It's time to stop reading memoirs by people fighting cancer.

It’s just about time to stop reading cancer memoirs. They’re haunting, fascinating, and I keep adding more books to my pile—but I’m going to make myself quit when August is over.

Reading so many, I see poignant connections among them.

In his 1979 memoir of prostate cancer, A Private Battle, Cornelius Ryan mentions visiting his publisher Michael Korda to tell him about the cancer; I’ve read Korda’s Man to Man, so I know Korda will have his own fight with prostate cancer, twenty years later.

In her 1989 breast-cancer memoir, It's Always Something, Gilda Radner talks about how important The Wellness Community became to her; in Stan Mack’s 2004 memoir of Janet Bode’s breast cancer, Janet and Me, Mack talks about going to a support group at Gilda’s Club—an organization started by Radner’s husband, Gene Wilder, after Radner died in 1989.

Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness is an account of his prostate cancer. The book includes Broyard’s short story, “What the Cystoscope Said,” inspired by his reaction to his own father’s experience with cancer. Cancer killed both of them, the son forty-one years after the father.

But as compelling as these memoirs are, I think I need to stop reading them. Pain, hospitals, fear, affliction, humiliation, and dread have become too vivid in my mind.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s account of the first year after her husband’s death, she tells the story of John’s first heart attack.

I lent my copy of the book, so I can’t check the exact words, but I remember reading that John told Joan something like, “Now I know how I’m going to die,” after his heart attack. She scoffed at this; he could be hit by a car. But, in fact, at that point he did know how he was going to die.

That phrase has lingered in my mind. “Now I know how I’m going to die.” It gives me a sense of panic that I didn’t feel before, when I hear words like cancer, chemotherapy, exploratory surgery, and all the rest.

In many ways, reading these illness memoirs has made me better able to think about bad things that might happen in the future. But I think it’s time to stop reading them now. Time to take that familiar advice: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Comments

[Murphy]

As a member of a family that has dealt with many mortal blows, I recommend W.S. Merwin's poem "For the Anniversary of My Death." http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171868

The poem is one that I have often thought of, and its tone is perfect for the kind of contemplation you've been doing. It also offers a way out of thoughts of death and back into the world.

k

[Jude]

My dad had leukemia, the chronic kind, which meant he lived for 16 years. At one point, 4 years before he died, he had an attack of leukemic meningitis that almost killed him. I was away at college when I got the news, and even though we'd all lived with what he jokingly called his "fatal disease" since I was 10, suddenly this seemed like the end. I went to the college library and checked out every book I could find about death. The most useful tip I found in all those books was that each time we say goodbye to someone, we should act as though it's the last time we'll see them. They told the story of a woman who was fighting with her husband, so she didn't kiss him or say goodbye that morning when he went to work, and he died in a car crash. I've tried to live my life that way--treating my loved ones as though it's the last time I'll ever see them, and although it sounds maudlin, it's actually a positive way to live one's life. If I make an effort to always be kind (with the usual human shortcomings induced by stress)--at least by the time they walk out the door--then neither of us is left with guilt.

[Abe Burnett]

I don't know where I've heard this, or if you've heard it before; if we spend our lives worried over all the details, desperately striving to capture every last moment, day, week, month or year--always facing down the specter of impending death, we'll eventually die without having ever lived. Life isn't about how we die, but about how we live. Thus, life is about surprise, complexity, fear, hope, love, hate, etc. etc. etc.

The guiding principle I aspire to live by is to welcome enthusiastically every surprise in my life--the painful, challenging, easy, and joyous. Whenever, however they arrive in my life, I hope to one day embrace them, and appreciate them for making my life interesting, varied, and full. When we look at difficulties in such a light they become our friends, rather than our enemies.

Just my two cents. Besides, I have yet to experience anything truly horrid in my life, so perhaps I'll fold under pressure and end up completely abandoning the above stance.

[Jim Batterson]

Just a little factual note. Gilda Radner had, and died of, ovarian cancer, not breast cancer. I discovered you blog recently and have been reading end-to-end. Thanks for writing.