Close to the Bone

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.

Married Illness

Here is a new and wonderful book about making a good—or decent marriage—while facing chronic illness. Called: “A Husband, A Wife & an Illness: Life Beyond Chronic Illness” written by Dr. William July and his wife, Jamey Lacy July.

They had just begun their marriage—his first and her second when a terrible auto-immune illness began to torture her. A former personal trainer and super athlete she was reduced to chronic pain, a life of medical appointments and treatments and a changed body and appearance. The blows were to her and to them. They went bankrupt, lost their dream home (her big income was gone overnight) and their lives were changed in every way. But, they write, they found a way to make a marriage in this long painful illness. It helped that Dr. July was and is a marriage and relationship counselor. But even knowing doesn’t always mean doing.

Powerful lessons from his mistakes and their almost mistakes: the well-spouse has to keep living; has to have a life apart; has to have a self. Not easy to do is it caregivers?

For many of us cancer too is a now a chronic illness. Our minds if not our lives are focused on what’s next, fear, and planning.

Here is a book that is simple, practical and very forthright about how a marriage can survive and sort of thrive in the face of all that.

For more practical wisdom go to theri website: http://www.couplesfacingillness.com/

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I did a lot of reading last week at the beach. One of the best books was a new novel called, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbery. There were so many pages I underlined and starred in the margins. Here is one bit that felt true to love in the time of cancer:

“When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body; it also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped.”

Isn’t that an incredible sentence?