Tag: cancer

 “. . . it doesn’t come easily, nor should it.” Own Sweet Time: A Diagnosis and Notes by Caroline Clark

. . . questions I’ll never get any further with the thing that I do. Auto fiction? Essay of the self. I need to do this in fits and starts. Straight to the desk after drop-off. I used to get up in the silence of 5 a.m., write, then go back to bed.

Major life events—the loss of a spouse or parent, serious injury, significant upheaval, illness—often inspire those already inclined to seek understanding through words to want to write about what they have experienced. Cancer, with all of the unknowns and the complex treatment options that come along with it, is a diagnosis as frightening as it is overwhelming. But how to tell the story? Writer and translator Caroline Clark’s Own Sweet Time: A Diagnosis and Notes breaks from the expected breast cancer memoir to offer a very different response to the reality of facing, and living with, the news no one wants to hear.

Her inventive approach to writing about her experience is one that is less about the entire journey, although we see many unvarnished moments, than it is about placing the diagnosis and treatment plans, and the heavily weighted silence that weighs over that first critical appointment with an oncologist against all the unspoken truths of the situation. With permission, Clark and her husband recorded this initial session which is reproduced verbatim, with all the attendant “um’s” and “mm-hm’s” on the right hand page throughout this small volume. On the facing page, individual words are picked up, prompting the author to respond with childhood memories, random thoughts, parenting challenges, and emotional reactions from the past and the post-treatment present. Scattered among these passages and fragments are questions about writing itself, especially in the face of such a life altering experience.

The diagnostic discussion is dense with information, the basics—drugs, treatment schedules, surgery, possible side effects—and, the most unnerving inquiries—what to tell the children, the probability of a full cure, the risk to her daughters in the future—those unknowns that fall somewhat outside the oncologist’s script, no matter how commonly they arise. The words that Clark picks up on are indicated with a faint ° that does not interfere with the reading of the transcript. Where those words take her is occasionally directly related to the context or phrasing of the source, but for the most part her notes have a free flow. They are also deeply personal.

Her notes touch on faith, the body, therapy. Some are passing observations. But two themes seem to take up more space on those open facing pages: memories that go back to an anxious childhood leading into an ongoing struggle with hair pulling (Trichotillomania), and reflections on parenting that lay open the stressful reality of going through such a physically and emotionally demanding process as the mother of two young girls:

. . . time I thumped my fist down hard with all my strength on the duvet next to her. It wasn’t the duvet but her stomach. She was winded. I was scared. Got her out of bed into mine. She tried to tell me it was okay. It wasn’t. Something had to change. Slowly after the cancer year, I realised it wasn’t her that needed changing, it was me. I needed to change. I needed to want to be there with her. How can you make yourself want something? You can’t. Your only hope is to find inner peace.

A disarming dissonance arises in the juxtaposition of the relatively ordered and clinical nature of the appointment against the myriad of thoughts those words trigger as Clark looks back on the most demanding and difficult time she has ever endured. What an oncologist can tell you about the journey will never begin to encompass the physical and mental challenges that lie ahead. For each individual the path is unique. But how to make sense of it all? Caroline Clark’s original, honest work is beautiful, heartbreaking and important.

. . . feel. That wide new space of truth-telling. Is this what writing is? Putting down the truth?

Own Sweet Time: A Diagnosis and Notes by Caroline Clark is published by CB Editions.

To fall with grace and compassion: A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving by Katie Farris

I know people who shy away from poetry for fear that they will not know what it means, as if a prerequisite of appreciating poetry is an intimacy with style and form and an inexhaustible knowledge of that which came before lest an influence be mistaken or missed in the reading. So, here is a collection to assuage that fear, a small book that can be met by anyone. Paradoxically it is accessible precisely because it chronicles an experience, a reality, that we all fear—a diagnosis that so many of us have known, if not intimately, then in a friend or loved one.

In the miraculously titled A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, Katie Farris invites us to walk alongside her, as she ventures into hell, so that we can know, as she is determined to believe, that even in the midst of hell, there are things that are not hell. Her words, lines, poems, bruised against the flesh of living, become an offering, an answer to a terrifying uncertainty, a string of songs that speak to her journey, expose her joys, and catch her falling body in their shadows. Love poetry to a burning world.

Here’s a shot between
the eyes: Six days before
my thirty-seventh birthday,
a stranger called and said,
You have cancer. Unfortunately.
Then hung up the phone.
– from “Tell It Slant”

This slender chapbook is her response to the third stage breast cancer that is staking a claim on her body, tracing the shock of diagnosis, the invasion of surgery, the toll of treatment. Unflinching and honest, this collection of poems speaks with an awareness only illness can heighten.

For Farris the experience of cancer seems less of an inward looking process, but rather one of looking and extending outward, into the world. Which might, appear at first glance, counter-intuitive. She turns to her husband, wondering about the balance of intimacy and caregiving, if a “slow / sweet collapse into / oneness” has its limits, and yet discovering, to her surprise, that mid-chemotherapy she wants sex:

Philosexical, soft and
Gentle, a real
Straight fucking, rhymed
Or metrical—whatever
You’ve got, I’ll take it.
Just so long as we’re naked.

Poetry itself is also a comfort, a companion, as one might expect and, at this time, it is Emily Dickinson with whom she develops a special friendship, if you like. Echoes of her idiosyncratic spirit may be heard. “Emiloma: A Riddle & an Answer” playfully addresses Dickinson, alternately with questions directed to her own condition and treatment. The kind of questions that evade comforting responses:

Will you be
my death, Emily?
Today I placed
your collected poems
over my breast, my heart
knocking fast
on your front cover.

*

Will you be
my death, chemo?
The shell of my self
in the sphere of time
plucking, plucking
the wool of my hair
from its branches.

But, perhaps one of the most powerful elements in this collection, one that speaks to me in particular in relation to illness and healing, is her engagement with the natural world, with images of trees and birds. In front of the Atlanta Cancer Center she ponders whether we arose in imitation of trees, longing for roots and raising our arms like branches, while another poem contemplates the strangeness of survival, of standing “in the forest of being alive.” It is, however, in the closing poem, “What Would Root” that she finally gives herself to that forest, a reconnecting with a vivid, corporeal recognition of being one with nature—the water, the soil, the roots and branches—however tenuous or complete the journey is. In just 37 pages, this chapbook, is evidence that when the world is falling apart, writing love poetry may just be the best defense.

A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving by Katie Farris is the winner of the 2021 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize and published by Beloit Poetry Journal.