Writing through Healing, Healing through Writing
by Mary Carroll Moore, The Women's Press
– continued
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.