had been a journalist and editor, writing a weekly syndicated newspaper column, ten books, hundreds of magazine articles. I knew about writing, I knew about meeting deadlines. My writing had become a job, rather than a joy. What I secretly longed to do was make the leap from my 800-word weekly output into the world of fiction: particularly short stories. I had studied fiction for years, attended classes and workshops, poured over MFA catalogs. As the cancer journey progressed, I faced this secret longing and decided to do something about it. Hoffman writes in her essay, "In my experience, ill people become more themselves, as if once the excess was stripped away only the truest core of themselves remained." Fiction would give me the means to explore death and the deepest fears of living at the edge of life--things I was dancing with every day. I began writing a short story about Melvin, a man whose wife is dying from breast cancer recurrence. Melvin and Kate take a last vacation; they go to a Caribbean resort. There Melvin falls in love with another woman, a healthy woman, a woman with two breasts and no disease. Writing this story took me to the edge of my own fears--what if my husband left me, what if I died from complications, what if? Nineteen drafts and rewrites later, I submitted the story to a national fiction contest. It won fourth place. Encouraged, I began to write more. My writing journal became my fantasy island where I explored topics I couldn't talk about. During a trip to France the summer before I was diagnosed, I'd bought a stack of bound student notebooks, with pale blue crosshatched pages. These notebooks became my way to make the journey visible to myself. I took notes like a reporter: pages each day describing the cancer patient's worries and fears, the exhaustion of round after round of doctors appointments and tests, the weighty decisions that would affect the rest of the person's life--my life. I studied exercises other cancer patients use for healing: "Each day write three things you are grateful for." I tried this one wintry afternoon when Adriamycin, a chemotherapy drug, left me too weak to get out of bed. Very small things began the list: my dog's sweet breath, a bouquet of snapdragons from friends in Virginia that caught the pale afternoon light, the smell of my husband's morning coffee. A surgeon I had found after much searching. How much I liked her, her quirky black glasses that reminded me of a favorite writing teacher. Sleeping through the night. As I got braver, I began using writing to listen to my body. I'd ask it questions: How do I heal from the latest treatment, how do I eat today, how do I say good-bye to my dying cells? I let it answer in dialogue, surprising myself with the communication that grew as I listened better and better. Writing became not only a means to explore my stories, but also a kind of applied kinesiology, of muscle testing my inner self, and how often it was accurate astonished me. Finally, I began holding conversations with death. The fear of dying hovers over cancer like a cloud the size of Lake Superior. As I wrote, death began to talk to me. It began to tell me why it was here, what had happened to bring it so strongly into my every moment, what it could teach me. Writing became a potent antidote for fear. Passages appeared in my fiction. Sentences I wrote dispelled the terror, moved me closer to stillness, to the present moment. All you can count on, said death, is this moment, this breath, this ray of sunshine. I began to know that was true. As my stories allowed me to express my fear of dying, slowly my fear of living began to recede. Writing every day, living with characters who acted out my worst nightmares, kept those nightmares at bay. The writing focused me on the thing most directly in front of me, on the light on a lake's surface. I trusted the opposite shore was there, but I no longer needed to see it to keep on living. Nine months of treatment passed. I finished my first writing journal and began my second. A year passed. My eyebrows grew back. Ten short stories. I sent them out to more contests. Two more won prizes. My hair was beginning to grow back when one night I had a dream that showed me how firmly my writing had held my hand during the journey I was just beginning. In the dream, someone stole my new car. Overnight the vandals changed the car's color, rearranged the car's interior, and took away the bells and whistles. Before I woke, the thieves put my "new" car back in its parking spot. As I wrote the dream in my journal the next morning, I realized the car is a metaphor for my changed life since cancer. It's simpler. The interior is not what I had in mind when I signed up. But it is still my life. Writing has helped me reclaim that life. I am no longer running through it. I stop alot, I watch. You have to do that to write good fiction, but you also have to do that to live. Writing has been the hand that led me through the experience. In the process, parts of me evaporated like steam from a soup kettle. But I like the richness that is left. 
© Mary Carroll Moore. All rights reserved. |