With every cut of the surgeon’s knife and the smell of cauterised burning flesh I’m taken deeper into the pain and grief of my mother and sisters cancers. I find the pain anchors me to them; I am part of the sisterhood of suffering, with our connected origin story. The surgeon is cutting the little mountainesque cancer cells growing on my nose, insignificant really in the world of cancers. But that’s not all that’s coming away.
At 56, I am the same age my mother was when she was diagnosed with breast cancer 18 years ago. I’m 3 years older than my sister when she died of cancer 5 years ago. Since then, cancer has defined me and my place in the world.
The mountain is turning down inside me as the “punch biopsy” reveals invasive squamous cell carcinoma. That’s an appropriate word right now, “punch.”
My response to my family’s cancer story was to raise my hand in front of my face to deny the feeling of grief, terror and helplessness rising to the surface. Ego told me I wouldn’t get cancer because of who I was, but I never dared to ask myself who am I behind that outstretched hand.
The punch has turned into a slap and as slaps go, they brutally bring you around.
I have always tried to solve health dilemmas at the level of mind: eat my way out of cancer, supplement my way out, remedy my way out. I was going mad with fear and in the process denying my natural body wisdom and intuition to find a more spacious, heartful and loving relationship with myself.
Now, squeezing the life out of my partner’s hand in humbling, sweaty surrender, I have to answer the question that hangs in the air. “Who am I if I am not defined by cancer?” I literally face my deepest fear – mattering, worthiness, a right to exist – and the mask I have worn begins to collapse..
In the beauty is the breaking. In pulling apart my old story with deep compassion I find a bigger picture. Journeying through the mountain on my nose. I breathe in suffering and pain, not just my own, but my families and others and send it down, down, down, through the centre of the mountain. I breathe out love and compassion to myself and others, in the Buddhist practice to awaken compassion called Tonglen.
Mountains have always been a metaphor of freedom, challenge and redemption for me. My father used to say “Go climb the mountains of your youth,” as an initiation into the healing wild unconscious. It never failed to transform and free me. When the unconscious comes knocking, in times like this, when I don’t know what else to do, I journey to my mountain., to be alchemised towards a place of growth and wholeness.
Will you come with me to the mountain,
where the snow gums rest,
their tired limbs draped gracefully
over the luminous landscape?
To lay down our complicated grief,
and be washed clean by the first snowmelt of spring.
Image credit: Death treading by Esther Sarah Kay
Hey Belinda, stumbled into this post as I came to your blog seeking perspective after a rough 10 days since learning that Mr ‘c’ has returned to our family, and is taking our father by the hand to some life exit close by, in just a few weeks. Needless to say your post was very apt and comforting in feeling a sense of common human experience. I get this feeling you describe of the hard but beautiful work of catching up with our evolving selves. I sometimes feel like I am on one of those long, long treadmills taking me away from a place of knowing comfort through a constantly changing landscape which can make me dizzy and sick if I don’t pay attention. I guess we have to stop from time to time and arrive at a définition of who we have become, and at the same time stay on that treadmill and accept we (and our cells) are permanently moving through life… We can tear up when on a brisk morning walk in cool weather. And we tear up when on a brisk walk through some rough territory in our lives. I am going to try and make tears a comforting companion during the journey and think of it as a hike.
Hi Elena,
I received your comment on a particularly difficult day when I felt so heartsick that I couldn’t eat or sleep and your words comforted me in return. I am so sorry to hear about your father. Yes, life is asking us to stay with the discomfort and pain, to cry in anguish that tears at our hair, our clothes, ourselves. But what helps is this….our connectedness. In these moments I am drawn to sit with my own and communal suffering and am reminded of these words of Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron.. I hope they help you too…
“It’s as if the mountain pointed to the centre of the earth instead of reaching into the sky. Instead of transcending suffering we move towards the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move into it however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes…..we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in waking from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of Bodhichitta. Right down there in the thick of things we find the love that will not die.”