When History Is Personal by Mimi Schwartz

Author:Mimi Schwartz [Schwartz, Mimi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0729-6
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2018-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

Part 3

Storyscapes

Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know more.

—Confucius

Story on a Winter Beach

Spirit is the art of making what’s blocked start moving again.

—Rumi, a thirteenth-century Persian poet

When I was forty-seven and diagnosed with breast cancer, I gathered every good-luck story I could: about my college roommate’s mother who had breast cancer thirty-five years before; about my colleague who called to say she’d had a double mastectomy twelve years earlier; about my good friend Sue who had had three cancerous lymph nodes and ten months of chemotherapy and looked terrific three years later, better than before.

These stories helped me get on with my life as mother, wife, teacher, writer, daughter, and friend. The darker stories of those having problems, of those who didn’t make it, felt dangerous, like a jinx. So I stayed away from the breast cancer support groups and avoided articles with titles like “The Anguish of Breast Cancer” and “Victims of Mastectomy.” I wanted no anguish, no victimhood—only lucky stories that encouraged me, six weeks after my mastectomy, to say “I had breast cancer.”

Years later, I still say “had.” But the further I got from my mastectomy, the more I realized that my old definition of “good” story, i.e., cancer free, was too limited. It allowed luck to override the power of spirit; and stories of spirit, unconcerned with luck, are the really good stories.

I first realized that on the beach of Cape May, walking in mid-January with poet Judy Rowe Michaels. It was maybe two years after my mastectomy, and we were both teaching in the Cape May Writers’ Getaway, held every year over the Martin Luther King weekend to lift the winter spirits. The crisp air and frozen sand let us move at a good clip, and I marveled at her energy after a second round of chemotherapy. Yes, it made her sick for a day or two, yes, she had lost her hair, “but I’m fine!” she said and started telling me about the house she’d just bought, her first. It sat on a ridge of New Jersey’s Sourland Mountains northwest of me: a renovated hunting cabin with big windows, a wood-burning stove, and—best yet—a hot tub in a garden off the back porch. So much better, she said, than the cramped second floor she and her husband had rented in nearby Hopewell for years: “A health-giving space, something we always wanted, but never got around to buying until now.”

Maybe she’d live in it a year, maybe twenty years, maybe a few months. It didn’t seem to matter, which is what I loved. She never mentioned luck. She had made her own by buying a mountain house and going daily into its “big bedroom/study with its big view.” And all the anger and fear we feel when we might die went into new poems like “No Guarantees,” which moved beyond those dark feelings into a life she savored—whatever lay ahead:

I drink fresh coffee my husband brings in

from the café where I

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.