The Word Cure: Cancer, Language, Prayer | Image Journal - Issue 41(Winter 03/04)

The Word Cure: Cancer, Language, Prayer - Valerie Sayers

As I continue my journey through essays in magazines and journals, I am starting to see the patterns.  (I know, this is old hat to editors and experienced readers and writers, but I am a rookie, so bear with me.)  There is a type of essay, I'll call it "cancer narrative" in which the writer receives that life-changing phone call: "We'd like you to come in.  We found something."  Thus begins the tale of response, emotion, acceptance, attack, doubt, faith, and all the myriad things that come with such a story: family, friends, clinicians, secondhand cancer stories, new ways of seeing the world, etc.

You might think that I am being dismissive.  I am not.  Cancer narratives are very powerful, very personal.  I do not subscribe to some theory that these writers are being narcissistic by telling their affecting stories.  Well, I would be dismissive if they were all sentimental and maudlin, if they were paraded out in print simply to strike a nerve and manipulate the emotions.

In the hands of these writers however, these stories, while sharing  many key elements (whose cancer narrative could not?) are all very different.  They bring their experiences and personalities to the narrative.  No two people respond in exactly the same way to bad news.  People do not work out their emotional and psychological issues with a shared specific approach.  These writers, these cancer victims, share their stories not because they are seeking sympathy, but because they want to tell you what got them through it, even if they'll eventually succumb.  They're giving of themselves to us and we'd be wise to listen.

Valerie Sayers was diagnosed with melanoma.  She approaches this essay with plenty of humor, though not black, not cynical.  She is respectful of her illness if not always of herself.  Mrs. Sayers' turns her cancer narrative into a struggle with words and the limitations of them and her own selfness (is that a word? maybe I should say "self-awareness".  See?  I'm suffering from it, too.  Maybe that's why I keep using parentheses.)

Mrs. Sayers makes two statements that resonated with me:

1) Despair was the only unforgivable sin.  Which she said twice.  But it is despair that leads her out of her wilderness of self-awareness.  Allowing her despair to wash over her, without artificial aids to handle it, and without self-destruction led her to what she should call a "religious experience" though she does not use that term.  It's a powerful part of the essay.

2) I am on the plane of the universe that houses all the writers carrying so many bucketsful of irony and self-awareness we can hardly move forward.  That needs to be reduced and made into a t-shirt slogan.  Perhaps, if I am reading her correctly, she is complaining that the only fiction she can write is cancer related.  I read this and think, this is what holds back would be writers.  They can't drop the irony.  They can't lose themselves in their work.  They're caught up in appearances, concerned about the revelatory nature of their imaginations.

Mrs. Sayers has shared with us a universal truth.   I'll give my uncultured take on it:  Cut the self-consciousness crap and start living.


Please note that in a demonstration of irony and self-awareness I said, "I'll give my uncultured take..." and then I feel compelled to write this sentence just in case someone were to read this blog entry and point out this very irony.

I have a ways to go.  This is why I am reading and writing.