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.”

I’ve done everything wrong today.

“Sing in the morning?” Hardly. It’s not even noon yet, and I’ve already yelled, screamed, hissed, snapped, and said things like, “Can’t you please just do ONE THING I ask you to do?” and “Get out of my way!”

My only excuse is that the Little Girl woke up in misery. The minute I picked her up, she started to make the universal sign for “ear infection”—pathetically batting the air next to her head, trying to wave away the pain.

Listening to your own baby crying in pain is agonizing. This is obviously advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint, but my nerves were shot after the first few minutes.

I had an hour and a half of singing, rocking, and walking around the house before the doctor’s office opened at 8:30. Mercifully, the doctor was willing to squeeze us in right away. As predicted, the Little Girl has a double ear infection—poor thing, she’s never had one before.

I couldn’t have handled the situation with less serenity or good manners. I was reasonably polite in the doctor’s office, but I snapped at the pharmacist, at the taxi driver, and at the poor sweet Big Girl who was trying hard to be helpful.

I think my work on the Happiness Project actually made me behave worse. In the past, I wouldn’t have been so conscious of how atrociously I was behaving. Realizing what a bad job I was doing made me feel guilty and inadequate—which in turn made me act even crabbier.

But now the Little Girl is asleep, having had her Tylenol (she threw up the first batch), her prescription is waiting in the fridge, the Big Girl is visiting her grandmother, and I’m promising myself to do better later.
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This month, I’ve been reading of lots of memoirs by people dealing with catastrophe–most often, illness. On the Internet, I stumbled across no more mashed potatoes, a blog by a woman who is dealing with chronic illness, in her case from TMJ disorder. A lot of very helpful material there.

“I should like to like Schumann’s music better than I do; I dare say I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all.” –Samuel Butler
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I think of this comment by Samuel Butler whenever I’m breaking my commandment to “Be Gretchen” and trying to make myself like things like fly-fishing, foie gras, or the novels of Philip Roth.

Last night, I had to remind myself to follow my Twelve Commandments and to “spend out”—that is, to stop senseless hoarding, to be willing to use things up, to trust to abundance.

We were packing to go away for a few days to a house we rent in the Catskills.

As I was gathering things for the Little Girl, I caught sight of an unopened package of “Sassy Diaper Sacks” in her drawer. These are small, scented diaper disposal bags, the right size to tie up one dirty diaper.

Just before the Little Girl was born, we made a trip to a gigantic baby supply store. As second-time parents, we managed to steer clear of most of the useless gadgetry that first-time parents can’t resist. But these little sacks caught my eye.

“They’d be so handy when we’re at someone else’s house,” I said to the Big Man. “I never know what to do with dirty diapers if we’re visiting people who don’t have a baby themselves.”

“Sure,” he shrugged. He just wanted to get out of there. Super-stores depress him.

So we bought the diaper sacks—a package of 50. And now the Little Girl is eighteen months old, and I’ve never opened the package.

Have we visited people who don’t have a diaper-disposal system in place? Of course. And why hadn’t I used the diaper sacks? I asked myself. Well, I had to admit, I was saving them. But why? For what?

This is the foolishness of not spending out. I act as though a more deserving time will come in the future—a time more deserving than the last eighteen months have been. I can easily imagine the Little Girl outgrowing diapers before I decide that the time had come to break out the diaper sacks.

It was very foolish to buy those diaper sacks. They’re the kind of unnecessary product that just puts more plastic in landfills. But having bought them, it’s silly to “save” them. Not using them is just as wasteful as throwing them away unused.

So I packed the sacks to take on our trip. And in the rental house, instead of using the clear, plastic, grocery-store produce bags to tie up the diapers before putting them in the trash, I use these specialty bags. They’re very nice, very convenient—just as convenient as the produce bags.

But I’m glad that I’m putting them to their proper use, instead of hoarding them to no purpose.
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I’ve been diving into the treasure trove of information at management expert Bob Sutton’s Work Matters blog. It’s about management, but really it’s about dealing with other people, and the suggestions are so smart, and the writing is so funny, that I enjoy reading even the parts that don’t apply to me.

I decided to take a little break from reading catastrophe memoirs, and I picked up The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.

Benjamin Zander, a conductor, explains a technique—“giving an A”— he used in his class on the Art of Musical Performance. From experience, he knew his students would be so anxious about their grades that they wouldn’t take risks—yet taking risks was essential to their mastery.

So he announced that each student would get an A for the course.

“However,” he told them, “there is one requirement that you must fulfill to earn this grade…you must write me a letter dated next May…‘Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because…,’ and in this letter you are to tell, in as much detail as you can, the story of what will have happened to you by next May that is in line with this extraordinary grade.”

He includes some excerpts from students’ letters, and they’re astonishing to read. Putting themselves in the future, the students wrote letters that described with extraordinary excitement and relief the goals they’d attained and the fears they’d surmounted. It was surprisingly moving.

It struck me that the Happiness Project is a bit like the “giving an A” approach. Although I frame the process differently, I imagine very clearly how I want my life to have changed, for the better, by the end of this year.

Eliminating grades might seem like a utopian strategy that wouldn’t work in any other context, but my law school used a lesser version. At Yale (at least when I was there), for that first terrifying semester, all first-year students got a “Pass” for their classes, unless they did something extreme—like refuse to take the exams. And for all three years, Yale Law School only awarded grades of “High Pass,” “Pass,” “Low Pass,” and “Fail.” Low Passes were quite rare; I’ve never heard of a Fail.

The funny thing is, most of the students—even the first-years—studied just as hard. But this system took the edge off considerably, and it allowed people to take much greater risks in what they chose to do. I wrote a paper about dread!

In our last year of law school, a friend had a funny experience at a job interview.

“What’s your class rank?” asked the interviewer.

“We don’t really get grades,” my friend said, and he explained the Yale system. “So we aren’t ranked.”

“But surely you must have some idea of your rank in the class. Approximately where do you stand?”

“I really don’t have any way to know, because I don’t know what other people get.”

“But you must have some idea,” the interviewer insisted. “Take a guess.”

“Well,” my friend said, “I’d guess I’m first in my class.”

So try this: imagine that it’s December 2006, and you’re very pleased with the “A” you received in recognition of all that you accomplished this semester. What will you have done to deserve that “A”?