There are many reasons to read this luminous collection of essays about living with terminal cancer. The essays are insightful, revealing, literate, funny, but the primary reason is to reside for a moment in the presence of Dorothy Sauber, a woman of uncommon intelligence and sparkle, a woman who saw the world straight on, a woman who observed this last stage of her life with characteristic curiosity. She was shocked by her diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer but spent not a moment in self-pity. Dorothy was interested in everything including her own process of dying and, in some ways, she valued the illumination her illness offered. She would have far preferred to have lived but, since she knew she was dying, she made the most of the experience and approached death as the ultimate event, the final marvel. That wasn’t even a decision, that’s just what she did. She faced her life and her death straight on and found revelation and meaning wherever she was.

Dorothy was a great teacher and a great traveler. She was an artist; she was generous; she was particular. She was a woman who was completely herself, who seemed not to need the approval of others, who was not shy about her accomplishments, but not boastful either. She was an artist who saw the world always through the lens of her aesthetic and piercing vision. She didn’t have time to waste: she wrote, she read, she made art, she made friends, she collected, she taught, she nurtured. So her approach to her diagnosis was classic. She continued to live her life fully; she celebrated her survival and she got on with it, whatever it was.

Some were surprised that she took only two trips after her diagnosis because traveling the world was so much a part of her life, but she knew she wouldn’t find what she needed out there. It’s not that she turned inward, or more inward than the woman who filled more than 80 journals already was, but that she immediately knew what mattered to her most was her family, her friends, and the beauty that she surrounded herself with: her immaculate art-filled home, her cabin, Powderhorn Park, her life. She lived those last two-and-a-half years where it mattered most: at home with her family and her friends. She read. She wrote.

She wrote because like all good writers she had to write to know what she thought, but she also wrote these essays to be read by others.

-Kathleen Coskran

Today it is easy to imagine I am not dying. In fact, I feel so positively alive as to wonder why someone somewhere told me I have stage IV lung cancer. This morning, I went on my routine power walk, pulled weeds out of the side yard perennial beds, and made a list of tasks for the afternoon. Later today, I’m planning to go out to meet friends for pasta and return home to read a few more of Emma Donoghue’s newest short stories before calling it a day.

Perhaps I feel so positively alive because I am just that—still alive. On Sunday I learned that the last of the three friends of friends diagnosed with terminal lung cancer within days of my own diagnosis had died. Like me, all three of these now deceased people never smoked. Two of the three were women. Two of the three were younger than I am; the last to die was a 45-year-old avid cyclist and father of two young children. Unlike me, all three had chemotherapy and/or surgery and radiation. But there is no comfort in any of our differences. The statistical odds for long-time survival once metastatic adenocarcinoma is diagnosed are sobering regardless of one’s age, sex, or treatment choices.

Maybe I feel so alive today because I am already dead and exist in a newly attained state of afterlife. If dreams represent the real world, as some cultures believe, then about six weeks ago I made the journey out of this life and into another. I dreamed I was lying inside a crematorium. As I observed myself from the edge of the blaze, my physical presence dissolved slowly but surely, turning into a pile of gray dust. Near the end of my dreamed burning time, when all that remained was the steel tray covered with molten ash and one white curved cranial bone, I suddenly realized I had surrendered myself for cremation one day earlier than was scheduled. And in my dream I recognized how true to my life death had become. In life I am forever ahead of time wherever I am headed. It seemed only fitting that I arrive too early to my own funeral as well.

While still dreaming, I had to decide what was next. Should I call a halt to the fire in order to enjoy one more day, even if all that remained of me was a pile of ash and one small head bone? Or should I accept my mistake and finish up what I had started, concluding that losing one day wouldn’t be all that significant as I already had had so many wonderful past days? In the end, I let the fire burn on. After waking up from the dream, I lay in bed for a long time absorbing how it felt to be dead, secure that all was as it should be.

At my fourth month cancer check-up, once again my blood work came back looking normal. My kidney function, blood pressure, liver and pulse all suggest I have a good amount of health inside. “Are you really sure I have a terminal disease?” I asked my oncologist as I stood up to leave.

Without a pause he said, “That is the one thing we are certain of.”

“How often do you think about dying?” a friend asked recently.

“Thoughts of dying are the bookends to my days,” I replied. And it is true. Not one day since diagnosis have I woken up or fallen asleep without remembering I am on death row. After a good check-up report, I simply figure I am not yet at the front of the line for execution. And with no available appeal process to distract me, I get plenty of reminders of dying during the daytime as well.

Last week I ran out of check blanks and had to choose to get one box, two boxes, or four boxes of replacements. My newspaper subscription expires soon, and they want to know if I’ll take the one-year or two-year deal being offered. Early in the spring, I admired the new varieties of iris but opted to plant snapdragons instead. Yesterday, I accidentally broke the stand off my alarm clock, and today I’m wondering whether to buy a new clock or go down into the basement in search of duct tape, a cursory implement of hope even in the best of times.

And there are plenty of larger questions about what’s next.What is the best use of my time now that I know it is to be shorter rather than longer? Are there contributions I should be making to society or my local neighborhood beyond “Do no harm.” Does having terminal cancer mean I have a new mission or calling I’d not had before?

In the past, whenever I thought ahead to the possibilities of my later years, I’d be spurred on in my fantasies by thinking of Mother Jones union organizing in her 50s; May Sarton writing her most influential book, Journal of Solitude, in her 60s; and Lillian Carter, former President Jimmy Carter’s mother, at age 70 working with lepers at Godrej Colony in India. Writer Brenda Ueland trained for Pikes Peak annual uphill trek in her 80s. My friend’s mother-in-law with two knee replacements at age 92 took herself to Paris, and then, because she was having so much fun, on to Prague— all against her cardiologist son’s advice, for sure. At age 58 I am surrounded by countless women who, once their children were raised and their careers finished, went on to reinvent themselves over and over again throughout their aging years. But since being diagnosed with terminal cancer, all that has changed. Suddenly, my own wide open prairie of a future has been reduced to the size of a sandbox.

Once diagnosed with lung cancer, I finished the last two weeks in the school term before locking the door behind me. There are many jobs ill-suited to being sick, but I believe teaching rates right next to impossible. Being a mediocre college teacher, due to unpredictable missed days or compromised health, is the last way I want to spend my final days on this planet.

I had a good teaching career and loved my work, but as Charlie King sings, “Our jobs are not our work, and our work is not our lives.” That my job and work often seemed to be one and the same was one of the gifts of teaching courses like “Women in American Culture” and “Women in a Global Perspective.” “Introduction to Africa” and “Essay/ResearchWriting” courses were the cream cheese on the bagel.

And now more than ever, I am grateful that my college teaching career was not my life. In addition to teaching I have parented, had plenty of travel and adventures, had time to draw and create collages, and possessed the stamina to fill more than 80 black bound journals with thoughts about books, art, and life in general. I also have a drawer full of file folders holding various stages of essays about women authors, time spent in distant cultures, growing up in rural Minnesota, my father’s death from Alzheimer’s, and more ethereal topics like beauty, human responsibility, and love. Last week I added to the drawer a new file folder labeled Cancer Essays.

Cancer Essays is not the book I was planning to write. But writing these essays may just be the duct tape I need for my own questions of what’s next. As I write one essay after another, I keep hoping they are like travel writing—that there is an unending need for new stories about traveling even in the most familiar of lands. Thousands of authors pass through Paris, and no two ever see the same city. Thousands write about dying, but once inside its city gates no two walk the same path.

The time for imagining my magical crone years as Mother Teresa Minor or VirginiaWoolf Jr. is over. But as long as I feel so positively alive, I can go on describing my own meandering through the streets of cancer sickness, love, and loss. I don’t need to remind others that, regardless of whom we travel with, in the end we all travel alone. But I can always hope that these essays send the message to others to make the most of their journeys, no matter where they are headed.

Having cancer makes most people sick. Having terminal cancer drives some of us crazy. Suddenly everyone and everything look different. Or perhaps everything looks the same but, with the exit timer set on sooner rather than later, we start looking differently at who we are and how we spend our final days.

Take housework, for example. A few years ago before starting a first night of class, I asked 45 female students how many of them had gone ahead and read some or all of the course’s required books. These were, to my way of thinking, irresistible reads—So Long a Letter from West Africa, Women in Apple Trees from Sweden, Fasting, Feasting from India, and The Good Women of China. An older woman in the back row spoke up, saying college students were too busy to do any extra reading and challenged me to explain where I would find the time for such indulgence. “I don’t vacuum,” I replied. My quick response had the desired effect. A collective release of student anxiety brought air back into the classroom and laughter filled the space between lectern and chairs.

But I’ve often wished I’d given those students the correct answer. It is not because I don’t vacuum that I have time to read. It is because of my conscious decision to live without television, mall shopping and other avoidable distractions of modern day society that I have had 40 years of one of the greatest gifts of all: time to read and read again and then to read some more.

And that over these past 40 years I have also found time to vacuum. When my two young sons were chasing lost Legos around the living room and shedding soccer socks on their way to the shower, I kept the carpets clean. While countless expected and unexpected house guests dragged their suitcases up and down the front staircase, I managed to wipe away household dust. Some days, in fact, there was nothing better than a freshly swept floor or polished Queen Anne table to reassure me that I could accomplish just about anything I’d put my mind to.

It is only now that I have stage IV lung cancer that I’m questioning the value of even the most basic housework. With death settling in on the back porch, I ask myself, “Is cleaning the kitchen a good use of my time? If today was the last day of my life, how would I feel knowing I’d spent it with a mop and dust rag?” And this is when the crazies get a foot in the door.

Since being diagnosed several months ago, I have done what I suspect many people in my circumstances would do. Every morning I wake up resolved to make the most of the day. I remind myself to make note of how the day’s light changes on the melting snow outside the window. I open my arms ready to catch unexpected moments of joy. I repeat over and over again the Tao maxim to “Taste Every Grain of Rice” hoping I’ll dazzle some whirling dervishes with the blaze of my heightened consciousness.

And every day without fail, my resolve gets hijacked. Some days I don’t make it out of bed before lower levels of consciousness take over.

Several weeks ago, while still under the bedcovers, I caught sight of two cumbrous dust bunnies scurrying off across the bedroom floor. These dust balls had the look of fattened hyenas fleeing an ancient walled city in the morning light after a night of gorging themselves on cat hair, blanket lint, and other morsels of human neglect. As I headed out to brush my teeth, I realized what the cunning hyenas and dust bunnies have in common. They are both experts at finding their way through even the best laid plans for walling out the unwanted.

In fact, there isn’t much inside this house that doesn’t infiltrate my ambitions to spend every dying day in a state of elevated aliveness. One minute I’m caught up in the coloring of a cardinal in the side yard, and ten minutes later I’m down in the basement cleaning out the cat’s litter box. I enter the kitchen for a cup of lemon ginger tea, and the dirty dishes grab hold of me like avenging relatives. A diagnosis of terminal illness doesn’t stop the broccoli at the back of the refrigerator from going bad, fix a broken pipe, or keep the city’s recycling truck from coming every other Thursday. The most basic elements of daily life remain unaltered, even when a person’s daily circumstances get radically rearranged.

Yesterday I climbed up on the utility ladder to replace the battery in the kitchen clock. But before I took the clock down off the wall, I caught myself wondering if maybe the clock might be the exception.What about the off chance that it wasn’t sluggish alkaline but time itself making new allowances for my diagnosis? What if inside my house time, recognizing how little of it I had left, was actually out of sympathy slowing itself down more and more with each passing day?

“Chop wood, carry water” the early mystics advised their followers in their search for enlightenment. St. Francis of Assisi, when asked what he would do if he were told it was his last day on earth, looked down at the shovel in his hand and responded, “I’d continue to tend my garden.” There is a part of us all that wants to believe that what ever we happen to do in a day is plenty good, even for our last day. That it is in the ordinary we can also find the extraordinary.

But there is also a part in many of us that can’t let go of the search for a more exciting brand of extraordinary. Some of us are bred and raised for the quest of something extra, something that takes us far from home and farther yet out of our own daily routines. What, if not some distinctive measure of career or achievement or adventure, gives any of us the certainty that our lives have been well lived? And, once the late 1960s erased the breadbox message that housework is the key to every woman’s fulfillment, when has doing housework made for good dinner table conversation?

Over the years I have gone far from home and had what some people might call extraordinary adventures. I’ve ridden a low-slung makoro through the Okavango Delta, eaten rice and dhal in Gandhiji’s get-away ashram in central India, shimmied down the Co-Chi tunnels outside Hanoi, ridden around Havana on a bicycle, seen Erro’s art in Helsinki, and last August sat in Johannesburg’s new Constitutional Court with others celebrating South Africa’s NationalWomen’s Day. I’ve walked the medinas in Morocco and Tunisia, visited village weavers in Cambodia, entered religious sites of ancient Anatolia, and floated up the Mekong River between Laos and China waving to people panning for gold. And while some of my experiences might make a travel brochure, just as many would not. I’ve been bitten by a dogfish in Senegal, seen young boys shot at in Gaza City, and kept close track of the refugee leader’s feet while walking from Malawi into Mozambique on a road turned into Swiss cheese by exploded land mines.

“Are you planning on doing any more traveling?” people often ask when hearing that I am sick. At least once a year since 1990 with few exceptions I have packed my Eagle Creek Traveler and headed thousands of miles and multiple time zones away from the ordinariness of dish soap, dust rags, and recycling bins. And no doubt more than a few have been surprised by my answer. “No,” I say, “I’m planning to stay home and dust the piano.”

Today, in fact, I dusted the piano as I have never dusted it before. As I slowly rubbed down its rich reddish brown curved mahogany cabinet, I remembered what a mess this odd sized baby grand had been when the piano movers brought it into the house six years ago. The outside had endured years of abuse, and the innards were nothing short of a disaster: keys stuck, felts worn down to the wood, hammers and knuckles leaning into one another like upended planks on a battered ship. But a local piano repair man needing quick cash to pay his January heating bill, and my persistence that he return again and again until he finished the job he started, salvaged the instrument. And the 1920s piano was better than salvaged. Over time it remembered how to sing in just the right voice and grew forgiving of my fumbled Scarlatti, McDowell, and Debussy.

Going on to clean the rest of the house, I grew more and more aware of just how the ordinary can become extraordinary. After years of use the Queen Anne table has become an altar where meals get offered to family and friends. Wingback chairs are thrones from which my sons and I pass along ancient and newly found stories. The desks and drawing table serve as lightning rods for ideas and images pulled down from mystical spaces. The wrap-around floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves are polished passageways leading to tomes of old and new wisdom, compassion, and revelation. Dusting history, literature, memoir, and art stitched and glued to spines reminded me of how I can never get enough of the written word while living, and how dreadfully much I will miss it when I am gone.

I am finding that I don’t need to go anywhere beyond these walls to live my remaining days well. Pictures of grandchildren, boxed up letters, my sons’ favorite childhood books, Zambian baskets, and my grandmother’s old Irish tea pot are all here still needing to be dusted. Each and every day within these walls I grow more satisfied in the search for life’s balance between extraordinary moments and diving into the ordinariness of everyday living. Like the robin arriving back in my yard, I can get a good view of the garden by opening my wings and flying to the top of the nearby maple tree. But as soon as I start thinking about worms, I can hurry back down to dig my claws deep into the dirt between the snow crocuses and daffodils.

There could be worse things to be doing with one’s last days than housework. In fact, dusting and mopping might just be among the saner activities I’ve done since learning I have cancer. And, it is even possible that having the Martha Washington sewing cabinet and the old pine pie chest well dusted will provide some extraordinary comfort in the days ahead.

Growing up on a small family farm meant having almost daily contact with disaster. At an early age I was introduced to birthing deaths, bloating deaths, infection, and disease. Cattle, horses, and pigs in my father’s pastures and pens lived the Russian roulette life of the farmyard. More than a few of our dogs, cats, and chickens ended up under the wheels of passing milk trucks and farm equipment. Even the healthiest of sheep on the farm might not survive a southern Minnesota ice storm or blizzard. And, Minnesota summers were sometimes no more merciful.

The summer when I was ten years old, my mother, father, and I were seated at the old oak kitchen table when a wind came up so suddenly it rattled the kitchen chimney. Our forks were in midair when the room went dark. The sounds of the storm battering the house, barn, outbuildings, animals, and fields entered the room through the screen door. First came the heavy rain on the tin roofs of the sheds, and then came the beating at the kitchen windows. Hailstones the size of brass door knobs pressed down on the farm from all directions. And then, as quickly as it had arrived, the storm moved on, the darkness was pulled back from the sky, and the chimney left to its old ways.

For the first time in years, my father had a crop in the north fields that promised to cover the October farm mortgage payment. In the time it took us to say noonday grace and fill our plates with meat and potatoes, a mid-July storm stripped all of my father’s 80 acres of ripening corn down to stubble.

The storm passed, but there was no air or speech left in the kitchen. After a long look out the window at what had once been, my father turned to the space between the three of us and said, “I’m going out to feed the heifers.”

Marjorie Williams, D.C. journalist and writer of the posthumously edited The Woman at the Washington Zoo, asked her doctor why she had gotten liver cancer. Her tests for cirrhosis and hepatitis had come back negative, and the doctor had told her, “It’s wild that you look so healthy.” Marjorie Williams died at age 47 from what her doctor could only explain as, “Lady, you got hit by lightning.”

When my friend pressed the oncology resident recently about what his theory might be of how I had gotten lung cancer, he replied, “She just got unlucky.” The major suspects had been ruled out. I had never smoked cigarettes, didn’t spend time with or around second-hand smoke, hadn’t lived or grown up playing near an asbestos site, and had never been employed by a coal mine or 19th century textile mill.

I just got unlucky. And Marjorie Williams and I are by no means the only ones hit by bad luck lately. Every day’s newspaper runs obituaries telling of women and men, girls and boys, babies of all ages, some who might even have looked wildly healthy, being struck down by some unexpected storm.

For over 40 years, I’ve taken care of my body. I am the right weight and have no other diagnosis of illness. I’ve eaten wisely, exercised regularly, and, aside from the occasional piece of high-end chocolate, have never developed a taste for caffeine, alcohol, or packaged food of any kind. It is not a surprise that I appear healthy. What is surprising is that I have lung cancer.

In fact, I am still in shock from hearing the diagnosis. On December 2nd, I went in for a routine physical to check out why I had suddenly begun to have some shortness of breath. The family practitioner took one look at the x-ray, and pointing to a large white mass in my left lung said, “You either have a blood clot, an infection, or a malignancy.” Because it was so late on a Friday afternoon, she sent me for an overnight at the local hospital for testing. By 3 p.m. the next day, a resident doctor told me I had cancer. More tests were needed to determine whether I had breast cancer or lung cancer.

On December 8th at 8:30 a.m., I was told the results of the breast scan and bone scan. I have stage IV adenocarcinoma, or non-small cell lung cancer. The oncologist, never once losing eye contact with me, said there was no known cure and any treatment I chose, at best, would only be a means to live a little longer. When I asked for a more precise prognosis, he told me, “I’ve been an oncologist for 33 years, and I have never been right.” Then he laid out the national studies on this sort of cancer—survival time, on average, is one year after diagnosis. I have since learned that the five-year survival rate of non-small cell lung cancer patients is one percent, or as I wrote later in my journal, “They don’t have the guts to say zero.”

And I started to relive again that mid-July day on the farm. I saw how my father’s best crop in years had been destroyed while the three of us sat helpless in our kitchen chairs. I remember my mother and I walking out to the edge of the fields and seeing close up what had become of the fall farm payment. And I remember at age ten being absolutely certain that this event was not because a superpower from above or a cursed force from below was trying to pull my parents under. Growing up on the farm had taught me at an early age that even the hardest work isn’t enough to guarantee a crop or keep a calf healthy or save a flock of chickens from disease. My parents’ daily lives were about putting their wits and backbreaking labor up against the uncontrollable. Nature didn’t offer them much help, let alone any guarantees.

Remembering my father’s sparse words that day has helped me cope with my own unexpected loss of a harvest. I find myself comforting family and friends with the corn crop story as a means of reminding us all of what we already know—that none of us have any guarantees about how long we live or how we die. I don’t remember being handed a card saying, “you will live to be 85 or 72 or even 59.” And if I ever had such a card, I add, I must have lost it somewhere along the way!

I had illusions of longevity, but now I know that all along those illusions were paper kites without wind. Because my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and even cousins grew old, I was lured into thinking I too would become a well-ripened, old member of the Sauber Devine clan. In fact, when I turned 44, I was so confident of a long life that I said to a friend, “I’ve now lived half of my life.”My grandfather Patrick Devine was 94 when he was diagnosed with cancer, and those of us gathered around his hospice bed agreed Pat had had a good life and time had been rightly generous to him.

When Pat was my current age, he had 36 more years left to live. A Friday afternoon trip to the doctor and a few CT scans later, I’m left wondering if I’ll survive long enough to see my soon-to-be born grandchild. I catch myself hoping I’ll live one year so I can hold this new child in my lap and read aloud Maple Hill Farm. Three more years sounds very appealing. Five more years would be even better. Ten years might qualify me for the Guinness Book of World Records.

We all know we must die sometime. It is just that some of us would like to live a bit longer than we get to. I can’t help but think about all I’ll miss by dying sooner rather than later. I had always imagined myself taking my grandchildren, once they were old enough, on trips to places like Budapest, Harare, Dublin, Topeka, Kansas, or wherever might fuel their love of the larger world. My sons are just beginning their careers, and I’d hoped to see them settle into houses and middle age. And I had plenty of plans for the years after retirement from my own career as a college teacher. If lists of ideas for research and writing and other projects make for good wallpaper, I have enough to redecorate my own house and the next door neighbor’s yellow bungalow.

My father looked long and hard at his ruined crop before he came to accept what he could not change. I know I can’t change my diagnosis of terminal cancer any more than the three of us could have stopped the hailstones that summer day so long ago. But my father did go out to feed the heifers, and I too, like my father, am moving on, doing what I can to match my wits against what I can’t control.

Religious people in the same situation as mine might find comfort in thinking, “Thy will be done.” I grabbed a pitchfork and said, “I’ve got to get my will done!” For the first few weeks after my diagnosis, I shoveled through jobs that await anyone suddenly faced with a shortened life. I wrote my last will and testament, completed my living will directive, organized my financial accounts where my sons can find them, and researched cremation plans. On the farm where I grew up, work came first, no matter if it was a Sunday or aWednesday, a sunny day or a stormy one.

And along with sorting out my business affairs, I began the process of telling family and friends about my diagnosis. Like a child first practicing the alphabet, the sounds of cancer and terminal were not sounds I was familiar with within the context of my own life. But by repeating my cancer story over and over again, I began to make the necessary connections. And I began to better grasp why the word cancer evokes fear and terminal brings such grief.

“We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love,” wroteMadame de Stael. But when death puts its hand on our own beloved self, then that is another place altogether. Fear and grief become a suit of clothes the terminally ill can’t ever take off and put away in the closet.

I can’t say for certain where my father found the fall mortgage money the year of the hailstorm, but most likely he’d been forced to sell off some or all of the young heifers he’d gone to feed that July day. My father thought he was going to have the best corn harvest in years. But he got unlucky. I too have gotten unlucky, but perhaps it is luck enough to have learned at an early age that hailstorms do happen.

There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been:
A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful,
and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive and conquer;
who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death.
-Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

If economic efficiency is getting the best possible return for an investment, then it goes against reason for human beings to spend more, not less, time with other human beings who have terminal diseases. Logic says that the more efficient use of human emotional energy would be to move away from the dying in search of healthier and hailer specimens who can deliver bigger payoffs far into the future. After all, one certifiably dying friend equals one less ally against one’s own misery and inevitable death.

But economic efficiency seems to hold little sway when it comes to emotional ties among family and friends. And while the human heart’s rationalization may be foreign and unquantifiable to the statistician, it is lucky for us chickens that it holds firm in its resolve to accompany our loved ones to the end.

When my grandfather, Patrick Devine, was diagnosed with terminal cancer at age 94 and told he had only days to live, I witnessed something I had never seen before. I grew up going to all sorts of wakes and funerals for deceased members of the family and surrounding farm community. But this was a wake with the soon to be buried person still alive and talking. My grandfather, in a bright blue hospital gown, held his folded hands over his chest for three days straight as family and friends streamed to his side like bears to a honey pot.Mikey Nash, Ben andMaggie Casey, the Sullivans, Ryans, O’Herns and Devines all took turns saying their goodbyes to a man some of them had known for nearly a century.

I kept to the hospital room’s corner beige vinyl chair with my legs folded out of people’s way and my ears open to learn what I could about a man whom I knew best as a grandfather. Horsetrading stories, farm tales, family jokes, and plenty of tears rolled into Irish blessings poured out over a man I now know was well loved and respected by so many. When I told my grandfather at the end of the third day that he looked like a flower in his blue gown, he turned his head towards me and said, “Well, that would be right because I’ve been a thistle all my life.”

When I was diagnosed with terminal cancer five months ago, I knew my own living wake had begun. Friends and family began wanting to spend more time with me and, while my friends and I had a long tradition of lunching together, these post-diagnosis noonday meals took on an entirely new flavor.

It took just one lunch to demonstrate that breaking the news I have stage IV adenocarcinoma while seated with a friend at a restaurant table was a terrible waste of good food and money. So I started telling friends about my disease over the telephone well in advance of our scheduled meal. By the time our lunch date rolled around, I ordered my bowl of soup confident that my hardest job was behind me.My friends could digest their sandwiches because they had begun to move past the initial shock of my prognosis.

The first round of cancer lunches was therapeutic for both my friends and me for sure, but these lunches were sometimes hard to get through. I remember years ago a woman from Rosebud Reservation told me how her grandmother would walk far out into the prairie to be alone in her grief, but that the sound of her wailing could still be heard back at the house. These early lunches, for anyone eavesdropping, had all the sounds of a muzzled wail. Friends cried quietly over tuna salad sandwiches. I choked down my dessert while reminding my friends that Henny Penny had been wrong about the sky falling down.

None of us can know in advance how we will react when a loved one gets a death sentence. But early on in these cancer lunches, I saw certain patterns to my friends’ responses to my sudden turn of fate. Some grew fearful for their own health. Others found themselves painfully plunged back into memories of dying parents and siblings. A few were gripped with worry that they themselves might not be strong enough to see me through what lay ahead.

I had friends with little or no experience with dying and those who had seen more than their share of death. Friends from certain family systems were insistent that I spare no expense to find a cure. Several good friends grew withdrawn and depressed. One long time friend said, “It makes me so sad to imagine my life without you.” And I thought, but didn’t say, “And it makes me so sad to imagine me without life.” “Everything has become illuminated,” another close friend declared over hamburgers and fries. For her, like me, my having cancer had changed everything, and life would never go back to how it once was.

And so many friends were amazingly clear about what they had to offer. “I’ll scrub your kitchen floors or wash your car,” “I’ll get your groceries anytime you need some,” “Please call on me to mow your lawn or shovel your snow” were among the many practical and generous responses to my disease. A few friends surprised me by knowing exactly what they wanted from me. One friend came to lunch prepared with, “What I want is: one, for you to spend more time with me; two, make me part of your dying; and three, take me along one more time to your cabin in the woods.”

That I survived to have a second round of cancer lunches became reason to celebrate. Some of my friends insisted that we start going to the more expensive restaurants around town and treat ourselves to upscale cuisines. Instead of my driving to meet friends at restaurants, friends came to my house and picked me up. Presents of books, teas, soaps, and candles started to show up at the lunch table. And rather than wanting to see me less, people asked to see me more. My lunch calendar began looking like columbine in full bloom. Out-of-town friends just had to squeeze their way in.

Round three of the cancer lunches is in progress now. Tomorrow is my 59th birthday, and friends are calling once again to get on my lunch calendar. And more and more I see how everything has changed. Practice is making us all better at being together as though it might be our last time. My friends and I laugh more, cry easier, and no longer part ways without saying we love each other. And we share our mutual efforts at making each day count. Since my diagnosis, one friend has stopped buying “that cheap ice cream” and now buys herself the best. Another friend decided there was no reason to put off traveling any longer and just returned from a grand trip to Europe. Everything has become illuminated and, in many ways, for the better. Among my friends, my dying has produced a flurry of living.

One of my friends recently reminded me of this story from my past as we chewed our way through organic Nicoise salads. For my high school graduation, I was chosen to play the grand entrance organ march. I knew I wasn’t the best organ player in my music program, so I asked Sister Prudentia why me when other players were much better. “We know you are not the best player,” my organ teacher assured me, “but we can count on you to play through your mistakes.”

“It’s the perfect metaphor for your life!” my friend said. Maybe it is an even better metaphor for my cancer lunches with friends. I may not be the best at the job of dying, but I am determined to keep track of the beat and my whereabouts in the piece of music being played every time I sit across from a loved one. It is true “there is no one here but us chickens.” And, while it would be nice to “flee misery and skip death,” it should be possible to play on, mistakes and all, in the interests of having a grand final march.

My friends are learning with me that rather than giving ourselves over to panic and fear, together we are able to celebrate life as we know it at this moment. I have always been keenly aware that we are dying as we live. What these cancer lunches are bringing home to me is just how alive we can still be while dying.

I will not fold my hands over my chest like my grandfather as long as I am able to reach out and return the embrace of all the people I have loved over all these years. None of the people I care about are deciding yet to look for a better deal down the street. And that is enough evidence for me to prove that the heart has its own logic, that the intangible force of love has its own system of rewards, even in the face of the inevitable loss of a loved one.

For years I’ve visited libraries. I’ve sat in libraries, researched in libraries, looked up and down shelves of libraries, and studied patterns within libraries. In Lilongwe at the University of Malawi, I remember being struck by a disproportionably large presence of books about trees in Alaska. In Jinja, Uganda, it was comforting that the most fingered books on the school library shelves were those by African writers. Closer to home, I watch as community library space shifts to video and DVD titles. In my own library, world literature, social and cultural histories, and books by and about women rule the bookshelves.

So I felt well prepared to make good use of the local cancer center libraries following my recent diagnosis of lung cancer. I knew very little about cancer and even less about stage IV adenocarcinoma. I went hoping to find information, treatment advice, and good cancer-related reads for the days ahead.

The first three cancer center libraries I visited drew me in with the sheer beauty of their interiors. Rich mahogany bookshelves and soft leather chairs circling library tables beckoned at the hospital where I had my follow-up appointments. At the local Women’s Cancer Center, textile hangings and good lighting made the large L-shaped room comforting and reassuring. At another major hospital cancer center library, afghans and throw pillows were tastefully distributed throughout the reading room. In all these libraries, the shelves were spilling over with books, videos, and pamphlets on the subject of cancer.

Entering these cancer center libraries, I was sure I had come upon a cornucopia of promising reads. But as I began to look closer at these offerings, I was reminded of something I once read by John Berger:

“The human imagination…has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.”

Here, the human imagination had been gathered into three distinct categories, each category in one way or another attached too closely to the material and ethereal world. I had happened upon a place where the human yearning for a good run, even when all the rabbits disappear into the wild, gets short shrift.

The first group, and by far the largest, is dominated by medical manual type books. Titles like The Pain Clinic Manual, Medical Pocket Guide to Chemotherapy, and Skin Cancer : Atlas of Clinical Oncology + CD-Rom shove up against one another like rush hour commuters suited up in hardback, paperback, and spiral bindings. But while all these books look to be very hard working and promise to deliver essential information about symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, the most significant clue to what they have to offer lies in their date of publication. Given the speed of medical research and treatment discoveries, the real challenge for readers in this category is finding up-to-date books specific to the wide range of possible diagnoses. Books published three years ago harbor fugitive information past its prime. Books older than five years are best left for archaeologists.

The second grouping of books clusters around the topics of health and care of the person with cancer. With information about alternative medicines, acupuncture, diet, vitamins, exercise, yoga, and meditation, these books offer practical advice on how to maintain good physical and mental health while one’s body endures such incursions as surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy. Books like Eat Right Live Longer, Flax the Super Food, and Triumph: Getting Back to Normal When You Have Cancer come complete with printed sidebars of condensed medical facts and anecdotal evidence of improved health. These books, unlike those in the first category, ride on a notable optimism that the human body, with the right help, can and will in many cases overcome cancer.

Up Front Sex and the Post-Mastectomy Woman clued me in about what lay ahead in the third grouping of cancer library reads. I’m still not sure what Up Front Sex includes, but I do recognize in Post-Mastectomy Woman the problems of labeling anyone by only one part of her or his anatomy. Titles like Beauty and Cancer: Looking and Feeling Your Best, A Feather in My Wig: Ovarian Cancer Cured, Seventeen Years and Going Strong, and You Too Can Say “No” To Cancer mingle among proclamations that “Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Suddenly, the material world of biological facts had fallen away, and I had landed in a land of metaphysical disconnect. Chemotherapy options became choosing the right head scarf. Anxieties about sickness and death were trumped by the eternal pursuit of female beauty.

As I read title after title in this third category, I thought about Lewis Carroll’s Alice facing the Queen of Hearts in the increasingly bizarre game of croquet. Biology and alternative remedies disappeared, and in their place appeared a different set of rules about how to win at the game of cancer. Books written for, and often by, women warn women with cancer not to start swinging their mallets at the Mad Hatter quest for beauty. In fact, more than ever, women with cancer, and in particular breast cancer, are told they can and should learn new ways to look sexy—even during chemotherapy. Some books are more callous than others in their disregard for women with breast cancer. Impotence from prostate cancer gets the occasional nod, but there is no The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Prostate Cancer. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to LivingWith Breast Cancer can, however, be found at cancer center libraries, local libraries, and bookstores across the nation.

Mixed into this pink ghetto of female beauty tips are true stories of individual women’s courage and wisdom in times of illness and dying. But even these testimonials, upon closer examination, seem to send dangerous and potentially damaging messages to women living with and dying from cancer. With titles like No Mountain Too High: A Triumph Over Breast Cancer and Cancer Has Its Privileges: Stories of Hope and Laughter, women are told over and over again that it is their attitude, emotional strength, and determination above all else that decide their fate. Stories of women who were miraculously cured of cancer perhaps pass along the idea that if all sick women would just try a little harder, they too “can do it.” Turning female illness into contests of courage and triumph encourages us to admire the few while running the risk that the vast majority of women facing cancer in their everyday lives become invisible.

It could be that the 21st century superwoman in the world of illness raises her children, heads the law firm, conquers her cancer, and knows all about Up Front Sex. At the very least, women diagnosed with cancer have been handed yet another job society expects them to excel at: they are to keep themselves alive at whatever cost while at the same time showing their loved ones the unflinching face of cheerfulness and optimism. Male survivors, such as the famous cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, aren’t writing about keeping up the laughter while climbing the mountain of recovery. And while an individual’s attitude is certainly an important factor in all people’s health, I didn’t find any books telling men with bladder cancer to buy different colored pants as part of their treatment plan. Women with cancer, on the other hand, are bombarded with messages to buy the right head covering, make their men feel at ease in the bedroom, go on healing adventures, hope, laugh, and keep smiling. That’s an awful lot to ask of anyone, let alone someone who is sick and/or dying.

In her 2001 essay “Welcome to Cancerland,” Barbara Ehrenreich describes the world of breast cancer as “pink-ribbon-themed,” “infantilizing trope” in our “implacably optimistic breast-cancer culture.” I now know that the pink ghetto is not only reserved for women with breast cancer. I walked away from this third category of books convinced that the jobs of self-healing, adapting one’s looks to cancer, and taking charge of the emotional fallout from cancer have been assigned to women. And history reveals that once a job, role, or expectation becomes feminized, the pay goes down, respect diminishes, and few men think to question the resulting inequalities.

The 2004 book, Breast Cancer Husband: How to Help Your Wife (and Yourself) During Diagnosis, Treatment, and Beyond made me wonder if the added “(and Yourself)” was to help boost sales or simply state up front how things really are out there in Cancerland. That women and men are treated differently in cancer clinics and at home comes as no surprise. That there is such a visible divide on the shelves of cancer center libraries simply points out just how far we have yet to come.

I wondered as I left the cancer center libraries, where were the books I thought I’d find? What about the history of cancer or critiques of social attitudes towards the C word? How about books discussing our national cancer policy and the ethics and economics of cancer research and treatments? And, perhaps even more urgent for a reader with terminal cancer, where were the books that talked about dreams of the human imagination, “like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open?” Where were the books about people like me who, after listening to their own teeth chattering through the first nights after diagnosis, get up every morning still in love with the dream while accepting that chasing rabbits is coming to an end?

It is predicted that one out of every two Americans will get cancer in their lifetime. In August of 2005, Newsweek magazine reported that lung cancer alone kills some 160,000 Americans each year. That’s an awful lot of teeth to be chattering on any given night.

Literature talks about chattering teeth. In Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ivan’s teeth are definitely rattling around inside his head as he struggles to get a handle on his physical and emotional maladies. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a classic illness story. Diary of a Pigeon Watcher chronicles one woman’s recovery while watching the cycles of birds just beyond her urban windowsill. J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron makes good use of cancer as metaphor for apartheid rot in South Africa. Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, May Sarton’s After the Stroke, and Terry Tempest Williams’ marvelous book Refuge, about her mother’s cancer and the environment in which she lives, illustrate well the power of cancer writing. In my home file drawer, I recently came across an essay I clipped out of Harper’s Magazine in 1997, titled “A Woman with Breast Cancer/The will to live, as seen under a microscope” by Spencer Nadler. I didn’t have cancer at the time, didn’t know anyone who had cancer at the time, but the essay spoke to me in ways I didn’t ever want to lose. More recently, the Washington Post printed Marjorie Williams’ essay “The Halloween of My Dreams.” Ms. Williams gives us a good look at the self-sustaining dreams. Shortly before she dies of liver cancer, Marjorie Williams superimposes on her little girl’s Halloween dress-up the joy she’ll be missing when her only daughter heads off to the prom.

Once Alice returned to her own familiar world, she started feeling like herself again and was ever so glad to be home. And while my time in the cancer center libraries was not a waste, I won’t be returning anytime soon. Instead, I’ll make my own pile of good cancer reads of novels about women and men in all states of health and illness. I’ll add in essays and poetry I read years ago, so I can taste their pleasures again; and from a top shelf in my living room, I’ll pull out my Barbara Tuchman collection. And, once settled back into my old brown corduroy chair, I’ll keep an eye out in hopes that somewhere in my cancer reading pile there’ll be one more rabbit waiting.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Evelyn Ellison Twitchell regards targeted cancer therapy drugs as one hot new place for investors to put their money. Because research has made possible “what was once a dream,” companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Onyx Pharmaceuticals stand to profit as “the total cancer-drug market is expected to nearly double to $70 billion by 2009.” Fortunes made and jail time served, as in the Bristol-Myers Squibb case of Martha Stewart’s insider trading, all point to a stockbrokers’ paradise, as new and improved antiangiogenesis drugs, VEGF traps, and EGFR inhibitors continue to hit the market.

But in December I was experiencing night sweats, fluid on my lungs, weight loss and shortness of breath—symptoms of advanced lung cancer, so it was an oncologist, not a stockbroker, who introduced me to the high stakes world of targeted therapy cancer drugs. Instead of OSI Pharmaceutical stock options, I got handed a prescription for one of the many cancer therapy drugs, a specific EGFR inhibitor unable to cure but aimed at slowing down my brand of fast growing cancer cells.

Now, once a month I step up to a pharmacy window and exchange my insurance prescription co-pay for 30 targeted therapy cancer pills. These particular pills, fast tracked through FDA approval a little over a year ago, come with two-year studies showing only marginal increases in survival rates for stage IV non-small cell lung cancer participants. Recommended as follow-up treatment after chemotherapy fails, little is known about the impact of these drugs on people, like me, who skip chemotherapy and head straight to EGFR inhibitor drugs. Long-term effects of EGFR inhibitor drugs, of course, are anyone’s guess.

“Your friend with cancer has a definite glow about her,” a neighborhood psychic tells a friend of mine after seeing me walk through the local park. “Great. Now I’m emitting radioactive auras as well!” I responded. Printed warnings about possible side effects of targeted therapy cancer drugs weigh in like a Chilton’s auto repair manual. And like Chilton’s Auto Repair Manual, drug companies scrupulously list all that can break, leak, and malfunction when the human engine starts to fail. At best 30% to 50% of people taking these drugs get the benefits of added road time. I’m one of the lucky ones, but that said, I haven’t a clue about what is really happening inside my own body.

External changes, on the other hand, are easy to spot. One of my sons noticed the For Sale sign at the local Norwegian barber’s building, site of my $13 haircuts, and teased, “I think you’ve gone and put him out of business!” I haven’t been back for a haircut since starting on the EGFR inhibitor drug. The hair on my head stopped growing. What few leg hairs I once had flew off one day when I wasn’t looking. Several months ago my straight brown eyebrows mutated into short fat gray stubbles staring each other down like two burly hedgehogs. My pubic hair rearrangement is best left undefined. Rashes, skin burns, and weight gain add to my everincreasing dented look.

None of these external changes is reason enough to stop swallowing one EGFR inhibitor pill every day at precisely 4 p.m. But every day as this EGFR inhibitor slips down my throat, I think about the economic implications of what I am swallowing. Targeted cancer therapy drugs supply promising investments on the stock exchange, for sure. But the day to day dollar cost of the cancer drug I’m taking leaves me with plenty of troubling questions.

One day, while heading out the back door of my house, I started laughing out loud at the absurdity of what these little white pills cost. I asked the surrounding air, “Is there an economist alive who in good conscience would defend spending thousands of dollars a year, not to cure, but to keep someone like me alive a few extra months?” The air was quick to answer, “Of course not.” At the market price of $2,800 for a monthly supply of this new cancer drug, I send to my stomach more money than many of my neighbors bring home after a month of hard work. As this drug forestalls my own dying for a few more months, I can’t help but look beyond drug companies’ receipts and wonder about my own part in economic injustice.

Years ago, I was into engineering simple-minded means to redistribute wealth. Whenever there was a question of who should pay a restaurant bill, I suggested we decide the matter based on our personal financial resources. When I’d ask a former student still clerking at Kmart “Which of us earns more money?” I’d pay. If my eating partner snickered at the notion that my teaching salary was anywhere near the pay received for being a lawyer or business owner, I’d give the higher salaried person the chance to turn things right. And, if only for that moment in time, I felt hopeful that some margin of fairness and equity was possible.

But now economic justice seems to just get further and further away. Promising therapies like EGFR inhibitors sell drugs and provide huge drug company profits, but why are they so expensive to the people whose lives are on the line? How do these drug prices impact ordinary people’s insurance premiums? What happens to people with too little or no drug prescription coverage? How many people diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, or kidney cancer now face the decision to bankrupt their family for these not quite miraculous drugs or lose their chance to see a daughter graduate from college or light another Christmas candle? When I told the oncologist I had a fantasy about being able to turn my little white pills into cash and give the money to someone in need, he smiled and said, “Well, that would be nice—but it’s not the way the system works.”

But how does the system really work these days, and who does or doesn’t get the chance to live a few months longer thanks to the most recent cancer therapy discoveries? Time, aging, and travel have done nothing but make me firmer in the conviction that no one human has greater value than another. The life of a young man in a Ghanaian village has as much value as that of a rock star in New York City. The children on one side of a war are just as valuable as those on the other side. A cancer patient at a private clinic is worth every bit as much as someone across town in the community health care center.

And, closer to home, what is the economic value of the few extra months this costly prescription might give me? I could now be useful for collecting ransom, depending on the value family and friends put on keeping me around. I’m too young for regular Social Security to kick in, but if I live long enough, I just might see some payback for all the years of those long-term disability insurance deductions. My contribution to the overall economic health of the nation is managing to hold steady. I’ve simply replaced my outlays at the gas pump and used bookstore with prescription expenditures and raw food purchases.

I am humbled knowing that, but for the place and time of my birth, I could well be the one making the hard cancer drug choices—or having no choice at all. And, while I may wish to, I know I can’t turn around the economics of prescription drugs by passing along these little white pills. But just once in awhile, as I’m taking my EFGR inhibitor drug at precisely 4 p.m. every day, I’d like to think some economic justice is possible in the world of pharmaceuticals. While swallowing the cost of the cancer drug, I like to think that some day everyone who could benefit from targeted cancer therapy drugs will get the chance.

One of my earliest childhood memories is hiccupping as I was looking out the second story farmhouse bedroom window. My mother, thinking it best to scare the hiccups out of me, without warning pushed me against the windowpane and shouted, “Look, there’s a lion in the yard!” I don’t remember if the hiccups subsided or not, but I do remember seeing the lion. In fact, I can still see that lion in my mind’s eye today. And I remember at age four, rather than feeling fear, I felt the thrill of having such a magnificent creature standing in our Minnesota farmyard looking back at us.

When I was diagnosed with lung cancer, I was unexpectedly pushed against a windowpane again. But this time rather than seeing a lion out my window, I immediately saw all the ferocious creatures already filling the yards of so many people I’ve met over the years at home and abroad. This new lion in my yard seems particularly dwarfish compared to wars, refugee camp living, losing young children to curable diseases, and countless other disasters I witnessed while traveling or studying in places like India, Africa, and Asia.

“But what do you do with YOUR fear?” a friend asked me recently, certain that her reaction to learning she had a terminal illness wouldn’t be so quick to take measure of Phnom Penh orphans or Nairobi street kids. “Do you just jump over your fear?” she offered. I didn’t have any quick and ready answer to her question, but her question set in motion an examination of what I have or have not learned about my own fears over the years.

For starters, I realized I had been raised by a tribe of fearless people. Every man I knew as a child—whether he was an uncle, a neighbor, or my own father—was a farmer. In hindsight, every one of them must have buried his fear of mean cattle, dangerous machinery, and silo asphyxiation deep inside himself before heading out to do his daily farm chores. I witnessed my own father scale 20-story haystacks, tackle ornery two-ton bulls, and stick his bare hand alongside hydraulic hitches to pull out entangled hay baler twine. It didn’t seem to matter what potential risk there was or what damage resulted. Rather than stop to question what he was about to do or sit down long enough afterward to make sure all his bones were intact, he just kept going. Time and time again, my father worked with untreated broken collarbones, dislocated shoulders, bleeding gashes on the top of his head, and bruises the size of Baltimore. On our 80-acre farm, fear did not get a say in which jobs got done and which ones were left behind.

The women I was surrounded by as a child were no different. I remember early one winter morning, my mother ran out of the house still in her long flannel nightdress in pursuit of some fast moving steers headed for the county road. When her bedclothes got caught on the barbwire fence she was leaping over, she simply pulled herself off the wire and kept on running, shredded flannel spreading out behind her like steamboat streamers.

My mother, aunts, and neighboring women drove tractors up steep ditches while the men bellowed out directions from behind mud-stuck implements. I heard them share stories about catching attacking roosters, herding angry sows back into pens, and facing down hungry foxes at the henhouse while the men were off in the fields. There were no cell phones back then, and 911 was never designed to help out in cases of farmers’ wives’ crises. Yet never once, as a child, did I hear these women sound afraid. Instead, these rural women in their 30s and 40s sat upright on their front porches relaying their scrimmages with the enemy like the well trained field generals they were.

“A fool without fear is sometimes wiser than an angel with fear,” Nancy Astor says in My Two Countries. Perhaps the fearless people I knew growing up were fools, but I can see there was some wisdom in their ways as well. I don’t know how, while I was growing up, my parents would have reacted had they faced war or serious disease or the death of a child. But I do know, within the perimeters of their own land and while still milking 25 Holstein and Jersey cows twice a day seven days a week for over 60 years and getting the hay crops harvested, they must have made some sort of pact with fear. Perhaps in childhood they had already decided that being angels with fear wasn’t for them.

But those were my growing up years, and eventually both my parents did have to face fear. The one time I saw fear in my father’s eyes was when he was 78 years old and in the hospital for the first time in his life. Once he was off the familiar grounds of the farm with no pitchfork or shovel to protect himself, his courage quickly slipped away in the struggle to stop the stampede of dying. All I could do was hold his hand and reassure him that this one last chore was something he could also handle.

After my father’s death, my 75-year-old mother single-handedly moved herself off the farm and into town. Her strapping young farming nephews were scheduled to come with their trucks, but because she thought the sewing machine head and loaded dresser drawers were “too heavy for the boys to move,” she went ahead and did it alone. When they arrived on the day of the planned move, all they could do was laugh at what was left for them to carry—the shells of dressers and a few sticks of furniture too large to fit in my mother’s car trunk.

My mother’s fears have come out now that I have cancer. She always seems fine with her own dying. Like all good Irishwomen who enjoy the sports page of the obituaries, my mother talks about death as though it were the woman next door—always too late or too early, but sure to show up when least expected. My own dying seems too early to her as well, but as she said to me the other day, “Well, we all have to go sometime, and you’re no exception.”

I have felt fear in the last two months in new ways, for sure. The night after my diagnosis was the most afraid I have ever been. Suddenly I feared I’d die too soon, that I wouldn’t get everything done I thought any decent dying person should do before departure. I feared I’d be too much of a burden on my sons in the thrashing about business of dying. I was afraid I wouldn’t wake up the next morning and would lose the last chance to tell everyone I loved just how much they had meant to me all these years.

But the wisdom of my tribe quickly kicked in. All I had to do was work without regard for my own safety to get done what needed doing. If I was fearful of being a burden on others, there were ways around that, including hiring help and ending my own life. Because I did survive the first night, I set out to make sure everyone knew how grateful I was for their love and companionship—everyone from my two sons to the grocery checkout woman I’d been chatting with for years as I bagged my groceries.

Seneca wrote in his Epistles, “If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living.” Perhaps this sentence best describes the wisdom of those who surrounded me early on. They knew all too well that, if fear rules, the hay will rot, cows will vanish, and attacking roosters will get the upper hand every time. I learned from these fearless people that there are daily decisions that we can make to exercise our muscles against being afraid. Life ends for us all. But if we let death terrify us, not only might we miss our own living, we may also lose out on our dying.

My most recent dream of my father was of him arriving at my house in his old gray Chevrolet. At first I was happy that he was still alive and that his Alzheimer’s had gone away, making it possible for him to brave the city traffic to come to my house. But when he told me he had put the car keys up on the outhouse windowsill to pay the parking meter, I knew that only in my dreams could I imagine him alive and fearless again.

The other night my mother dreamed that all the milk cows had gotten out of the pasture and were lost. In order to see where they were headed, she climbed up to the very top of the water tower in the neighboring town. Sitting in her wheelchair inside the nursing home the next morning, she remembered her dream and said, “I guess I’ll never be done chasing after runaway cattle!” Even in her dreams, my 85-year-old mother is more fearless than most people I know.

I don’t think I jump over fear so much as I ignore fear. Perhaps I simply think that if my parents could wrestle down steers and sheep, I should be able to tackle cancer. Maybe I believe that if so many people for so many years all over the world have had to face pain and suffering and uncertainty, I should at least be able to stare down a diagnosis of adenocarcinoma. And I know my mother was right when she said to me, “You’re no exception.” I know I am just one more farmer’s daughter who learned early on when to grab the legs of a backbiting rooster and where to stand when the bull comes charging.

Perhaps cancer clinics should post the following message for new cancer patients to read as they exit:

Beyond this door exist innumerable scientifically unexplainable and unproven remedies and cures, for while only the few are called to be oncologists, many still believe in miracles.

I personally hadn’t given miracles much thought since grade school. Lured by the drama of ancient battles between good and evil and the childhood desire to avoid my farm chores, I frequented the St. Wenceslaus Catholic School library. There the shelves were filled with volumes of books recounting in graphic detail female and male martyrdom and the miracles accompanying them. I still remember the story of St. George, persecuted for speaking in defense of Christians in 303 A.D. First he was poisoned, then crushed between two spiked wheels, and later boiled in a cauldron of molten lead. Each time, his life was saved by miraculous intervention.

The Virgin Mary appeared to St. Catherine Laboure in the form of a picture turning itself around to reveal the design for what Catholics in 1500 called the miraculous medal, curing a 12-year-old crippled child at St. Catherine’s gravesite. Miraculous appearances of The Blessed Mary to St. Bernadette at Lourdes, St. Blaise of Sebastea’s healing of the sick, and countless miracles following the burning death of St. Barbara filled my imagination as I put off for as long as possible the dreaded chores of washing the milking machines and cleaning out the henhouse.

Since my diagnosis, stories of miracles have made a major comeback in my life. In fact, I am rather surprised that almost everyone I know has seen firsthand or heard about a cancer miracle. These stories have a common enough theme: the oncologist gives the patient four weeks, four months, four years to live, and by some unexplainable intervention, the patient outwits all statistical and scientific odds for survival. One of my favorite cancer miracle stories came via a friend reading a birding book by Frances Wood. An elderly woman was diagnosed with cancer and told by her doctor she had only a few months to live. Being a life list birder, she immediately set off traveling the world in hope of checking off all the list’s classified feathered specimens. Fifteen years later and over 8,400 species cited, the woman died—not from cancer, but in a car crash in Madagascar.

And who with cancer wouldn’t want a miracle? St. George must have been mightily pleased to be mysteriously rescued as the two spiked wheels began to roll together across his chest. When the boiling cauldron turned into a bathtub, George must have become absolutely ecstatic from his good fortune. I’d be ecstatic if my lung cancer suddenly changed from scalding adenocarcinoma to the tepid fever of a common cold.

But I am not a believer in divine intervention. Instead, I read studies on statistical average survival rates and see how one person’s miracle gift of more time must be subtracted from someone else’s time. For every story I hear about mysterious cures, I know there are thousands of stories about sadly shortened lives that are carefully kept from cancer patients. And I know that, while as a child I was quite fascinated by the lives of saints whose very existence seemed to spawn unexplainable and unproven cures, the world I know as an adult is far less extravagant in its blessings.

And yet I am starting to like these cancer miracle stories that keep coming my way. Perhaps it is because first and foremost, tales of unexplainable cures are gifts of hope and comfort, easily passed on to someone with cancer. That one man with a rare form of bone cancer outlived all statistical projections proves that doctors don’t carry crystal balls inside their lab coats. That a woman with colon cancer defied all the odds to go on to be a mother and then grandmother serves as a reminder that nothing is more unpredictable than the date of death itself.

The last time someone toldme a cancermiracle story I began to wonder how and when all these many stories got their start. During a recent visit to my oncologist, he asked me, “Are your friends surprised you are doing so well?”

I told him I don’t think my friends know what to expect and so I wasn’t sure if they are surprised or not.

“Are you surprised at how well I’m doing?” I asked him.

My no nonsense doctor replied, “Yes.”

Is this how miracle stories begin? Is a cancer miracle story sparked by the onset of events that somehow veer away from the worst possible turn?

As I was growing up, my mother frequently sought miraculous remedies from her arsenal of favorite saints. St. Anthony got called into duty whenever a shoe or hen went missing. St. Christopher, represented by a plastic statue glued to the pick-up dashboard, rocked back and forth along the rough gravel roads to town and back again protecting us from an accident. A framed picture of St. Cecilia hung dead center over the piano, perhaps because my frugal mother was hoping against hope that the patron saint of musicians would keep the family egg money from being wasted on music lessons for a daughter more inclined to invent her own tunes than practice the major and minor scales.

The saint my mother relied on the most, however, was St. Jude, patron saint of the hopeless. Because of her certainty that many circumstances in our lives required drastic intervention, that our problems whether physical or mental were indeed hopeless, she frequently bypassed all the other saints and went straight to St. Jude. When we needed rain for the hay crop and the clouds stayed closed like tightfisted misers, my mother wouldn’t waste valuable time posturing before the more specialized saints; it was St. Jude she counted on for an immediate response.

My mother is now praying daily to St. Jude to cure my cancer, and she is not the only one seeking nonmedical remedies on my behalf. Immediately after word of my diagnosis got out, I landed on a Norwegian Lutheran prayer chain, a Catholic rural town prayer chain, a Methodist Monday women’s group prayer chain, and a Unitarian Universalist prayer chain, my Universalist friend qualifying her group’s prayer with “but I’m not sure it will work.”

People have sent me religious books on cancer and Dr. Lorraine Day’s tape I’m Not Afraid of Cancer Anymore advising me to seek God as one of the ten ingredients needed for curing my own cancer. A friend in California has a friend of hers come over every Thursday to help meditate and send healing vibes my way. Another friend in Helsinki is seeking a Finnish shaman’s cure on my behalf. One college colleague drove to my house and dropped off Christian Science literature complete with weekly workbooks. A woman from Bogota I’d met once years ago stopped me on the street the other day and offered to lay her curing hands on me. While in a small Wisconsin town last month, I agreed to let a recently ordained liberal Catholic priest anoint my forehead with sacred oils and beseech the Lord to heal me. When he finished his ritual, he crossed his arms over his chest and said humbly, “Well, it can’t hurt to try.”

I feel a bit like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz who, after the tornado passed, found herself deposited in a foreign land. I have not said a prayer of any kind since leaving the Catholic Church at age 18. Forty years and a diagnosis of cancer later I find myself, a non-believer, swept up in a chorus of other people’s prayers and hopes for healing miracles. And I am surprisingly touched by this outpouring of faith directed towards my illness. Perhaps, like the fictional Dorothy, I think philosophical differences are no reason to turn down help while looking for the way back home.

George Santayana’s definition of miracles gives nonbelievers an easy way to think about miracles: “Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.” Doctors don’t have all the answers, the patterns of death and healing are too illogical, and cancer is far too complex to be fully understood. And it is true that every day any one of us experiences “propitious accidents” which could, if we wished, be labeled miracles. That my doctor is surprised I am doing so well is certainly a favorable turn of events. That I have a doctor is the result of a fortuitous accident of the time and location of my birth. Had I been born in the late 1940s in rural Benin, I probably wouldn’t have the good fortune today of being able to hand over my health insurance card every time I check in at the local cancer center.

Everywhere I look I see favorable and unexplainable circumstances. Outside my window, a red maple tree grows where I was told it would never take. In the nearby park, an oak tree has recovered completely from the searing blaze of last year’s lightning strike. Several houses away, a child whose birth was anything but promising runs through the yard. Are any or all of these miracles? To people of faith, perhaps they are. For me they confirm what Santayana’s definition suggests: we humans aren’t in control of very much, but every once in awhile we reap the benefits of what we can’t begin to explain or understand.

A farmer in rural Wisconsin (another favorite cancer miracle story) refused all medical treatment for his cancer and went back to his farm to put in his spring crop. Five years later, someone from the cancer clinic saw the farmer and was surprised he was not only alive but still healthy. The farmer explained it this way. For years he had respectfully listened to the visiting agricultural extension experts tell him that his soil was best suited for this and that crop and that sections of his land were unsuitable for other crops. One corner of his fields was deemed by these experts as particularly ill-suited for the planting of potatoes. After the experts drove away, the farmer returned to planting his potato eyes in the same ill-suited corner of the field where he had planted potatoes for years. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the experts. It was just that he never thought he needed the maximum yield the experts promised was possible if he followed their advice and planted something else in that spot.What he wanted was simply enough potatoes to get through the next winter; and year after year after year, his potato plantings did just that. His decision to not seek the latest in cancer treatment has gotten him through many winters as well.

I’ll never know for sure if the Wisconsin farmer cancer story is true, but I think about the story often, as I swallow my daily dose of a newly approved cancer fighting drug, lie on the acupuncturist’s table, take immune boosters, and chew up another heaping pile of raw beets, squash and carrots. I also remember that two people in California are meditating on my behalf, someone in Helsinki is consulting the stars, and in a local Lutheran church a small group of generous women is bowing down in prayer for all the many people in need of divine intervention. And my own mother continues her prayers to St. Jude, still hoping against hope for a miracle. I’m not yet inclined to expect a miracle of any kind, but I can’t help but feel loved by those who seek one on my behalf.

At the end of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy clicked together the heels of her ruby red slippers and miraculously returned to Kansas. I see no signs of magic slippers appearing at my house, but I do trust that I’ll continue to hear cancer miracle stories. I like being reminded time and time again how many fortuitous accidents are out there keeping people with cancer alive. And I know these same stories offer something irreplaceable to those telling the stories. Cancer miracle stories offer hope to those who want to believe in the possibility that they can keep their loved ones with them forever.

I learned at an early age to never, but never, visit someone empty handed. For every church funeral, new baby, and sick neighbor, my mother made an appearance at someone’s door carrying a home baked apple pie, fresh farm eggs, or a pint of summer strawberries from her front yard garden. One Christmas Eve, my mother and I delivered a bottle of wine to every farmer who had ever sent a calf or cow to the slaughterhouse via my father’s big red cattle truck. As my mother worked the Ford pick-up brakes on the icy yards of my father’s customers, I jumped out of the pick-up cab and ran her gift of gratitude up to each farmer’s house. Years later I realized what that gift of Mogen David wine said about my mother’s lack of experience in a liquor store.

Over the years it has also been my habit to bring gifts whenever I go visit a friend or neighbor. But since learning I have adenocarcinoma, my gifting habits have changed. In addition to delivering a jar of jam or bouquet of flowers whenever I go to other people’s houses for lunch or dinner, I am now giving away my prized possessions. Last month, I gave my Cote d’ Ivoire chair to a good friend who has her own African connections. The saffron colored silk shawl I’d bought at a Buddhist women’s center in Cambodia I gave to a friend who works as a spiritual director. Two shelves of poetry books went to my young friend aspiring to be a poet herself. And when my academic friend Julia headed back to Austin, Texas, after her visit last weekend, she left wearing the coral and Berber silver necklace I’d worn while studying in Tunisia several summers ago.

Deborah Eisenberg in her short story, “Revenge of the Dinosaurs,” writes of “Billions of intense, abundant human lives on this earth . . . vanishing, leaving nothing more than inscrutable little piles of commemorative trash.” While I’m not prepared to call my own possessions “trash,” the reality that our earthly possessions endure long after we disappear is indeed humbling.

My father lived on the same farm for 40 years and when he died, his remaining possessions might have been labeled “commemorative trash,” but they were by no stretch of the imagination “inscrutable little piles.” Instead, what remained after his death were gigantic stockpiles of anything and everything commonly found on a small family farm. On the day of the auction, 637 registered bidders showed up to see my father’s farming life laid out over the width and length of a hayfield. The auctioneers, starting on what would be a very long day of work, first called the crowd over to the half a dozen hay wagons loaded with the smaller items. Boxes of bolts, tools, shovels, pitchforks, anvils, chicken feeders, cow horn cutters, and horse harnesses were sold off by 10 a.m. The fencing wires, tractor belts, handheld planting machines, milk cans, pig troughs, cow tanks, and feeding stations were next. Then silo parts, horse saddles, corn crib elevators, hoists, and the feed mill got their turn.

As the autumn day grew dimmer, the auctioneers made it to the outer rings of the hayfield. There standing as colossal as Trojan horses were all the horse-drawn and motorized farm machines my father had collected over the decades.

Showing up in time to see the vast line-up of corn pickers, hay balers, combines and throw wagons, my sister remarked, “From a marketing point of view, this auction is a disaster.” For every wooden sleigh with velvet seats up for sale, there were another four waiting for the next bidder. If a farmer didn’t win the bid on the FarmAll M tractor, he could bid on the FarmAll A or FarmAll H. Then there were all the John Deere and International Harvester tractors. That my father had not one but two steel Red River threshingmachines impressed even the Amish farmers who left praising the Lord for their good fortune, as they loaded their horse-drawn hay cutters, cultivators, and manure spreaders onto their waiting hired trucks. One of the silver Red River threshing machines traveled half a mile down the road frommy father’s farm, where it still performs its new job as a lawn ornament.

The auction was a natural outgrowth of my father’s favorite pastime: every Saturday that he could get away from his own farm work he’d go to bid at other farmers’ auctions. Seeing my father’s possessions spread out in the hayfield at the auction made me proud of my father’s enduring stewardship of old horse equipment, farm tools, machinery, and other farm necessities.My father’s life was never easy, but the sheer size and scale of his commemorative piles gave me hope that through his collecting he had found much pleasure.

I am my father’s daughter when it comes to collecting. Over the years I, too, have accumulated stockpiles of possessions. But while my father preferred horse-drawn plows and hay conditioners, I got my pleasure from bringing home art, books, and African baskets. Drawers and cabinets in my house hold collections of old lace, antique quilts, and textiles from Guatemala, India, and Africa. In the front porch are collections of beads, sea shells, foreign coins, and naïve art postcards from former Eastern Europe. Somewhere in the pie chest is a collection of Czech glass bead handbags and bird feathers. From April of 2005 to March of 2006, my exhibition at the Hennepin History Museum titled A Century of Aprons: American Women’s Aprons—Their Art and Function included 112 aprons dating from the 1860s to the 1970s.

I am also my mother’s daughter. Giving it all away was my immediate response to the news that I am dying. Not all of us get life’s pink slip in time to gift, but I have been given this opportunity. I spent the first night after being diagnosed with cancer ferreting out just the right gifts to present several evenings later at a women’s group I have been a part of for 15 years. To the doll collector went my own small group of china heads and frozen Charlottes. To the book lover went a pair of antique bookends complete with quill. To the other women went the only afghan I made, a Native Indian basket by Margaret Hill, and everyday silver earrings and bracelets I used to love wearing.

Since then, I have been giving gifts to my two other women’s group members, people who come to visit me here at the house, and the many friends and neighbors I wish to have something special so they might remember all the good times we’ve had together. Whenever people resist my gifting, I explain that gifting is my way of passing along the responsibility and stewardship for this or that object, thereby significantly shortening the time it takes to get them talking about their garden projects and plans for the summer.

One of my sons grew concerned when he heard about my giving away jewelry, baskets, and books. He began to imagine that weeks or months from now he’d arrive and find me sitting on a wooden box in an empty house with Lizzie the cat licking the last remaining plate from my grandparents’ wedding china. But I can easily gift ten times more than I already have and still be surrounded by plenty of comfort and beauty. Many have compared the inside of my house to a museum, but few have seen the loaded steamer trunks in the attic.

Giving away my valuables seems even a better decision when I envision other options for their disposal. For years a few of my good friends joked how they hoped they’d outlive me so they could shop at my estate sale. They knew that, like my father, I had spent many Saturday mornings going to house sales and bringing home bits and pieces to tuck away in chests and closets. And perhaps it is my experience at estate sales that inspires me to gift the very best and most unique items to my friends. Because I have been among those who love finding a good piece of lace for under a dollar, it’s easy for me to imagine strangers having a good time going through my collections in search of a bargain. However, I’d prefer to die thinking the Yoruba cooking pot and Stella Ebner woodcut will get their proper due because someone knows the person who cared for them over the years.

That my remaining collections may yet prove burdensome to my two sons haunts me. Both sons live miles away. Both sons have families of their own, and neither family at the moment has a house large enough to hold the baby grand piano let alone trunks of woven fans, embroidered stoles, and vintage Japanese kimonos.

So I think back to my father’s auction ten years ago. I remember that, while the job of figuring out what to do with the farm fell on me, there were plenty of people out there who knew just what to do with my father’s 77 horse-eveners and the piles of scrap metal behind the granary. I remember listening with relief as the auctioneer’s expertise guided the bidding on the fifth-wheel buckboard wagon and wooden stoneboats. And I recall how good it felt seeing that hayfield covered with my father’s passions and loves. We billions of people do leave behind piles of material goods every day, but every once in a while the piles we leave have unexpected importance to those who remain.

I plan to continue gifting as much as possible, while at the same time letting go of what I can’t give away before I die. The 112 aprons in the exhibit I donated to the history museum to be part of their permanent collection. The other 500 or so are still piled up in boxes in the front hall closet. My collection of books about women artists will soon go to the local women’s college. The rest of my books can remain on the shelves waiting to see me out. My sons will decide for themselves what mementos they want to keep and whether or not to hand over the house keys to an estate sale agent and walk away.

We humans connect to our earthly possessions in a variety of ways, but death has a way of evening it all out. My father hung on to every leather strap and horseshoe nail to the end. My mother, who never thought twice about durable goods, will die remembered for her generosity with pies and garden produce. Unlike my father, I’m embracing the chance to give away my prized possessions; but unlike my mother, I’ve cared too much about collecting to be able to empty all the cupboards.

There is no shame in leaving behind “commemorative trash” if it passes along something of meaning to those we care about. Through gifting I’m getting to experience in new ways the joy that comes from telling others again how much I have loved them over the years. For every item I place into another’s hand, there is a blessing in return. I can’t imagine this isn’t a part of the “intense, abundant human lives” we all wish to live.