I’m preparing for a cancer caregiver workshop next week and found a book that I am recommending. It’s not new but it’s new to me. The book is “Close to the Bone” by Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD. I never discovered this book, written in 1996, though her earlier book, “Goddesses in Everywoman” is a favorite of mine and my copy is bent and starred and underlined and broken from photocopying.
“Close to the Bone” is subtitled, “Life Threatening Illness and the Search for Meaning”. This book jumped out at me because the other book that I’ll use in the spiritual workshop is Victor Frankl’s, “Mans Search for Meaning”. Tragedy and meaning; suffering and meaning; cancer and meaning. The work of finding meaning or sometimes making meaning out of tragedy or suffering.
It reminds me of the quote by Fredrich Nietzsche, “He who has why to live can bear with almost any how”. But Bolen is talking about not just why to live but why suffer and the value of being brought “close to the bone” or close to our soul’s needs by an illness—our own or someone we love.
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