Letters From Cancerland: The Death & Dying Poetry Club
I love poetry. I have always loved poetry. Poetry is so many things. It's jazz, it’s a song, it’s a symphony, it's a chant, it’s a nursery rhyme.
And I used to write poetry. But for reasons too personal to share, I have not written much poetry, except for an occasional parody, for over 20 years.
It was my good friend Mark who showed me the way back to poetry. “Showed me the way” is a bit generous. It was more akin to long-ago days when you clustered around the pool and some wiseacre shoved you into the cold water when you were least expecting it, then cannonballed in right beside you as you came up gasping for breath.
Mark was diagnosed with myxoid sarcoma, a rare soft-tissue tumor, in March 2014, and the remedy was to cut about one-third of his left quad out. (There was more to the treatment than that, but that is what sticks in my head, because Mark is a serious cyclist.) We were already friends, but his sudden move to Cancerland deepened our friendship. Once he was able, we started walking, talking about cancer, uncertain futures, life choices, and dying. As you can imagine, there was a lot to talk about.
His psycho-oncologist suggested to Mark that he keep a journal of his feelings, frustrations, and fears. You know the drill. Mark rolled his eyes when he told me this on one of our walks.
“I’m not journaling, April.” He didn’t add “no way, no how,” but you could hear it in his voice as we walked.
So Mark refused to journal. But, somewhere along the line, he started writing poetry in lieu of journaling. After a while, he shared some of it with me.
Dang. It was good. It was powerful. And after he sent me this one, I invited Mark and his wife Melinda to join me and my husband Warren for dinner:
Waiting for the other shoe to drop
I hear God upstairs
… undressing
You’d think he’d be quieter.
He makes sounds like a drunken sailor,
knocking items off shelves
and stumbling around
… now he’s singing to himself.
I hear the toilet flush
now he’s laughing to himself.
Does he know I’m down here?
Does he care?
After dinner, our spouses did the dishes (they volunteered – honestly, they did!) while Mark and I talked about cancer, talked about prognoses, talked about living with uncertainty, talked about death, talked about poetry. Then we all had dessert and brought the evening to an end.
The next morning I was unsettled. I thought about our conversation. I thought about poetry. I thought about the laughter from the kitchen while we talked of darker matters in the living room. Then I wrote:
The Reconvening of the Death and Dying Talks
In the kitchen
There were bright lights
And
The sounds of dishes
And laughter.
In the living room
We sat
And opened our hearts and hands
To death and dying.
In the kitchen
Warren and Mel talked and talked and talked
About Chicago
About percussion
About life.
The goodness of their talk filled the room and radiated outwards.
In the living room
You and I talked of dark paths.
You pointed to my copy of The Divine Comedy
And said you had it on your nightstand to read.
You might take it to Italy.
When I told you that after Mayo
Warren and I drove
In absolute silence until I started crying,
You looked at me, stricken, like a dog scolded for a bowl it did not tip.
You are on that lost path in the forest dark,
Seeing a glimpse of sunshine ahead.
I am on an empty plain,
Big Sky above me,
Listening to messages in the wind.
Then Mel and Warren spilled into the living room
With all that brightness,
With all that goodness,
With chocolate cookies and the Columbian Exposition.
Thus ended the reconvening of the Death and Dying Talks.
I was in the pool. And when I yelled from the shock of the cold water hitting me, Mark yelped and laughed and jumped in too:
Poems with no readers
I think
Might be the closest
Thing
To the truth
We have.
I am (famously, some would say) a doodler, not an artist. Painting, sketching, sculpting are all beyond me. I live with a musician, but I can barely labor my way through a simple scale on the flute I last played 40 years ago. I don’t sing; I can’t dance. I can’t sew or weave or express myself in any number of artistic outlets. I write, but I have limited my writing about myeloma to this column, some of my blog posts, and my treatment notes. I was actively journaling when I was diagnosed, but there are few reflections there on being ill. I had closed off any artistic outlet for self-expression about what I think about the cancer, my perspective on what is happening, or what waits up ahead.
What I have come to realize, as the words scroll from my pen (I usually draft longhand), is that I have kept more inside me than I ever admitted:
Lines for Mark from T. S. Eliot As Interpreted by April
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon the table,
And I will speak of amyloids in my liver
Which I will carry to Portland
And you speak of high white blood cell counts
Which you will carry to Belgium and Italy.
Measuring out my life in coffee spoons?
Standing in the room while women come and go
Speaking of Michelangelo?
Or cycling?
Or The Divine Comedy?
I will eat a peach without any dare.
I will disturb the universe.
I will stand on that crashing shoreline and call to the mermaids,
Demanding they sing to me.
I got shoved into the pool. The water really was fine once my heart stopped pounding from the cold and I shook the water from my eyes. I have not stopped writing poetry since that morning after our dinner. My electronic folder is growing. Mark and I trade poems back and forth.
And that is how we came to create the Death and Dying Poetry Club.
April Nelson is a multiple myeloma patient and columnist at The Myeloma Beacon. You can view a list of her previously published columns here.
If you are interested in writing a regular column for The Myeloma Beacon, please contact the Beacon team at .
April
It's good to let our feelings out, so for you and Mark, the Death and Dying club is good medicine. Whether we have cancer or not (and I do have MM) all are progressing down the road to death. Nobody I know, or have read about in history, made the leap to eternal life here on earth. We all are heading toward death. Cancer patients have a different road, perhaps more well defined than the average person.
Being able to share your thoughts and feelings with mark is great in that it has resurrected your poetry writing. All who read this article will get different meanings from your verses, but that's ok, because poetry is meant to stir our senses in a way that is not known to other art forms. Thanks April and Mark
These poems from the the Death and Dying Poetry Club are all great! I hope you keep waxing poetic. I'd love to hear more.
Aloha April,
Boy you cancer people sure are morbid. Just kidding, I wrote about death just one month ago.
While I am not sure I understand poetry very well; I very much appreciate your writing style and I very very much appreciate you advancing the discussion of death. We are doomed to forever be afraid of the difficult scary things in life which we don't discuss.
By sharing our feelings and talking about death, I think we can face it more comfortably and achieve so much more in life.
Please keep up the excellent articles!
Tom
Dear April, That was quite a poetry writing session you have had this summer! I think that writing is a form of 'journalling' that is very creative and helps to put one's thoughts and feelings down on paper. I like to read poetry sometimes. One book i still have on my bookshelves after all these years is 'Cariboo Horses' by Alfred Purdy (1971). I was quite young when I read it first, and didn't comprehend some of Purdy's themes, which tend to be quite serious and sad, but his imagery is fantastic and I enjoyed re-reading it after our recent road trip. tHE drive took us through a bit of 'Cariboo country', all dry sagebrush and rolling hills. A quote from the poem 'Cariboo Horses' for you....
'But only horses waiting in stables hitched at taverns standing at dawn pastured outside the town with jeeps and fords and chevvies and busy muttering stake trucks rushing importantly over roads of man's devising over the safe known roads of the ranchers families and merchants of the town -
On the high prairie are only horse and rider wind in dry grass
Clopping in silence under the toy mountains dropping sometimes and lost in the dry grass golden oranges of dung -'
Purdy didn't much get into punctuation and liked run-on sentences.
Hope that the new treatments will help you a lot. Best wishes from Foothills country.
April,
I take exception to your characterization of a lack of artistic skill. Poetry is art. What is art other than self expression.
I wish I had your talent!
Ron
Hi April - thank you. I needed that. Poetry is unique in the way it touches each of us. Keep it coming and keep sharing your poetry with us. I am going to go back and reread those poems and hope for more.
April, you have a very creative flair with the pen so keep writing. Poetry and verse can reach far because we as humans are often very similar initially when faced with fear and hope and life issues than touch everyone in one form or another. But how we then go on to deal with these things is what makes us different or unique.
The club of MMers are in a difficult situation, we hear the word incurable yet also of new treatments offering hope. We hear positively from those that do well and worryingly about those who do not. So we are left in a sort of uncertainty of time with our clinical teams making decisions we hope will give us more time. It can feel unreal, but it is real. The poetry and writing reflect will reality of life around and about us and our reactions to our situation in the context of the wider scheme.
Jumping in at the deep end worked
When I sat down to write this column, I wasn't sure if I was so far out in left field that no one would read it, let alone comment! Thank you for these comments; the poems continue. As for morbidity as a topic (Tom), my September column is a total about-face and more like the line from Monty Python, "and now for something completely different."
"You looked at me, stricken, like a dog scolded for a bowl it did not tip."
What a great line...!
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Goats appear and then just fade away, .....come back another day.
Colin Hay
So glad you found writing poetry again....I've done so for over 20 years and wrote a chapbook "Memory Cell" all about the MM experience. My group meets monthly, and we laugh a lot with champagne, knowing that poems can consist of 3 things: food, sex, and death. Enjoy. Suzanne Gay
Poetry is underappreciated.
I grew up with parents who socialized with Beat poets and they had a zest for life that more people need to adopt.
Bad poetry, good poetry, sonnets, haikus, ballads, epic poems, odes, limericks... all good.
Never saw verse in a forum here before. I am glad that I did.
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