Why Write About Cancer?
September 25, 2023
The Reverend Debra Jarvis interviewed me for her podcast (I’ll post another link when my episode is up). Here’s how she describes her mission:
This is the podcast where you can get comfortable talking about death and learn some things about life from people who are facing death.
Jarvis found me through this substack, where I write about life with cancer and a terminal prognosis. She asked me why I write about cancer.
I told her I was writing to understand the world cancer has thrown me into. The disease stunned me with a diagnosis, slipped a bag over my head, threw me in a car trunk, and drove me across the border between the Republic of the Healthy and the Kingdom of Cancer. Now, I must understand what is happening to me and those around me.
Reader, that’s terrible writing; you shouldn’t be impressed. Ask instead:
So. Much. Drama. But why must you understand this? Just entertain yourself. We’re happy to cut you that slack.
I tried, but cannabis and video games delivered nothing.
I am writing because I need to change.
This isn’t the first time I’ve emigrated to a new country. I must adapt to my new citizenship in the Kingdom and learn the rules and mores. Why do the medicines seem to make me sicker? I was a scientist in the Republic but can’t find work in the Kingdom. What am I now?
And how do I talk to visitors? Many friends call or visit, and they always ask, “How are you?” Among the healthy, that’s a way to clear your throat when you greet a friend. Now, it’s a profound question.
The challenge is to convey how sick I am because, to her credit, my friend needs to hear that I am recovering. However, even if I feel better today, that doesn’t mean I’ll recover.
But I must also explain why my life is going well despite the medical facts. I need to justify my claim that this is a good life. If I can’t, my friend may infer I am in denial about what’s happening. Or she’ll think I don’t trust her enough to tell the truth. I must find honest, accurate, and convincing words.
Finally, Rilke said, “You must change your life,” and this is my last chance. Yet, how can writing transform me?
This is how. To change, I need to see better. But see what better?
To see the lived world, my experience of the speck of the universe I am passing through. That world is rich, thick, complicated, and obscure. It’s elusive because the most essential things in it—the other sentient beings, like you—each have their own inner experience that I have limited access to.
Our vision extends only within a small surrounding bubble of our worlds; worse, our selfishness and self-deception occlude our sight even in that volume. We are almost blind. To transform myself into a better person, the first step is to improve my moral vision to attend to what’s there.
The lived world is where cancer happens, especially the caregiving and care-receiving. Other worlds are relevant to understanding a cancer patient’s moral life: the world of cancer therapeutics, the economics of the health care system, or the legal world defining patients’ rights. These lenses give us ways to see beyond our local consciousness bubbles. They matter.
However, a lens like economics maps our lived worlds onto a few quantifiable dimensions: costs, benefits, supply, demand, and so on. Too many think only of such worlds when we think about what matters. When we do that, we flatten the world. Economic models might help me decide how to vote, but won’t help me say goodbye to my wife. The moral life requires me to see those I encounter in their wholeness and particularity and not as abstractions.
That’s what I want to see. But will writing improve my vision?
I write 1000-1500 word memoirs, with a few photographs and images of paintings. It’s non-fiction, but creative non-fiction is an art. When you learn an art, you need to master its craft, but you also must change how you apprehend the world.
You learn music theory and finger or breath technique when studying an instrument. That’s not enough: you also need to improve your listening. You must hear how your sound differs from the correct sound your teacher just played. Cooking requires mastery of chopping, sautéing, and so on. But what’s most important is refining your taste so you can identify what each ingredient brings to a dish. I took a drawing class. My first drawings were terrible, not just because I didn’t know how to hold a pen. The teacher asked me to draw a fern in a vase. I didn’t see the delicate filaments at the end of each frond.
In writing a memoir, I struggle to record honestly what happened in my inner and outer worlds and the worlds of others bound to me. There’s lots of writing craft to master: techniques for building narratives, constructing paragraphs, and polishing sentences until your words are “clear and simple as the truth.” But to write well, I must see and listen to capture the detailed actions and emotions communicating what matters. As follows:
I got my cancer diagnosis at 3:00 AM. I was alone in an Emergency Department exam room. The attending physician entered and introduced herself. She had an impossible job. She had to give me--a complete stranger--what would be among the most important messages I would ever receive. People jammed the ED waiting room even at that hour, so she could not give me much time. The doctor did not presume to know my emotional needs. Instead, she respected the moment’s gravity and said, soft and calm, “I have serious news.” Those four words acknowledged that this conversation would break the levee on the river of my life, that what had flowed safely to the sea would now flood the village. But the news was serious because my life mattered; that recognition was what she gave me.
In writing my story, I’ll pick details highlighting moral values in the situations I am responding to. But I need clear vision and deep attention to discriminate the values implicit in the story. To that end, I will watch life in close detail to understand how my choices, thoughts, and emotions affected others and me and how they likewise affected me.
My hope for transformation is this. Learning to write will build moral vision, attention, and discrimination. I want to learn to see better because that’s how you write better. And if I can see better, that will help me act better. Or so I hope.
Many of these thoughts have been inspired by an immersion in Iris Murdoch’s (1919-1999) writing. She was a British moral philosopher and novelist.
Trained at Oxford, she taught there and developed a radical line of criticism of the philosophy of her colleagues. Her work anticipates much current work in virtue ethics and feminist philosophy. The Oxford philosophers had little sympathy for her views, and she shifted her focus to fiction.
This was not a retreat: Murdoch argued that art was a path to moral truth. She wrote 26 novels. Most of these books remain in print, and some are listed among the great novels of the 20th century. She won the Booker Prize.
Murdoch was among the first philosophers to read and appreciate the work of Simone Weil and, above all, Weil’s concept of attention. Murdoch extended Weil’s thoughts, but Murdoch’s conviction that art is a path to truth was original and developed in parallel to Weil’s views on attention.
Today, Weil is better known. She earned fame through her commitment to living by her ideals and the extraordinary force of her writing. Still, Murdoch is more precise, systematic, and coherent than Weil. Moreover, some of Weil’s later views are deranged. She was driven to self-destruction by her unshielded exposure to the trauma of the world. Murdoch was in better control of her life, if only because she stayed within an upper-middle-class academic and literary milieu. A French Jew, Weil fled from the Nazis after the fall of Paris, travelling on foot down highways threatened by Stukas. The English Channel and the Royal Air Force protected Murdoch from the Wehrmacht. I’ll have more to say about these women.
Thank you for this beautiful essay, Bill. I'm looking forward to reading your other posts too! I was not much able to write during my three separate cancers. The physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy required to navigate the Kingdom impaired many of my cognitive/creative pathways for a very long time. But I've been slowly emerging these past years...
Sometime ago I was reading one of the many wonderful books by Barry Lopez and he remarked on the importance of fully describing what you see, artfully, accurately and concisely. As I interpret his words, the better we can describe our experience, the more we will more fully live it. I picture him, patiently observing details in a scene he wishes to convey, the changing light as time passes, its effect on the shadows, the colors, the imperceptibility of tiny changes in object and subject, allowing us to know it better. So, the more fully we can live our experience, the better we can describe it and share it. Thank you so much for your courage and tenacity.