- When we met in the NYU treatment room, Dinah, who has auburn
curls and wore large hoop earrings, told me that even after a successful
course of chemotherapy she was paralyzed by the fear of a recurrence and
wasted her days “waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
She too worked with Tony Bossis and in the difficult first moments of
her session imagined herself trapped in the hold of a ship, rocking back
and forth, consumed by fear. “I stuck my hand out from under the
blanket and said, ‘I am so scared.’ Tony took my hand and told me to just
go with it. His hand became my anchor.
“I saw my fear. Almost as in a dream, my fear was located under my
rib cage on the left side; it was not my tumor, but it was this black thing
in my body. And it made me immensely angry; I was enraged by my fear.
I screamed, ‘Get the fuck out! I won’t be eaten alive.’ And you know
what? It was gone! It went away. I drove it away with my anger.” Dinah
reports that years later it hasn’t returned. “The cancer is something
completely out of my control, but the fear, I realized, is not.”
Dinah’s epiphany gave way to feelings of “overwhelming love” as her
thoughts turned from her fear to her children. She told me she was and
remains a “solid atheist,” and yet “the phrase that I used—which I hate to
use but it’s the only way to describe it—is that I felt ‘bathed in God’s
love.’” Paradox is a hallmark of the mystical experience, and the
contradiction between the divine love Dinah felt and “not having a shred
of belief” didn’t seem to faze her. When I pointed this out, she shrugged
and then smiled: “What other way is there to express it?”
Not surprisingly, visions of death loom large in the journeys taken by
the cancer patients I interviewed at NYU and Hopkins. A breast cancer
survivor in her sixties (who asked to remain anonymous) described
zipping merrily through space as if in a video game until she arrived
smack at the wall of a crematorium and realized, with a fright, “I’ve died
and now I’m going to be cremated. (But I didn’t have the experience of
burning—how could I? I was dead!) The next thing I know, I’m
belowground in this gorgeous forest, deep woods, loamy and brown.
There are roots all around me and I’m seeing the trees growing, and I’m
part of them. I had died but I was there in the ground with all these roots
and it didn’t feel sad or happy, just natural, contented, peaceful. I wasn’t
gone. I was part of the earth.”
frankie
(Frankie)
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