Everyone who has had cancer has a story to tell. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I read everything I could find, looking for answers, looking for others who felt the same way that I did. I was particularly comforted by others' stories of their experiences.
My story came to me in images, through dreams, and through the words in my journal. I tell it (in Path Through the Fire) to serve my further healing and the healing of my family. If my pictures and words also help others to ease their way through cancer or any other life-threatening or debilitating disease, I will be pleased.
I want to tell of the bittersweetness of the whole experience: the sickness and the hope, the terror and the unending love and support of my family and friends; the edge between rational and imaginal knowing, and for me, the need for both.
My drawings and journal writings were critical. They mirrored and guided me through the heat, the intensity, the destructive and healing powers of chemotherapy and radiation, and led me on my particular path through the fire.
Journal entry, July 10, 1994
I think my hair may start falling out when the kids are here next week, and I want to make my head shaving a ritual, a spiritual event. I'm thinking about the act as an assertive move on my part to ready myself for battle - to do my part in this fight. I have the strongest, most powerful chemicals going into my system from the outside to fight the battle. I need to make as strong and powerful move from the inside to balance the onslaught of the chemicals so we can attack the enemy from two fronts. So I need to pay careful attention to how I ready myself, and I want my family to participate in this readying - sort of like warrior handmaidens - men and women - to add thrust to my strength in making this move. I know that what I'm needing to do is to engage as a balancer in this destructive war against destruction where killer is pitted against killer. What I need for balance so I don't annihilate myself is the strength of my own creative force fire - quiet and just as deadly as it is lifegiving.
