Hi everyone,
I started “A cancer Story” in my head well before Sally passed. It’s how my mind works. I see stories in everything, everywhere, all the time. I started writing on January 1, 2023, not knowing that in 15 days she would be gone. It was almost like I had to write, I needed an outlet, I needed a way to process what was happening, writing has always been that for me and for whatever reason, Jan 1, I started.
Sally was a writer too, I thought she was a beautiful writer. She expressed clearly in a way that often defied her emotional expression in speech and action. Thinking back on it now, that’s why it struck me, her writing, because it was so balanced and communicated deep care through a mature clarity when she was at her best.
We talked and planned for years to write together and apart, to express the stories of our life, our struggles, our triumphs. We dabbled together but really never came to do it in a way that we always dreamed. She always wanted to “tell her story” and she tried and she definitely has a story. Again, thinking back on it, hers was almost like it wasn’t meant to be in the way she thought about it. I’ve never thought about it like this before, but maybe her story wasn’t meant to be written by her. Maybe hers was about living her life and being with people. Maybe that’s how her story was meant to be written, though her touch with people. She had an impact on everyone she met and as she grew older and became a mother, her strength in communication through acceptance grew.
She would always start a writing project, lay it out, then fail to follow up. It was a regular pattern with her. She’d feel it, vision it, structure it but as soon as she began to put it down on paper or pixel she doomed herself to stop. I think maybe Sal, maybe, it was because she wasn’t meant to reflect in that way, she was meant to live, she was meant to live with people and love people and spread her message and her love through touch and time together.
I don’t know but the reason I write is to process. I write to share. I write to connect and I write because if I didn’t I might go crazy.
But the problem in writing is, it’s like a picture, it’s a narrow view, constrained by words and logic and meaning. Even in the writer, it’s only expressive of one thought at a time and only the best writers can tie those thoughts together to form a feel or a narrative…but still, only a picture, a moving picture at best.
So when I receive comments or feedback, it’s both meaningful and shocking to the system. It’s meaningful because ultimately that’s what I want by writing, to discover meaning, it’s shocking because often times a comment can take you out of the narrative, out of the moving picture and into a different picture. For a person like me, there are a million pictures, each with a narrative and a million more pictures shooting off from those narratives. I can become lost and overwhelmed by the sheer volume and the impossibility of expressing in words what is in my mind and heart. That is why a poetic partners can be helpful and it’s what “What Do You Mean, Never” is to “A cancer Story”.
The question, “Would you have made different choices, knowing what you know now” is maybe the biggest question in the world and also a question that has been on my mind and in my heart from the beginning, not just with Sally but with life. In general I don’t find much use or desire to answer it. I’ve accepted that life cannot be undone and so time spent on that type of contemplation can be a distraction of disasterous proportions.
I do not think there are appropriate answers to this question. I think the best that we can do is ask more questions to try to get down, closer, to some “truth”, maybe something closer to a universal truth if there is such a thing.
Questions like,
“Are you afraid to die”
”What are you so afraid of in death”
”Do you understand the nature of this thing we call cancer”
”What is your understanding”
”Do you understand the nature of the people who are treating you”
”What do you understand about their nature”
”Do you understand the nature of the system which has created the people who are treating you”
”What do you understand about that system”
”Are you ready to die”
”What if you do not have a choice”
”Can you beat life”
”Can you beat death”
”Where are the survivors”
”What can the survivors tell you”
”Are you willing to lose your mind to live”
”Is there anything you won’t do to live”
I’m sorry. This is what I think about when I think about the “choices” question. My impression is that most of us don’t examine life, we don’t examine the dark corners of our hearts, we don’t know what’s there. How is it possible to say you regret your choices when you may not have examined them. And really, who examines them? My take on this is no different than my take on life and society in general. Look around. Who’s living an examined life? Who’s bringing a flame to their darkest corners? Who has the courage to accept the horrors of their own mind?
What would you do?
I do not mean to be abrupt or to communicate coarsely or without care. I hope you do not take it that way. I am exploring now, flame in hand, peering around, realizing the cave is deeper than I thought.
Perhaps the only way I’ve been able to make any sense of this is to accept the certainty of death. Sally and I talked about this often and to me it seemed as if she thought that she could not die, ever. If she were to “beat” the cancer, could she beat life? There seemed to be a disconnect to me about the the ultimate reality, we will all die. When I think of this, I do not get discouraged or fearful, actually it’s the opposite. I feel comfort and desire to live. I feel the image of my life zooming in to the present moment and a responsibilty that nurtures me to kiss my son, to breath and to be beauty. I am not ready to die and I do not want to die but I do think there are things I would not do in order to stay alive.
There were things Sally did not want to do. I’ve written about them in coming articles. She did not want to go to the ICU at the end and much more. She did plenty of things she didn’t want to do during her story, she handled many of these things heroically. I know she believed in the power of the human body and spirit. I know it was a trauma for her to opt into some of the treatments she opted into. I know she overcame some of that trauma.
And so, I apologize again, because this is as far as I can go right now with this. The question is one of the best questions because it gives you the opportunity to enter infinity and infinity is life and life is infinity and so somehow we’ve come around to peace and perhaps to presence and if Sally is anywhere she knows you love her and she loves you too.
I do not think she did not know.
With love for you, Sal.