Dinner Table

 

Come to the dinner table where you have a place among others who have cancer or are grieving the loss of someone they love. Dine with those who are living with uncertainties and fears. They understand what you are feeling. Here you do not have to explain.

Prostate Cancer History

Helen Valier, A History of Prostate Cancer, 2016, Palgrave MacMillan.

    This is the best book I’ve found that covers the scope of prostate cancer—history, treatments, research. There are quite a few articles that deal with specific topics in a limited way, but Helen Valier has brought everything together, and her book answers most of my questions. I say most because her book came out in 2016, and medical advances have continued to occur over the last seven years. One example is the development of the PSMA-PET test that can detect trace amounts of cancer cells that traditional scans miss.

Breast Cancer

 

Anticipatory Grief

Anne Boyer’s book about surviving aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, The Undying, takes the reader inside what it feels like to endure chemotherapy without any promise of surviving. Boyer covers a wide range of topics—the physical suffering, fears about dying, figuring out how to cope with pain, research into the medical treatments, the philosophy and history of breast cancer procedures, and the social inequalities of a for-profit health care system. 

Dying, Not Dying

 Can I speak about dying if I’m not dying, or do all my thoughts stay speculative rather than grounded in reality? At least, I don’t think I’m dying, and my oncology doctor says I won’t die from prostate cancer. Yet, sometimes men do. The American Cancer Society expects that 288,300 American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2023, and 34,700 men will die.

Prostate Distillate

 

If you’re a man, you are likely to develop prostate cancer at some point. This will generally happen when you’re older/old, and in most cases, it will be so slow growing that you will die of something else before your prostate becomes a problem. That’s good news.

Poetry of Dying

Poetry and dying go together because when we’re facing the end of our life, our senses sharpen and our ocean of words distill into a surging river of images and metaphors.

 

Many of us would not want to take time away from living our last months to sit at a desk and deliberate over the right words to describe our dying. We would prefer to do some of the remaining items on our bucket list, or simply to enjoy each day free of everyone’s expectations.

 

Talking to Trees

When a friend received bad news about her cancer, I thought, “I’ll go out and talk to the trees.”

Bear with me a moment. I used to light candles, think of those who needed support, and prayed. I sometimes still do, but talking to the trees seemed to be the right thing to do here.

Cooking with Grief

Everyone once in a while, a book on dealing with a life-threatening illness catches my attention because it deals with anticipatory grief. Recently it was Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer, published this year by Milkweed Editions.

An Honest Journey Through Grief

What we want from a memoir, when matters of life and death are involved, is honesty. We don’t want sugar. Sugar doesn’t give us real hope. Sugar melts away when tears begin to fall. We want truth because we know that one day we will face what they have gone through, and we want to know how to survive. 

Elaine Mansfield’s book, Leaning Into Love, is honest about her husband’s struggles with cancer and chemotherapy, her tiredness of trying to help, and her struggle with grief and beginning a new life alone.

Dying and Grief

Book: Kate Bowler, Everything Happens For a Reason And Other Lies I’ve Loved

Most of the grief memoirs in bookstores are about dying. They’re not about grieving someone who has died. I don’t know why. Grieving goes on longer than dying, in most cases, yet both are epic journeys of fighting to survive. We gain insights and wisdom by reading both.

Death Of A Mother

Books: Meghan O’Rourke, The Long Goodbye: A Memoir; Once: Poems

            There aren’t many grief memoirs that actually describe how grief feels and how it moves. Meghan O’Rourke’s works do.

            In 2011, O’Rourke published two books about her mother’s last year of dying from cancer and Meghan’s first years of grief - The Long Goodbye: A Memoir, and Once: Poems. They are honest. They are unflinching. They blend emotions and stories of her mother with research and theories from psychology about the grieving process.

Chew the Gum

Anne Lamott tells the story of having her tonsils taken out as an adult. After two weeks, her prescription for painkillers ran out. She called the doctor’s office to get a new prescription, and the nurse said No. The nurse told her to chew gum vigorously, which is the last thing that Lamott wanted to do with a painful throat.

            The nurse explained that when we have a wound in our body, the nearby muscles cramp around it to protect it from any more damage, and that Lamott would have to use those muscles if she wanted them to relax.  

Brian Doyle

Writer. Age 60. Dead of a brain tumor discovered six months earlier.

Stark details, and too familiar. They don’t say anything about who Brian was. How he wrote in a way that made grown men drool and old women swoon clutching their rosaries. How he touched the lives of thousands of people who knew him or read his words. He was reverent and irreverent, often in the same sentence. Insightful. Optimistic. Funny. Stuffed full of heart and faith. An artist with words that stunned with their lyrical beauty.

Breast Cancer, Never Give Up

            At a benefit for breast cancer in East Peoria, world-famous Sylvia McNair sang music from Broadway and opera. Between songs she spoke of her battle with cancer and how crucial her community of close friends had been to her recovery. 




            She did not lecture about the disease, nor did she tell us how we had to fight the beast of breast cancer. She simply talked about her struggles and shared what enabled her to get through the chemotherapy, surgery, doubt, and despair. She did not hide from how hard the battle was, or how scared she had been when she thought she was going to die. 

Artifacts Left Behind

When a loved one dies, possessions are left behind and we have to decide what to keep and toss. While many possessions hold fond memories, some do not. A few hold special meaning, are symbolic of pivotal events in our life, or just hold something crucial of the other person’s spirit.

            One of Ev’s pottery bowls had me in this quandary.

Grief Before Death

Fear of the Unknown

“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”   J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

We have a great ability to predict the future. And we’re usually wrong. What we fear will happen often doesn’t, yet it holds us back from living today with gusto. We live as people dead before we actually die. Which is almost the same thing.

Picking Up the Scraps

Death leaves a scar. Once we have experienced grief, it never completely leaves. Grief sits behind us for the rest of our lives.

I realized this in the early months of my grief as I drove away from Judy’s house. She opened up a dark chapter in her past and shared her husband’s death three years before from cancer to help me. Although she was about to remarry, and was happy again, her eyes still held sadness.

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The Silence of the Body in Grief

When someone we love dies, we talk a great deal about our thoughts, emotions, and the physical impact of grief — light is too bright, we feel numb, and we can’t shake the lethargy that trails our steps like a weary dog. We do not often speak about the impact of the absence of their physical body.

I’m talking about more than missing their physical presence in the house.

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Stirring the Water: Compassion

Journal entry 23

The fifth month begins, which automatically makes it a moody time. Five months ago today Evelyn died.

I call Judy, anyway, trying to move out of my dead zone. We were in grad school together but haven’t talked for fifteen years because she doesn’t live close by and I’m not a phone person. When her husband, John, died three years ago from a brain tumor, I didn’t do anything for her because I was heartbroken and couldn’t think of anything helpful or positive to say. 

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Listening to Anger

Journal entry 13

When I’m out on errands in the morning, Marie spots me in a store. A longtime friend, Marie lost her thirty-eight-year-old husband a couple of years ago. She asks what seems to be the question of the week for everyone.

“How are you doing with your anger?”

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