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Archive for the ‘cancer’ Category

Surviving Depression: Wisdom From Gabrielle Roth and My Mother

Posted in cancer, creativity, crisis, grief, resiliance, Uncategorized, wisdom, tagged , , , , , , on January 6, 2013| 5 Comments »

As a therapist who walks beside others who struggle with depression, and as a woman who has endured its devastating blows myself,  I’m all too aware of what overcoming it demands of us.  We are required to hold on even as our grasp weakens,  overwhelmed by dread and hopelessness.  The pull of life  insists that we get up and face the day when all we really want to do is cover up our heads and refuse to come out.  And we are called during our long dark nights to recognize that those voices (all too often the loudest and the most convincing) that repeatedly remind us of all the ways that we have been wounded and taunts us with our failures, disappointments, and of the vast array of dangers that surround us, can not and  must  not be trusted.  And when almost every fiber of our being seems to be shutting down, we are challenged to acknowledge that the gaping wound inside of us is also an opening – one that is capable of ushering in as much possibility as it does pain.

Dancer and wisdom keeper, Gabrielle Roth,  who died from lung cancer this past October, just one month before my mother lost her own battle with lung cancer, wrote that in many shamanic cultures when someone sought a medicine person because he or she was disheartened or depressed, it was common for the sufferer  to be asked one of the following four questions:

“When did you stop dancing?

When did you stop singing?

When did you stop being enchanted by stories?

When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?”

As I sat yesterday in the gloaming, mellowed by the sweet territory of silence, I asked myself those questions.  And as I waited for answers, memories of my mother floated in and out of my consciousness.   As a child she  created entire universes within the magic and mystery of her own imagination, enchanted her husband as a young woman by belting out country songs about cheating hearts and lovin eyes, and captivated her eldest daughter with tales of  an abused and abandoned little girl and her faithful dog, buddy.   My mother taught me so much with her stories, and it was both the bitter and the sweet of her own life that offered up multiple lessons regarding how to live, what’s important, what needs to be let go of,  and what’s essential to remember.

And at this moment I am remembering one of my favorite stories of my mother as a child.  She was five years old and it was her first  day of kindergarten.  My grandmother was helping her get ready for school and she was both excited and terribly anxious.  As her mother combed her fine brown hair, she peppered her with the following questions.

“Can I come home if I miss you too much?” she asked.

“No.  You need to stay until the school day is over,” her mom replied.

“Can you come and visit me?” she bargained.

“No.  School is for children, not for mothers,” answered her mother.

“Can I sing in school?” my 5 year old mother asked hopefully.

“No Brenda.  You have to be quiet and listen to your teacher.”

“Can I play?”  she asked tremulously.

“Only at recess.  You go to school to learn,” my grandmother explained.

“Well, can I dance?”

“No Brenda.  You have to sit in your seat,”  her mother responded firmly.

“Well,” the tiny child sighed,  holding her skinny little arms over her head as she started to twirl round and around, “then, I’d better dance now.”

And I see her in my minds eye still, almost fifty years from the time that  I first heard this story, and feel my soul reaching out to the child that I came to cherish almost as dearly as I loved the mother that she would grow up to be,  and I am smiling and I am weeping now as I imagine her yet again, swirling around the kitchen, pig tails flying, dancing.

Both Gabrielle Roth and Brenda Byram are with us no longer but their legacy lives on – dance.  Dance even as your heart breaks, dance even as your body bends from the terrible gravity of grief, dance even though your stomach aches and your heart trembles.  Dance.  Dance while you can….

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Losing My Mother

Posted in cancer, grief, tagged , , , , on December 7, 2012| 5 Comments »

My mother and I two weeks before she died

 

“ One of my experiences in those first weeks – and I kept experiencing it to a diminishing degree through the ensuing months – was a feeling of being a smaller, lesser, more inconsequential person than I had been when she was alive.  Her loss made me feel less substantial, or more naked.  I had never recognized until then how she had amplified me, reflected me back and made me more believable to myself.  That had developed so gradually through our years together  that I had never noticed it, but when she was no longer there I suddenly felt – it’s hard to put into words – flimsy.”  William Bridges, The Way of Transition”  (Bridges is writing about the death of his wife, Mondi.)

 

My mother died at 4:20 on a Sunday morning in November.   I was stroking her face and singing her a love song when she gently slipped away.   It was as though I had sung her to sleep, and for that comfort, I will be eternally grateful.

My heart is too full of grief and love and regret and gratitude to make room for my brain to fully process this experience yet or to find the words to share with you what is running through my mind and body right now.   What strikes me the most today is that while I have experienced the heavy-heartedness of loss and grief before, never has my heart been this heavy, so leaden that I am absolutely exhausted carrying it around.

In Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, James Hollis observes, “The word ‘grief’ derives from the Latin gravis, ‘to bear,’ and from which we get our word ‘gravity.’  To experience grief is not only to bear the heaviness of the condition but, again, to testify to depth as well.”  The gravity of my grief leads me down into the depths of both my longing and my love.  One moment I am strong;  I am the comforter; the matriarch, and the next, I am weeping without warning — a motherless child, a woman underwater struggling for air.

Hollis also wrote, “When we lose a loved one, we need to grieve that loss and yet consciously value what we have internalized from that person.  The parent who suffers the empty nest syndrome, for example, suffers less the loss of the child than the implicit identity which went with being that child’s parent.  The energy invested in that role is now available for a different direction.  So, we honor best those we have lost by making their contribution to our lives conscious, living with that value deliberately, and incorporating that value in the ongoing life enterprise.  This is the proper conversion of inescapable loss into this evanescent life.  Such conversion is not denial but transformation.  Nothing which is internalized is ever lost.  Even in loss, then, something soulful remains.”

I am Brenda Byram’s daughter and it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps part of the heaviness I am experiencing now is the weight of my inheritance, the riches that I carry forward in this life.   My mother taught me so much about what it is to love, about how to listen deeply, to be generous, to recognize the beauty that exists within friends and strangers alike, to hear what was left unspoken, and how to make of myself a safe harbor that gently welcomes and provides shelter and sustenance.

While her childhood had been painful enough to break both of our hearts, and the canvas of her life contained a mad mix of both light and darkness, it was art at its finest – complex, authentic and beautiful.   And I am still working through the vast array of lessons contained within the multitude of stories that made up my mother’s life and death.

Following her mother’s death Deborah Sumner wrote, “My fear is that I lost more than my mom; I lost an ally, a protector, a counselor, and a confidante. Even though she’s not physically here, she’s still a huge part of who I am. I have all her years of wisdom and advice to look back on and tap into when I need it, and that gives me strength to face my fear.”

Once I was asked to answer quickly and without thinking what I was good at, and I was startled by the immediacy and intensity of my response.  I answered, “I am good at love.”  It’s what my mother taught me how to do best – how to love.  Thank you, Mom.   I love you now and always….

 

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Autumn and My Mother’s Cancer

Posted in awe and wonder, cancer, crisis, good life, healing, nature, tagged , , , , , , on October 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Today was a perfect autumn day, the kind that calls me out of my head and into my senses. The kind that finds me with my car windows rolled down and the music loud. The kind that makes me feel giddy and free. The kind that’s drenched in vibrant color and sunshine during the day, and graced with the scent of baking apples and cinnamon at dinner time. The kind that says to me, “hey, just maybe you can spend each and every day living in ‘radical amazement’ – each and every day – even the hard ones.”

There’s such sweet celebration and melancholy in autumn – temperatures drifting down, mists rising, the ancient choreography of birds embarking on their long migration, the harvest moon – an enchanting paradise so soon to be lost as nature once again begins her inevitable journey into the frigid arms of winter.

While the autumn advances and the leaves deepen and dazzle before relinquishing their hold on the bodies that have sustained them, my mother’s own grasp weakens as her cancer progresses and her spirit quickens. My love of nature has never been more acute than in autumn and I have never loved my mother more fiercely than right now.

I walk along the shore of Wolfe’s Neck woods, hear crows cawing in the distance, tilt my face up towards a gentler sun that caresses now instead of scorches. I’m both awed and saddened at the same time. I wonder how much of life is at its most beautiful just before dying. Is this the truest bitter gift of death, that life becomes oh so much sweeter?

Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

Ammidst the loss, the longing, the life, and the love, I am amazed……

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