Retrospective on an Anniversary of Sorts
Sixteen years ago today, on May 15, 2009, I woke in the morning a 53-year-old married mother of three, our youngest still in high school, halfway through my MFA in fiction. By noon, I’d received the biopsy results: rectal cancer.
I’d set my thesis novel, already well underway, in Manhattan and Maine. Multiple plot lines intersected. I gave the protagonist rectal cancer and ditched a few of the other characters.
When I write, I work to uncover what is deepest inside myself to show that to others. My writing will either reverberate with a reader or not; I can’t know which. But if I seek out and stick with what feels most accurate to me, and depict this carefully and honestly, I can hope to ease someone else’s sense of isolation inside terror.
Writing through cancer helped me home in on what I could say with authority, if only my own. In chronicling my experience, I was able to describe not just my fear and pain and embarrassment, but also the kindnesses, humor, and camaraderie extended to me.
SEEING
I have a decent enough memory, but details often merge and morph and blur. Catching specifics in the moment locks them in amber. I don’t have to use them all, or even most. But having caught them, I can later revisit, choose what pushes forward the story.
Cancer provided narrative focus, but as my memoir The Colors I Saw evolved, so did its purpose. Fear and pain were just a starting point.
I tried to grab each moment that offered either balm or a way forward. Often these involved my family—human, canine, feline, avian, equine—or close friends. I have no firmer hold on feelings, good or bad, than anyone else. I’d rather ignore them. But I know when I have to accept something seemingly unacceptable, such as a colostomy, I want to be able to do this.
First, I record everything. Everything. I can’t know when I’m taking notes if they will coalesce later into something to offer. Crises yell loudly; in real time, it’s hard to hear anything else.
Then I talk with my friends, family, therapist. I find the best way to accept something unacceptable is to trust there’s a path through it and surround myself with beings (human or otherwise) who want to keep me company along the way.
LOOKING BACK
Sixteen years later, I hardly think about my cancer experience. I see the reality of my body, but it no longer derails me. You may say time has healed. Maybe. Time could also have hardened and embittered.
I would say when time does heal physical or mental anguish, it has had help. Mostly love, human and spiritual. I put my faith in love.
Now, I’m closing in on a memoir about grief which I began writing after the death of my husband, Bill, in October 2019. Bill’s death was more unacceptable than my cancer or his cancer.
I thought I wouldn’t manage. Not at all, but especially to get down the grist of that time. There was no full keyboard without Bill. His sense of humor, his beautiful thoughts. His capacity for surprise and delight, his ability to provide both. Still numb, I sought inner chords, but was only able to reach one note.
After losing Bill, I also lost my sense of community. That loneliness was at least in part a result of Covid and the concurrent isolation. I don’t know how great a part, because I lost my husband just before we were all experiencing loss, when the whole world reeled from a pandemic.
Why was I so isolated? Maybe death is too hard a lift for most. The inherent helplessness to help. Or not knowing how. What will hurt? What will comfort?
Because I have three children—plus a few trusted friends, a former therapist who helped me find my way when I was very lost, a publisher, and a therapist, all of whom also feel like family—I was able to keep writing, even that one note, over and over. I could also keep talking.
The talking, with trusted people, soothed. The writing eventually brought Bill back. I can talk to him again and know he’s hearing. Not because I know there’s an afterlife.
I know love’s immutability.
About the Book
The Colors I Saw is Eliza C. Walton‘s riveting metafictional memoir of her messy journey from “You have rectal cancer” to living a full, if somewhat altered, life. Neither superficial nor overly sentimental, it is the story of her deep shame and loss, accepting an unacceptable reality, and the friends and family who helped her survive. Filled with references to the literature that fueled Eliza’s imagination and sustained her.
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