Anne SG and the Big C

I am here in the car, Jay driving, on our way back to the Mayo Clinic for a meeting with the oncologist and an MRI to take a final pre-surgical look at what’s going on with me. I’m reading Chapter 8 of Care of The Soul, photocopied and given to me by a colleague who is also a 17-year breast cancer survivor. In one section, the author writes: “If my colon is in pain because of anxiety, then the organ is not just a piece of biologically functioning flesh. It has some link with consciousness and a particular mode of expression” (163). After reading this I felt I had to sit down and write. I have written before about this mind-body connection. I do believe that I must learn to listen to my body, soul, and mind in order to create a positive, present-living existence that actually works for me. Though I have rigorously followed the tradition of those whom I idealized–other academics, superwomen, great thinkers. But, my life simply has not been working. Those rules just don’t work for me, though I have never questioned their legitimacy. I’ve just always tried to make my life work by those rules.

People often say to me, “I don’t know how you do it” referring to my so-far successful career, my almost full-time parenting duties, my sole management of our household, and my very happy marriage. What I usually say is, “I do none of it well.” They perhaps think I am joking, for on the outside I appear to be pretty successful at juggling. But my health has been fading and my heart has slowly been abandoning a career I once loved. The fact is, I cannot do it all. Maybe some can, but I cannot.

I do believe that sickness arises often in part to life’s imbalance. Of course, there are germs and genes to consider, but I think that’s an oversimplification, too easy an answer. Just recently I watched a stomach virus run through my family–it hit Elise immediately but for no more than 24 hours, but then she threw up again 4 days later. Jay it took almost a week to hit, but he was over it in a day. I never got it. My mother in law and father in law caught it after a couple of days, but when it did it felled them so completely I thought for sure they’d be hospitalized. Perhaps my body, feeling pretty satisfied with its recent onslaughts with me, protected me. Why is this? I simply don’t believe that there are any one-size-fits-all answers any more, which is why I don’t believe in Dr. Phil, the South Beach Diet, Parenting Manuals, or How-to-Make-a-Million dollars books. I never believed that there was one right way to teach writing, so why would I believe there was one answer to illness, or to how to live? It’s just too easy.

My father commented on one of my posts here that I should not blame myself for my cancer, that he is sure it is just a broken gene that has been passed along. This is surely true—I can hardly see how it can be mere coincidence that so many in my family could have been stricken with breast cancer at my age. But there’s a larger question here—how did the gene get “broken?” Why do we keep passing it on? What mind-body-soul connection could be made here? Could it really be as simple as a mutated gene?

There’s certainly no dearth of sadness, of mind-body separation, in my bloodline. Running alongside the premature gray gene are tendencies toward addiction, toward mental illness, toward destructive perfectionism. Could the gene be a broken attempt to evolve with the people it inhabited? What would “fix” the gene that science cannot address?
Maybe I wonder about this because I want to imagine that I can work on changing, or un-mutating those genes, through my actions. I mentioned before how I feared that I had handed my daughters a deadly cancer gene. But more importantly, really, is what I hand them every day. I am teaching them that what it means to be a woman is to be overextended, overcommitted, and still undervalued in many of the arenas in which she lives. It means finding what might be someone else’s way to a fulfilling life, rather than one’s own. I haven’t been creative in trying to solve the issues that face me. I have not only ignored my body, I’ve ignored my spirit.

Another reading from my colleague spoke of cancer as a gift. Also, a comment here by Trudi Buscemi spoke of my cancer as an opportunity, and a gift that would change my life. I find myself agreeing. This is better than a midlife crisis (I never wanted a red sportscar anyway). It has been an opportunity to see the beauty of the human spirit in others; to reevaluate how I can live my life in the right now (instead of in the constant forward-looking fashion that academia dictates); and how I can live a life that will feed my soul and bring something forth that will positively affect the world. And though it’s a time of destruction of part of my body, I think it’s also an opportunity to recreate the rules I choose to live by.

Next time: Whose dream is it, anyway?