The Word Cure: Cancer, Language, Prayer

Valerie Sayers

The Diagnosis

I’M AFRAID I have some bad news for you,” the nurse said, over the phone.
“We just got the biopsy results and it turns out you, um, have malignant melanoma after all.” Melanoma: the most lethal form of skin cancer. Your mole turned some psychedelic color and they gave you three months to live. But my mole was a plain old pink and for God’s sake, they weren’t supposed to give you news like that at work, over the phone. Not one but two doctors had told me that it wasn’t melanoma. I’ve never seen anything like this, but whatever it is, at least it’s not melanoma, the dermatologist said. No wonder she had her nurse call.

My hand held the phone but my body flummered around the office, my brain and my tongue and my hyperventilating lungs in different corners of the office. The cancer was on my upper left arm: I am a left-handed writer. “We need to get you in here as soon as possible,” the nurse said.

Evasion

After you hear the word cancer you are only capable of hearing every fifth word the doctor tells you. I heard amelanotic—it didn’t look like melanoma, it looked like a puffy pink pimple, which was why for all these years doctors had given it a pass—and I heard University of Michigan, where the dermatologist said they could pinpoint which lymph nodes might be affected. Lymph nodes! As I feared: the death sentence. I looked at my husband Chris and my younger son, Raúl, both straining to catch the doctor’s words which were tumbling out as if we had any idea what a lesion measuring 1.72 millimeters signified, or why the slides with their exotic amelanotic cells had been sent for a second opinion to a U.S. Army lab, as if we had any idea whatsoever what she was talking about. My sons were fifteen and twenty: too young to lose your mother.

“Are you saying this thing may be treatable?”

She laughed. Laughed! “Oh, melanoma is highly treatable,” she said. “A ninety-two percent cure rate.”
Cure. What a beautiful, clear word. No one had mentioned amputation, either, though I spaced out somewhere around lymph nodes and might have missed that part altogether. The nurse couldn’t have mentioned a ninety-two percent cure rate on the phone? We weren’t talking dying in three months, we were talking having the tissue surrounding my mole removed and perhaps a select few lymph nodes delicately plucked. The doctor suggested a plastic surgeon for the scar, as if a scar could give me a moment’s pause. I got to keep the arm? I would flaunt a scar, surround it with henna tattoos, design my wardrobe around it. I caught Raúl’s eye. He’s usually a droll jokester, but when he saw my puffy pimple bleeding after a shower he became stern and stood over me while I called for an appointment. Now he raised an eyebrow and managed to get a whole sentence onto a fleeting smile: Whew, they sure know how to scare you to death before they tell you you’re not going to die.

The Lecture

That night I attended, as planned, a lecture by Kathleen Norris, the poet who has written of her residencies in a Benedictine monastery. After my afternoon of malignant cell talk, I craved a good dose of spirit talk—rule and ritual—but as it happened, Kathleen Norris was speaking about a rebellious time in her youth, an affair with a married man.... In the crowded auditorium, I replayed the conversation with the doctor, the ninety-two percent cure rate. Ninety-two: another lovely word, a hopeful word. Ninety-two in the shade. I grew up in coastal South Carolina, where summer days often hit ninety-two, where my Irish skin, so white it was blue in a certain light, provided insufficient shade for my body. Can’t you get a tan? my teenage friends used to needle, as if I could will myself darker. So I willed myself out to the beach in the shimmering midday heat and turned my poor defenseless skin a pinker shade of blue. It wasn’t exactly regret I felt now for all those years in the sun, no more regret than Kathleen Norris was expressing from the lectern about her affair, more a rueful wonder that anyone had ever been that young, that silly.

I saw some friends but I didn’t mention the melanoma: with a ninety-two percent cure rate, it hardly seemed worth mentioning. Still, a phrase floated in front of me, a string of words I couldn’t catch hold of, something the doctor said about the measurement. If it was just your average little melanoma, why’d she want me to go all the way to Michigan? Dark circles appeared in the center of my night vision: the doctor had mentioned, helpfully, that some people get melanoma in their eyeballs.

Words

My relationship to words has always been physical. When I was nursing my babies, certain words triggered my milk’s letdown: shake, toast, dud. It was a mystery why a word like dud made my milk flow, till one day I heard the compounds: Milk Duds, milkshake, milquetoast. My younger self dreamed poetry in elaborate forms, fifteen-line neo-sonnets in iambic tetrameter with x-rhymes and a closing triplet, but when I woke I was usually left holding only a single word in my mouth, my pulse speeding as I raced after the rest of the poem.

Now I chased after words again, the doctor’s floating string of words just ahead, almost in reach. When I walked along the sidewalks of Notre Dame, where I was teaching, I saw scars in the concrete, lesions where the words were hiding. The day after my visit to the doctor I mentioned the melanoma to a friend and saw her jerk her head back. I knew her sister-in-law had died a too-young, too-painful death and had left children, but I hadn’t known, or hadn’t registered, that it was melanoma. Another friend’s father had his eye removed: that too, I realized now, was my disease. Two other close friends, I would learn in the next few days, had lost their fathers to melanoma. The whole world had it.

I worked late at the office, or tried to work, and after everyone else went home I pulled out the pathology report. My eye went to 1.72 millimeters. I had to read the surrounding sentences again and again, the way I read my fiction sometimes after I’ve worked it over too much. Nothing made sense. No idea followed another. I, who made my living with language, had been stricken with aphasia on top of the melanoma. Finally I was able to focus on the word measurement: “Accurate measurement of tumor thickness is not possible because the malignant melanoma cells extend to the deep surgical margin.” I read it again, or rather I passed my eyes over the words. Once more. I put the paper down, folded it, unfolded it, coaxed myself through till I thought I could make the words mean something. They meant the doctor wanted me to go to Michigan because they really didn’t know how big the cancer was, or what they would find. I flummered again, brought myself down to earth, breathed in, breathed out. I had no language for this experience, only physical sensation, sensation I had no experience of, no language for. Even the sentence I form now, nearly four years later, is circular, panicked.

Uh-oh

My internist hadn’t received the pathology report yet, so I read it to him over the phone. “Hmm,” he said. “Hmm.”

“I’m worried about that deep surgical margin stuff,” I said.
He asked if I could fax the report over and when I said, “I guess maybe a ninety-two percent cure rate is a little optimistic,” I heard my voice take a hopeful pleading turn.
“Is that what she told you? What’s the measurement again?”
“1.72.”

“Uh-oh. That’s a little deeper than we like to see.” I know I’m making this dialogue neat and tidy, but honest, I distinctly remember his saying uh-oh. “It’s a second-stage tumor—did she tell you there are four stages?—but it’s still a good prognosis. Eighty percent, maybe eighty-five, might be more like it.” I’ve always liked my doctor, a smart young guy who knows how to use language, who lays out information in neat non-threatening piles, but I could hear him plumping up the figures to console me. I’d known it already, that ninety-two was a lie, and now he simultaneously confirmed the lie and softened the truth. “You know,” I said, “I think I’m going to need something to get me through to the surgery.”

I’d never taken a tranquilizer in my life. I’d never let the doctor know the depths of my neuroses—I’m a pretty cheerful hypochondriac—but maybe he’d guessed. Most anybody around me for fifteen minutes could guess. In my twenties I suffered panic attacks and vertigo but resisted medicine: I didn’t believe my body was ill, I believed my soul was flailing (I was reading a lot of Russian novels in my twenties). I endured a watered-down, I’m-okay-you’re-whatever talking cure, but gave it up when I sensed that all my yakking about the meaning of existence was creeping out the psychologist. For years now I’d prescribed myself a mild sedative, a glass of wine at night—all right, sometimes two. All right, often two. If the empty wine bottles started to pile up, though, I went on a drinking fast and got more exercise. I might not have been able to will myself tanned, but I could will myself functional.

I was, too: I was highly functional. I kept on writing when I had my babies, right through the unpublished years and the adjunct teaching years, and finally got myself book contracts and an NEA and tenure at a big research university, and even if I came home at night sometimes saying Man, I’m going to kill myself if they put me on one more committee, even if I—now that I thought of it—in the last few years when administration and publishing and bitter colleagues and the weird Midwest seemed so intense, had heard myself form the words I think I’m going to die or even I wish I were dead, I hadn’t thought that emotion would work itself out so literally. I was just kidding about that! Really! And anyway when a thought like that went all the way to language, I heard the words as if they came from somebody else, somebody across the room, some petulant child. And I’d been horrified, hadn’t I? No I don’t, I don’t wish I were dead, I didn’t mean that, I take that back. Despair was the only unforgivable sin.

Now, talking to the doctor, I heard words forming again, but these weren’t unbidden, these were willed. Dear God, I don’t want to die. This time I really was using a child’s words, all I had, one syllable apiece. I didn’t want to flummer, I didn’t want to lose my ability to read a pathology report and make sense of what I needed to do next. Years ago I’d read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor—good grief, I’d given it to friends with cancer—and I found her argument as hopeful as health itself. I wasn’t going to treat this disease as a punishment or a working-through of my own darkest fears and desires. If I required a pill to focus my eyes and allow me to read the medical reports, bring on the pills.

Lousy Prayers

Waiting for the next round of appointments, I drugged myself. We called the anxiety medication my nervous pills, and they did help me function, or at least they helped me form neat and tidy language: one word linked to another, my synapses firing at a steady pace for a change. But an hour before I was due for another dose, I was in the throes of panic again; and at night, when the pill wore off, the effect was almost hallucinatory. I would wake in some nightmare place, spinning in a centrifuge, and I’d hear myself singing a snatch of hymn for comfort, something I’d loved as a child, “O God of Loveliness” or Tantum Ergo. In the middle of the night I couldn’t remember the words, much less comfort myself. I almost couldn’t remember what prayer was.

As a child I’d had sporadic bouts of religious fervor. My nighttime prayers were often the opposite of comforting; they were a terrifying burden. I came to a fearsome God with an endless list of souls I wanted to protect, catastrophes I needed to guard against: nuclear war, polio, shark attacks, hurricanes. I had a large family and many friends and the world, as we know, is a dangerous place. Prayers could go on all night. Prayers did go on all night.

Later, as a young woman flitting from Catholicism to existentialism to Zen, no theological writing shook me more than Richard Rubenstein’s declaration, in After Auschwitz, that he could never again believe in a God who shaped history. Why should a God who watched the twentieth century pass by, who allowed the Holocaust to proceed, act to stop my lousy little cancer? And yet that existential refusal to believe in a capricious god, a god who favored certain petitioners over others, was not even at odds with anything I had learned in the simplest childhood catechism lessons: God heard everything, but never promised to deliver the goods precisely as we requested them. What we could be sure we’d get by way of reply was grace, enough grace to deal with whatever we had to deal with.

The only problem was, at night, imagining the spreading cancer, I wasn’t interested in grace or patience or courage. I wanted the goods! I wanted a lifetime guarantee! This cancer stuff was as primal as it gets. I was all self, all the time, a middle-aged waffling Catholic consumed with my own existence. I’d always laughed about the most embarrassing aspects of my faith—the garish mass cards, the hyperrealist blood-gushing Sacred Hearts—and regarded much of the language of the contemporary church (the banal folk lyrics, the first-person sermons) as sentimental pap. Now I lay in pools of sweat trying to conjure the gooey pictures of the baby Jesus that pervaded my childhood. What was more shameful: my conjuring, my desperation, my bargaining, or the bad art?

I was weeks away from the surgery date, and in the dead of night I pictured myself drowning, the melanoma filling my lungs. On the worst nights, I woke to a trite greeting card phrase—Think Life—a mantra that crowded out the hymns and the prayers, as if Madison Avenue had set up shop at my bedside. Think Life. What kind of lousy prayer was that? I’d always been a great one for the mystics, for the idea of self-annihilation, but now I saw that my interest was strictly theoretical. Clearly, I preferred my self in one tidy drugged package, with a slogan on the cover. Clearly, in the face of death, I preferred to run away from God altogether.

Think Life

Talk about a self-conscious generation: we simultaneously mocked and celebrated my new password to the cancer club. “Think life!” Chris went around saying if I looked glum. He made fancy colored folders for the melanoma papers, and printed out a tab that said Think Life in bold type.

The first week, I couldn’t read anything medical, no more than a sentence or two at a time. My friends Teresa and Jill—an economist and a documentary filmmaker—teamed up with Chris to work the phones and the web. Within days they were experts on the latest autovaccines and knew which melanoma center was working on which protocol. Teresa did stats, Jill the narrative, Chris the translating. He left out the worst stuff—eyeballs and what happens at the very end—but he told me the truth. No ninety-two percent from him.

The appointments for the initial consultation and surgery were weeks away. I was aghast that it took so long—because it had been tricky to diagnose, two and a half months had already passed and I was ready to jump out of my cancerous skin—but Chris said melanomas grew for years and years. It was only when they metastasized that you had to worry. What if it was metastasizing now?

I’d been raised not to make a fuss, but a possibly fatal disease made politeness seem...irrelevant. The nurse at Michigan said she understood why I was worried, with a second-stage tumor of an as yet indeterminate depth, and got the appointment date moved up. I went off to Michigan to meet with the medical team. The cancer hospital was scary—the patients looked too bald or too young or too weak to be going through what they were going through—but it was an oddly comforting place, too, husbands stroking their wives’ hands, a little boy pushing his father’s wheelchair. Everyone looked sicker than I was, and no one looked as scared. The doctors and nurses were fighters of the good fight, movie stars. The melanoma dude was a younger William Hurt, his skin as fair as mine. He’d know the agonies of a day at the beach.

“This is serious, but you have a good prognosis,” the fair-skinned doctor said. “About a seventy-five percent long-term survival rate.” I’d just dropped a few more points, but I was getting used to the number slide. “We’ll use radiation to map which lymph nodes would be affected—” If it had spread to the lymph nodes, my odds would drop to fifty-fifty.

“And if it’s metastasized, then it’s time to pick out the hymns?”
The doctor said they didn’t usually put it quite that way. They didn’t usually bring it up, in fact, unless the patient wanted to know, but I sounded like the kind of patient who wanted to know. “It’s not that it’s all over—there’s a guy here who got it in his lungs five years ago—but basically at that stage we’re buying you time. You’re going to have to watch out for coughs and pains in your gut and headaches.”

Oh, swell. Cancer was a great disease for a hypochondriac. I could already produce symptoms at will and now, I knew, I’d just rotate them. The doctor said that they’d treated second-stage tumors with chemo until very recently, but they’d discovered that the treatment—which had some nasty side effects—made no dent in the mortality rates. So, after surgery, if the lymph nodes were clean, that would be that: watch and wait. I could just sit around producing symptoms.

I found I could hear him say mortality rates and buy you time without flummering. He was looking me in the eye, for one thing, speaking slowly and clearly, and for another thing I was medicated. I had a lousy prayer going, too: Think life, think life, think life.

A Nodule

One Friday morning, weeks after my initial visit to Michigan, long enough for me to have assumed that those x-rays and blood tests were all a-okay, I got a call from Ann Arbor. “I don’t want you to get too worried,” the nurse said. “Nine times out of ten it turns out to be nothing.” Nine times out of ten, eighty percent, seventy-five percent. This time even the nervous pills couldn’t stop the floor from sliding along with the numbers. “The doctor sees a nodule on your chest x-ray—have you had another x-ray recently? That we could compare?”

Chest. Lungs. A nodule. Time to pick out the hymns after all. The nurse suggested that, if we couldn’t find other film, they could do a comparative x-ray in another month. A month? I’d require heroin to function by then. I spent the day tracking down the G.P. in Brooklyn who’d x-rayed my lungs during a bad case of bronchitis. But that was years and years ago—about eighteen years, we figured out over the phone—and Dr. Swirsky, sounding exactly the same, gravelly and no-nonsense, said that he only kept the films for ten years, which was five years longer than the state of New York required him to. “What do you need them for?” he said, and I told him about the melanoma. I heard his voice soften: “I wish you the best.” I put down the phone and had a good cry. By then it was late in the afternoon, and when I reached my internist he said, “Let’s get a CAT scan.” But the hospital was closing up shop and it turned out that I’d have to go in on Monday.

Jill came over, looking morose. Jill had had cancer too—thyroid, from the x-ray treatments they used to give kids with chronic tonsillitis—and after the surgery they told her they hadn’t got it all. They had to go back in. That must have been terrifying, I said. No, you just get yourself to the hospital and do what you have to do. My Sontag in South Bend: Just take care of it had been her motto all through the research. Now she said: “I don’t know about this. This sounds bad.”

“Nine times out of ten,” I said, and she gave me a pitying look. She came with Raúl and Chris and me to a Japanese restaurant in a downtown hotel. I sipped sake a thimbleful at a time and chewed shrimp methodically. I felt as if I weren’t really at the same table with my husband and my son and my friend, as if I weren’t in the same room. This restaurant was only a way station. I wasn’t calm exactly, but I was almost calm. Leaving for the night, Jill said: “This doesn’t look good. This doesn’t good at all.”

I remember thinking: Hey! I’m the one who has to get through the weekend. I remember picturing Dostoyevsky when they told him they were going to execute him and then thinking, Well aren’t you the great one, you and Dostoyevsky? I remember trying to bottle the feeling—made for fiction, wasn’t it, what it feels like to be sentenced to death—only I didn’t feel much of anything, between the medication and the terror. This was what people meant when they said they went numb. I couldn’t remember ever going numb before.

The Dark

In the dark, I didn’t believe that the nodule on my lungs was going to turn out be nothing. I was sure I was going to die and sure I could will myself a long and useful life. I was sure the melanoma was the result of a childhood in the sun and sure I had made myself sick with a death wish. I tried to count back to the first time I noticed the pink bubble on my arm, years and years ago, years when the cancer had broken off and taken a hike—no, a joyride—to my lungs. If the cancer had metastasized, they might be able to buy me five years. The nervous pill allowed me to think in full sentences, each one connected to the next, maybe not logically, but connected. Emotion yielded to reason, fear to language—but language wasn’t enough. Till Monday, I was free to construct any story I liked about the future, but the ones I was constructing were hopeless. No, not hopeless. Despair was the only unforgivable sin.

I woke in the middle of the night, long past time for a dose, back in the twitchy panic zone. But somehow this time I passed through it and came out on the other end without rising to fetch the pills from the bathroom. The usual struggle with language: words raced by and I couldn’t catch them. Childhood prayers: three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys. It was hard to remember back a few weeks to a time when every waking minute wasn’t devoted to contemplating my own existence.

I lay there, incapable of any more thought, any more words, any more self. After a while I was visited by a clarity that didn’t arrive with the baggage of language or drugs. It wasn’t a physical sensation and it wasn’t a rational sensation. It was a stretch—a flash?—of peace. I have no idea how long it lasted: time didn’t matter, wasn’t part of it. I wasn’t detached—I was conscious of experiencing what I experienced—but I wasn’t attached either, or anyway not attached to words. I was not describing what was happening to myself. I was not turning it into narrative, as I do almost everything else that happens to me. I was just there. Nobody was singing a chorus of Think Life. I was buoyant, floating.

It was an image, not language, that finally signaled a return to the rational world. And look—this is embarrassing, even more grandiose than comparing myself to Dostoyevsky, but it’s true: the picture I saw was that moment Martin Luther King described, when he sat at his kitchen table in the depths of his despair, and felt suddenly and inexplicably the presence of God.

Self-Consciousness

As a card-carrying professor of English, I could probably theorize the experience away in a poststructuralist paragraph or two—certainly it would make a good psychoanalytic exercise—but that would be bringing language to an experience (if experience is the word) outside of language. When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I felt as if I’d lost language, lost control. Now, for a little while (if while is the word), I’d gone beyond language, beyond control.

It was not the kind of thing I’d ever write about. I was a memoirphobe, one who’s made some very public disparaging statements about living in the Age of the Self, in a time of spiritual striptease. It would have been in the worst possible taste to write about my own lousy struggles, much less my nighttime visitation. Besides, it sounded like 1969: Oh wow man, last night I dropped a tab and saw Jesus and Krishna. Last night I got strung out on Xanax and melanoma and felt the presence of grace.

But from that weekend on, it was to hell with good taste. I’d already pitched politeness. Now when the department secretary gave me a pile of holy cards, I read every line of every prayer and was surprised to find, in some of those lines, language I needed, old familiar language, simple and direct. The girly Jesuses with the wavy hair on the fronts of the cards still gave me the willies, but here on the back was Saint Francis: For it is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life. A few weeks back I lay in the dark believing that self-annihilation was only for mystics. Now, in the light of day, I read dying to self in black on white—words, thoughts made visible—and found my comfort. Dying to self was a vast improvement over dying to melanoma. Saint Francis was a vast improvement over Think Life.

It was as if I had to lose language—had to be stripped of it—to know its power again. Past the terror, I was back to In the beginning was the Word. I became a praying fool. It wasn’t that I now fantasized about the prayers saving me from cancer—I couldn’t believe that and believe in history. It was that now I could remember that childhood lesson: prayer is the entreaty that God hears and answers with grace. I fumbled for prayer, but began to lose my self-consciousness too, began to name my own sorrows and fears, my own will. Maybe I had found language by loosening my fearful hold on it.

I stashed holy cards in my desk at home, my desk at work, the books I was reading. I told my childhood friend Liz, now an Episcopal priest, about a one-day novena I found, nine prayers in nine hours, and from North Carolina she said a one-day novena for me. When I read her e-mail describing where she’d been each hour, I could hear her voice clear as if she were by my side. And maybe that is what it means to have others pray for you: their voices push you forward.

Nothing

On Monday afternoon I went in for more x-rays and a CAT scan. The x-ray technician took a couple of films, consulted another technician, told me they had to make a call, came back and took some more. This was it, then. They’d found it. They sent me upstairs to be scanned.

I was still buoyant, still full of hope—against the odds, as I now saw it. They could buy me time; they were working on those autovaccines. My doctor told me the scanner would look like a big doughnut, but I—the one who has to be strapped into the dentist’s chair, the one who refuses all medical tests that involve cold pieces of hardware—thought it looked like those lifesavers you see on boats, something you could hang onto. When they left me alone in the room, I prayed without ceasing. When the technician came back, we talked about our children, about the public schools.

And by the time I walked through the front door at home, the phone was ringing: my internist. “It’s not in your lungs.”
“The way the technicians were looking at the film—”
“They couldn’t find anything—so they called me and I had them take more films. I don’t see a thing on the scan either. There’s nothing there.”

Nothing there. I don’t know what happened to the nodule. Nobody knows. Chris says the x-ray machines in Michigan were set for a different resonance. My friend Jay—the one whose sister died of melanoma—wondered whose x-rays got confused with mine. But nobody at Michigan was too worried: nine times out of ten, it turns out to be nothing.

The Knife

Whenever I got in the car I went around yelling, from the bottom of my cancer-free lungs, “I want to live I want to live I want to live!” the way my teenage friends used to drive around town yelling Frank Zappa lives. Then I remembered that Frank Zappa died of cancer and that made me remember the Thom Jones story “I Want to Live!” about a woman with cancer who fights it as hard as she can but dies in the end, which in turn made me remember the Susan Hayward movie that ends with the gas chamber. So I quit yelling I want to live and recited other snatches of language: poems, Tom Waits songs. I had fears that I would cease to be and troubled deaf heaven with my bootless cries and rode a downtown train: prayers, undiluted. I was strangely unashamed to be scared out of my wits.

Months after I went to show my doctor the bleeding puffy pink pimple, they finally cut the melanoma out. The lymph node they plucked was clean, and so was the tissue surrounding my lesion: those deep surgical margins were the bottom, after all. Now it was time for watch and wait. Now I was embarrassed, that I’d caused all this fuss for such an insignificant cancer.

The day I got the word on the biopsies, I decided to get off the nervous pills and became a complete lunatic. I had trouble breathing. I rotated, as I had predicted I would, the symptoms: cluster headaches, a persistent niggling cough, the dull pain in my side. I couldn’t focus my eyes. When my internist asked if I wanted a refill on the pills, I said no, there was plenty of medicine left, it was probably just time to face my own mortality. He was exceedingly kind about all the nutty calls that followed.

Now every few months I strip naked and a dermatologist examines every inch of me. My scar is sensational: it turns out that my blue skin doesn’t take to the knife much better than it takes to the sun. Every six months I get a liver count, which is a good incentive not to drink too much wine. For a while afterwards I’d get snippy when people said, “Looks like you got a big wake-up call”—Maybe you’d like your own wake-up call, I’d think, but now not even the platitudes bother me too much. I do feel wide awake: blessed.

My Left Arm

My son Christian called from lower Manhattan the morning the World Trade Center was hit, so I was watching on television when the first tower crumpled down. But I could not remember what I had just seen—it was the only time in my life, as far as I know, that I simultaneously saw and repressed a visual image. The announcer said: “There are no words,” and I thought that was right. I could not even say what I had witnessed. Later though, watching replays of the sidewalk onlookers, I heard one woman say Oh my God just as another said My word. That combination was right, too. Richard Powers said it again in the Times, a couple of weeks later: “There are no words. But there are only words.”

And that about sums it up: that’s been the writer’s dilemma since the beginning of recorded time, and the believer’s dilemma too. My generation of writers was raised with Theodor Adorno’s proscription, no poetry after Auschwitz, and with Primo Levi’s reply, that the writer’s job is to tell it straight and clear. I don’t mean to place myself on the same plane of the universe as those who have suffered terror at the hands of others: I only had a puffy pink pimple that turned for a little while into my own private monster.

I am on the plane of the universe that houses all the writers carrying so many bucketsful of irony and self-awareness we can hardly move forward. Since my brush with mortality, I’ve written two stories about a woman with ovarian cancer and one about a civil rights era preacher with melanoma who dies contemplating his whiteness. Maybe I thought I was ready to look down the barrel of this gun, but I got a new round of symptoms as punishment for my arrogance. And as punishment for all my critiques of contemporary memoir, I have succumbed to writing this account of what it felt like be diagnosed with cancer—a tidy narrative, after all, with its climax in the dark night.

Sometimes I think the cancer is all I know anymore, and maybe I want to get beyond that point, to get beyond myself. How else, for a writer, but with words? How else, for a struggling believer, but with prayer?

Visit Valerie Sayers at Image Artist of the Month for May '05

Issue #41• Winter '03-'04