On Illness, Loss, and Choice
BY ELIZABETH POWER
In the spring of 1998 I attended the Computer Telephony Expo in Los Angeles and met a delightful woman managing a booth promoting management training and meetings over the Internet. She said she had had cancer and was interested in contributing an article about change to the website I was managing at that time, CancerOnline.org. The following piece clearly describes the way in which cancer — or any serious and chronic illness — can impact one's life.
— Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Editor-in-Chief
When you have a serious illness, it's good to know you aren't the only one who needs to deal with loss and limited choices.
Loss brings grief — and often the sense of failure. After all, what is it in life that we want to "lose"? Our health? Reputation? Car keys? Freedom? Jobs? Almost universally, loss means failure.
I never saw anyone win a ribbon for losing. In fact, I think this idea of loss as failure is so ingrained that our subconscious cannot differentiate between loss as failure and loss as success or winning. Dieting is a classic example. "Losing weight," the be all to end all, sets us on a course of watching every bite, counting every calorie, monitoring every drop of sweat expended and water consumed. Our subconscious simply cannot succeed at reprogramming "loss" as a success. And thus, we "fail" at "losing" weight: succeeding for a time to find ourselves face down on our favorite dessert. The limbic system, that old reptilian brain, wins again.
What does this have to do with surviving cancer? Loss, as it is counted in the experience of cancer, occurs in many places. We lose (hopefully for only a time) integrity of self, of body, image, emotions and mind. We become a people of loss, fractured. In our loss and fracturing there is much grief, over others' reactions, our own, who we were and who we become. And with it, the feeling of powerlessness, which we can quickly turn into fact. We can fail to identify the choices we make, where our own arenas of control and influence are, we can actually choose to let this perception of loss which powers our grief make us powerless! We can do so only if we choose to. Where is our power in facing loss of self or some form of integrity through experiencing cancer or other indignities, where is our power?
Our power is, in fact, in what we choose at every moment. The richness and strength we find in the struggle to become conscious of what is, and how the loss leads to an end and also to a beginning, yields fertile ground for gain. I say this without regard for whether cancer leads to a symbolic death with physical continuance, or to physical death of the body. For no matter what, until we draw our last conscious breath (and perhaps well beyond), we are choosing. So how might we reframe the losses that come with cancer?
Wheat does not reproduce unless it "loses" grains to the ground. Healing does not occur without the ownership and relinquishing (loss) of identity as a victim or survivor and the reclaiming (growth) of identity in a less powerless and yet not offending powerful way. Cancer often results in one extreme or the other, at least for a time. It is helpful to take a position of power and resistance, mustering all the forces of the pysche and spirit and body against cells reproducing wildly, to battle that out of control-ness with might. In this attitude, like wheat, "losing" resistance to the fight is good. We can empower ourselves to reproduce life in other ways that may improve and prolong our own lives. Some have contributed to their own spontaneous healing or remission through this mustering. This is a change, sometimes, from adhering to old beliefs that may have kept us passive about our health.
Health will not come our way without letting go of the need to keep our old ways of doing and being. We can't expect to get something different by doing the same things. So this letting go, or losing, is more accurately replacing or becoming. The grain of wheat that falls to the ground replaces the stalk that was growing. The new identity gradually becomes the identity, with the identity of victim or survivor in the far background. We cycle through the identity we used to have "BC" (before cancer) to the identity we have "DC" (during cancer) to a "AC" (after cancer) identity, a profound cycle of life within life, one involving loss as well as gain when we exploit the learnings for our own growth.
When we remember that all we have had prior to the loss is still maintained, although in a different form, we can re-frame our lives. People who have experienced cancer can always act as "cancer patients" or perhaps as "cancer victims" — those skills are there, dormant, when living from another frame of reference. Or, we can become people who have had cancer, so that the disease is no longer the center of our identity, only a contributor to the person we become as a result of the process. It requires us to recognize that the fear and anxiety we feel in the process are the normal responses to change, and that these feelings will be with us whether we look at the disease as a problem or as an opportunity. No positive mental attitude this, simply a reminder that no matter how we position the changes life brings us, they often feel pretty bad. The only time change seems to feel good is when we choose the change and can control or engineer it, hence the need for us to recognize choice at every moment. Thus it is that those losses incurred in the wounding and in the healing both serve as seed for growth and healing. If we will choose to suspend our belief in loss as failure, and adopt instead loss as another place where hope may be birthed, we find ground fertile with growing awareness of choice.
When our loss can yield the beginnings of awareness of choice, we gain, for choice brings hope, and hope, joy. Then we find that what appears as loss also becomes the fertile ground of growth and newness, of our potential successes as we choose to re-frame and re-context our experiences. Then this sense of loss, of failure becomes either our dark closed-in place or the opening of its door to let light and life begin to come in, to transform us.
© Copyright 1999, Elizabeth Power |
