This post isn’t about the dizzying momentum I’m experiencing in the months before a book launch. It is about one of the book’s themes that’s been highlighted in interviews and pitches. A recurring question interviewers and readers have is how much of a book is based on a writer’s life.
I should have seen it coming.
One element I’ve been addressing is my protagonist’s belief that she deserves the cancer with which she’s diagnosed.
A pervasive notion is that illness points to some character flaw or underlying evil; either God’s punishment or some form of Karma.
At eighteen I was diagnosed with a rare blood disease. The first word of its name was idiopathic, which means its cause was unknown. At that time, I wanted to investigate the deeper origins but had no means to do so. I sensed an emotional or psychological emptiness might be the reason since the closeness I’d shared with my mother had devolved into hostility and hysteria. That was as far as I got.
Twenty years later, diagnosed with cancer, I was deeply involved in multi-dimensional healing practices. I had the means and methods to plumb the depths, turn over rocks, and identify the source, and thereby free myself. I would find out what was missing in me, where I’d gone wrong, and atone. Or at least smarten up.
In some literature, I read that loss or grief could disrupt cells. I thought about heartbreak—both the one I’d caused and the one I suffered.
One pamphlet suggested that early sexual relations could disrupt cell development and start that ball rolling. Also having multiple sexual partners could do it. I thought about those things, too. Maybe the vagina gets so mixed up, I thought, that it runs amok.
I flew to India to immerse myself in the ashram’s many healing modalities. Only to discover that so much more than the above-mentioned was wrong with me.
One of the ashram’s schools involved reading of the eye to identify past trauma and shocks, but also one’s proclivities and personality traits. I was sick, apparently, because I wasn’t receptive, needed to constantly prove myself, imagined that I was better than everyone, and knew better than them as well. The proof was in the irises. So I endeavoured to listen better, be humble, receive whatever was offered, and not express my opinion.
If you look at around 8 o’clock on this picture of my eye, you will see a dark oval shape with an orange spot on the edge. According to my teacher, this combination indicates the presence of cancer as well as all the attendant pyschological tendencies.
Even there in the ashram where the focus was on elevating consciousness, the weight of blame came down hard. I wanted to live and was willing to do anything to clean out my basement. I wasn’t out for a quick fix. If that had been my objective I would have obeyed the doctor and had my bits removed: Bingo bango, all better.
The memory of succumbing to doctor’s orders to have my spleen removed when I was eighteen haunted me. The word holistic had not yet entered my vocabulary, but surgery felt like a cheat, a shortcut. Here now, was my chance to find out what was really going on with me.
Between the medical perspective and the alternative holistic one, I was kinda fucked. No wonder I was sick.
Little did I suspect how I’d be shredded, dissembled, and hung out to dry.
What I truly wanted, I thought, was to be alive, fully, truly alive. My teacher had other ideas, letting me know that my allowing cancer to manifest meant that my sunny disposition concealed the truth: I wanted to die. He was a wild man with wise words. We all tipped closer to listen to his exploits and triumphs, how he’d lived on the border between living and dying and had revelled in that space—a bottle of bourbon in one hand as he flew down the freeway on his Harley. In the end, he chose, he told us. Life. All by himself, with no help from doctors to mend his bones or staunch his wounds, he emerged whole. He had first-hand knowledge that cancer was the disease of self-importance.
I had to get rid of that double-quick, so I got humble. If the culprit was my thinking I was anything special, well then I would be as ordinary as MacNCheese. With shopping bags full of supplements and tinctures alongside hypnosis sessions, acupuncture, coffee enemas, teas that tasted of dirt, energy healing, and various suppositories, I lay down like a rug.
But wait. Wasn’t I there to prove I could heal myself? That I was superior to the medical establishment whose solution to my ills was to cut out the offending bits? I was a healer, surrounded by healers—I didn’t need those draconian measures.
Realization fell like a ton of proverbial bricks.
At my teacher’s feet, I dropped to the hard, hot ground. He leaned back against the wall on that white plastic chair, the two front legs hovering. The noon sun bright on his closed eyes, he listened to me wail. “If I’m sick because I need to prove myself,” I said between gulps. “And now I’m here trying to prove I can heal myself, then I’m trapped. I’m in a box with no door.”
He hummed. A contented smile crept onto his face. A golden drop of ghee glistened on his chin. “You’ve got it,” he said.
“So what do I do?” The sun was brutal, but to me it was raining.
“I can’t answer that for you,” he said, his eyes the colour of tarnished silver slowly opening. “This is your path.”
I hated him then, of course, but didn’t say so, because I was humble now; not important enough to press him.
He was right. I was in my own personal hell trying to bang, slide, and not be wrong my way out of that box. The point was that cancer was my fault—whether on account of selfishness, arrogance, or whatever else—and it was up to me to fix my essentially flawed being. You could say that in the service of healing, I was stripped down to the bones.
Back home in Canada my closest friend suggested that I had begun to benefit from the cancer; that it had become prestigious or a sort of currency. This brought me up hard to face that devil of self-importance. So I shut up about it and got on with saunas, supplements, Iscador injections, 714-X injections, depletion packs, and so on, including a rigid diet of raw foods, until at last, I arrived at a reflecting pool that was simpler and kinder…
I saw my face; my thirty-nine-year-old face that knew it was going to be all right. Not because I wouldn’t die. The tests showed that the cancer had shrunk a little, but that wasn’t it either. I’d stopped my frantic rush to try to save my life. I recognized the futility of such a goal. Dying or not dying wasn’t up to me. In the meantime, before that inevitable day, I would continue to care for myself. I would be kind. I was flawed, but my life was worth living.
I turned myself over to an oncologist who aimed to remove the uterus and radiate the ovaries. I said, no. I told him to take the bad bits and leave the rest.
I’m so grateful I had enough self-importance left to insist on that. The shining sidebar isn’t just that thirty-three years later I’m still here, but that I share this marvellous wondrous world with my twenty-seven-year-old son.
Such extreme and unusual courses of action in response to disease may be unique to me but the belief that illness has deep roots of blame is not mine alone. It could be God’s punishment or the wheel of justice or your own damn fault for being who you are. It’s a pervasive belief and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it’s all that helpful.
All of those observations about how my proclivities made me sick may have made me a little quieter, but looking back, my belief that I got sick due to my arrogance doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If it did, I can think of a few public figures who should be rolling on the floor frothing at the mouth.
Just saying…
So do the best you can with what you’ve got. Be kind. Forgive yourself for being a loudmouth, indiscrete, smoking cigarettes, or eating pork.
If you fall ill it’s because you fell ill. Period.
Take your medicine. Make some adjustments. Rest. Ask for help.
It’s not your fault.
I’m telling you it’s a game of fortune And circumstance. Death is not an option, so live fully, completely, delightedly, and wholly, while you persist.
Wow. I bow down.
Nice insights
You look, write and act much younger than the arithmetic indicates.