Finding Roads to Meaning and Resilience: Breathe Deep Seattle 9/21/19

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MY BOOK: ROADS TO MEANING AND RESILIENCE WITH CANCER

No one is immune from cancer, this nasty disease. Everyone could get it! The forty people, whose stories are in the book I wrote, are making meaning and building resilience while living with incurable cancers. I am one of the forty people. I interviewed thirty-nine people with lung cancer, and in this book, I share aspects of our stories. We are fortunate to be alive at a time when science has made it possible to survive with advanced lung cancer for more than a few months. I wrote this book to explore answers to our existential struggles. I also wrote it to open space for others to advance the conversations around their existential inquiries. By writing this, I hoped that patients, caregivers, and health care providers could find insights about patient experiences. I hope this work will help develop language to explain our struggles as cancer patients so that others can understand us better, and with that, also they better understand themselves. It is important here to not...
Read more

I Need Your Help

                                                  “How can I help when someone I love develops cancer?” This seems to be a simple question, and the answer can be both easy and difficult. A simple answer is the fact that you cannot help if your aim is to cure them. You also may not be helping if your plan is to bring a casserole and then leave as quickly as possible. True, there is no formula that fits everyone, and true, you may not be able to cure your loved one’s illness, but you can do something meaningful. You can be with them, and you can give them care and kindness. This sounds like a cliché, but I am far from wanting to reaffirm an old adage. To be there for someone and to provide kindness and care are easily...
Read more

Meaning: Section 1--Not Finding Meaning

Not Finding the Meaning  At the center of the painting, a man is kneeling next to the lips of a statue of a sphinx. The man is wearing a cloth robe that covers most of his body except the left side of his chest and his left arm. He leans with his ears toward the sphinx, as if listening to it whisper. But the sphinx’s lips are  sealed. The attentiveness in the man’s posture tells that the sphinx was anything but generous with  wisdom. The man is standing on sand that extends, along with old ruins, into the distance. Only the head of the sphinx can be seen; the body is buried in the sand, as are the pillars and ruins. Next to the man is a stick he probably used to help him trudge through the sand so he could question the sphinx. In the right corner are a skull and a rectangular structure that looks like a  tomb. It was December of 2016, two weeks after I was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. I was in Boston, seeking a second opinion from Harvard and wand...
Read more