I just finished a great book on living after a life challenge. The book is “A Whole New Life – An Illness And A Healing” by Reynolds Price. I highly recommend the book to: anyone facing a life challenge, their caregivers, their family and friends. I also recommend the book to any professionals who treat people facing such challenges.
Reynolds Price was an acclaimed author of novels, stories, poems, essays, plays and several memoirs. He taught narrative writing at Duke University
In 1984, at the age of 51, a large cancer was discovered in his spinal cord. (“The tumor was pencil-thick and gray-colored, ten inches long from my neck-hair downward”.) Urgent surgery failed to remove the growth. Radiation treatments temporarily arrested it but left him a paraplegic in tremendous pain.
Price recounts without self-pity what became a long struggle to withstand and recover from this appalling, if all too common, affliction (one American in three will experience some form of cancer). He charts the first puzzling symptoms; the urgent surgery that fails to remove the growth and the radiation that temporarily arrests it (but hurries his loss of control of his lower body); the occasionally comic trials of rehab; the steady rise of severe pain and reliance on drugs; two further radical surgeries; the sustaining force of a certain religious vision; an eventual discovery of help from biofeedback and hypnosis; and the miraculous return of his powers as a writer in a new active life.
The whole book is compelling reading but I found the last chapter to be the most rewarding. Price states that he wrote the book because “friends and strangers have asked me to add my recollections to the very slim row of sane printed matter which comes from the far side of catastrophe, the dim other side of that high wall that effectively shuts disaster off from the unfazed world….I shared their frustration for some fellow-words to consume those weeks after radiation when I finally recovered the will to read and searched....for any book, essay or sentence that might speak directly to the hole I was in----anything more useful than crackpot guides to healing or death, impossible complex starvation diets, alfalfa pills and karmic tune-ups. But nothing turned up….apart from short sketches of the Bible….”
“I needed to read some story that paralleled, at whatever distance, my unfolding bafflement----some honest report from a similar war, with a final list of hard facts learned and offered unvarnished----but again I never found it. Admitted, there are richly useful methods…. But nobody known to me in America, or on the shady backside of Pluto, is presently offering useful instruction in how to absorb the staggering but not-quite-lethal blow of a fist that ends your former life and offers you nothing by way of a new life that you can begin to think of wanting, though you clearly have to go on feeding your gimped-up body and roofing the space above your head.”
Price is writing towards people facing such life challenges as “birth disasters, unstoppable cancers, disorders of the blood and lymph, external wounds to flesh and bone, those devastations in which the body turns on itself and eats its own substance, the mind’s estrangement, the still irreparable disconnection of electrical service to major parts----each of a thong of catastrophes as common as influenza or migraine….”
The final chapter is devoted to Price’s recount of the “minimal facts that eventually worked for me, at least part of the time, and are working still.” He writes that “three facts stand at the head of any advice I’d risk conveying to a friend confronted with grave illness or other physical and psychic trauma.”
1. “You’re in your present calamity alone, far as this life goes. If you want a way out, then dig it yourself, if there turns out to be any trace of a way. Nobody-----least of all a doctor-----can rescue you now, not from the deeps of your own mind, not once they’ve stitched your gaping wound.”
2. “Generous people-----true practical saints, some of them boring as root canals----are waiting to give you everything on Earth, but your main want, which is simply the person you used to be.”
3. “But you’re not that person now. Who’ll you be tomorrow? And who do you propose to be from here to the grave, which may be hours or decades down the road?”
“The first two facts take care of themselves; if you haven’t already known them in spades and obeyed their demands, they’ll blow you neatly down till you concede their force. Harder though, and even more urgent, admit the third fact as soon as you can…. Grieve for a decent limited time over whatever parts of your old self you know you’ll miss.
“That person is dead as any teen-aged Marine drilled through the forehead in an Asian jungle, any Navy Seal with his legs blown off, halved for the rest of the time he gets; any woman mangled in her tenderest parts, unwived, unmothered, unlovered and shorn. Have one hard cry, if the tears will come. Then stanch the grief, by whatever legal means. Next find your way to be somebody else, the next viable you-----a stripped-down whole other clear-eyed person, realistic as a sawed-off shotgun and thankful for air, not to speak of the human kindness you’ll meet if you get normal luck.”
“Your mate, your children, your friends at work----anyone who knew or loved you in your old life----will be hard at work in the fierce endeavor to revive your old self, the self they recall with love or respect. Their motives are frequently admirable, and at times that effort counts for a lot----they prove that you’re valued and wanted at least----but again their care is often a brake on the way you must go. At the crucial juncture, when you turn toward the future, they’ll likely have little help to offer; and it’s no fault of theirs (they were trained like you, in inertia.)”
“Many well-meaning mates, lovers and friends will stand by, observing that you’re in the throes of blind denial----Give up, Let go. Get them out of your sight and your hearing with re-hot haste; use whatever force or fury it takes. Then try to choose life. Then see who you can live with now.
“More likely, they’ll stall you in the effort to learn who you need to be now and how to be him or her by tomorrow or Monday at the latest. Yet if you don’t discover that next appropriate incarnation of who you must be, and then become that person at a stiff trot, you’ll be no good whatever again to the ruins of your old self nor to any friend or mate who’s standing beside you in hopes of a hint that you’re feeling better this instant and glad of company.”
“The kindest thing anyone could have done for me, once I’d finished five weeks’ radiation, would have been to look me square in the eye and say this clearly, “Reynolds Price is dead. Who will you be now? Who can you be and how can you get there, double-time?” Cruel and unusable as it might have sounded in the wake of trauma, I think its truth would have snagged deep in me and won my attention eventually, far sooner than I managed to find it myself. Yet to this day, with all the kindnesses done for me, no one has so much as hinted that news in my direction; and I’ve yet to meet another dazed person who’s heard it when it was needed most----Come back to life, whoever you’ll be. Only you can do it.”
“How you’ll mange that huge transformation is your problem though and nobody else’s. Are there known techniques for surviving a literal hairpin turn in the midst of a life span----or early or late----without forgetting the better parts of who you were? What are the thoughts and acts required to turn your dead self inside-out into something new and durably practical that, however strange, is the creature demanded by whatever hard facts confront you now? So far as I’ve heard, nobody else knows----or knows in a way they can transfer to others. If they know, I haven’t encountered their method. I’ll go on sketching my own course then.”
In Price’s words, “if I were called on to value honestly my present life beside my past---I’d have to say that, despite an enjoyable fifty-year start, these recent years since full catastrophe have gone still better. They’ve brought more in and sent more out----more love and care, more knowledge and patience, more work in less time.”
R.I.P. – Reynolds Price
New Your Times Obituary: “Reynolds Price, a Literary Voice of the South Dies at 77”
Profile on PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly January 21, 2011 (sound volume is low)
Book available from Union County Public Library and book and Kindle Version available form Amazon com.
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