{"id":1603,"date":"2021-12-01T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2021-12-01T09:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=1603"},"modified":"2021-11-16T16:14:58","modified_gmt":"2021-11-17T00:14:58","slug":"memoir-cancer-and-tent-camping-my-friend-connie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2021\/12\/01\/memoir-cancer-and-tent-camping-my-friend-connie\/","title":{"rendered":"Memoir, Cancer, And Tent Camping: My Friend Connie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0When a friend or family member is diagnosed with cancer, the effects ripple through the community. If we and our friend are relatively young, we may feel shock but also a sense of insulation. We have not yet begun to consider our own mortality, or the likelihood of losing our peers to accident or one disease or another. It hasn\u2019t happened to\u00a0us<\/em>\u00a0yet and the odds are still in our favor, particularly if we don\u2019t smoke or drive drunk, we exercise and eat many leafy green vegetables. As the years and the decades go by, most of us will see an increase in morbidity if not mortality in our friends. They \u2013 and we \u2013 may develop osteoarthritis or Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, all those common ailments of aging.<\/p>\n

Some of us will get Covid-19. Some of us will get cancer.<\/p>\n

When my best friend, Bonnie, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she was the closest friend I had who had cancer. Since then, other friends have been diagnosed and some have died; Bonnie died in 2013 (peacefully, at home). One of the things Bonnie did way back when was find support groups for women with cancer. Maybe it\u2019s a holdover from the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, but it\u2019s practically a reflex: whatever is going on in your life, you grab a bunch of women to talk it through. Do men do this, too? If so, it\u2019s a secret from me.<\/p>\n

It turned out that a cluster of women who were at college with us at the same time and who still lived in the area wandered through these groups at one time or another, or were otherwise associated with this community. Some have also died, some weren’t doing too well the last I heard, and some are thriving. One of those I lost was my friend, Constance Emerson Crooker.<\/p>\n

Connie and I weren\u2019t close in college, but it was a small school and everybody pretty much knew one another in passing. She wasn\u2019t an avid folk dancer or a Biology major like me, but she and Bonnie stayed in touch so I\u2019d hear about her from time to time. Connie was one of those who stepped up to the plate in Bonnie\u2019s final weeks, and I was not only grateful for the extra and very competent pair of hands but for the chance to get to know her better.<\/p>\n

Connie was a long-term melanoma survivor, a \u201clate-stage cancer patient,\u201d and made no bones about being one of the lucky ones.<\/p>\n

One of the things Connie did was to go tent camping across America. Another thing was to write about it and her cancer. I slowly read and savored her memoir,\u00a0MelanomaMama: On Life, Death, and Tent Camping.<\/a>\u00a0Tent camping does not rank high on my list of favorite things to do. I didn\u2019t grow up camping, and I\u2019m poor at it at best. But as I wended my way through her breezy story-telling, I realized it didn\u2019t matter whether it was tent camping or ice skating or tango dancing (which Bonnie did, clear through the week she went on hospice) or anything else that gives us intense joy.<\/p>\n

William Blake wrote that if a fool would persist in his folly, he will become wise. I think that if we\u2019re blessed to have enough time and reflection we can move through the shock and terror and sheer awfulness to some other place, one of \u201csucking the juicy joy out of life.\u201d Which is why Connie\u2019s tent camping spoke to me and I\u2019m grateful she wrote her book.<\/p>\n

When something awful happens to us or when we at last glimpse it in the rear-view mirror, many of us want to write about it. If we\u2019re fiction writers, we use our imaginations to spin out stories in our preferred genre. A huge weight, a pressure of all the intense experience, the fear, the relief, the unhealed and oozing wounds, cries out for us to make sense of the whole thing. That\u2019s one of the things that fiction does, and often it does it much better than straight memoir narrative. Fiction requires emotional coherence, at least genre fiction does. I make no promises about literary or experimental stuff. We think,\u00a0If I could just nail this down in a story, it would make sense.<\/em>\u00a0I understand that longing, that temptation, and at the same time, in my own life, I\u2019ve had the good fortune to pay attention to my gut feeling that I wasn\u2019t\u00a0ready.<\/em>\u00a0Maybe I\u2019ll never be ready to \u201ctell my story.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Connie was and she did, with wit and the ferocious clear-sightedness of one who knows she has been reprieved and what it has cost her. Some parts are travelog, some parts are survivalog, some are the observations of an intelligent, thoughtful person who has had a long time to decide how she wants to live each day. I couldn’t read very much of it at a time; it was too \u201cchewy,\u201d too emotionally dense. I needed to reflect on what she shared and what it meant in my own life.<\/p>\n

In Connie\u2019s writing, I recognized something quite different from the impulse to tell our story to make sense out it. It was the even more powerful need to take what we have suffered and have it make a difference. Have\u00a0our lives<\/em>\u00a0make a difference.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey world,\u201d she seems to be saying, \u201cI was here. Me, the only Connie there is or will ever be.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cSo now, I\u2019m back to scans every three months. Watch and wait. Watch and wait. Wait for the pink and turquoise sneaker to drop. But I keep enjoying my miraculous recovery.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I say miraculous, I don\u2019t mean a conventional miracle. \u2026 It\u2019s miraculous that a Monarch butterfly can wing its way from Canada to one small patch of breeding ground on a Michoacan hillside. It\u2019s miraculous that a black hole\u2019s sucking gravity can pull everything, including light into is gaping maw. It\u2019s miraculous that there are billions of stars in our galaxy and billions of galaxies in our universe\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I\u2019m still here, gazing with wonder at it all.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And sharing that wonder with us. Thanks, Connie, wherever you are tent-camping now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0When a friend or family member is diagnosed with cancer, the effects ripple through the community. If we and our friend are relatively young, we may feel shock but also a sense of insulation. We have not yet begun to consider our own mortality, or the likelihood of losing our peers to accident or one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,270,15],"tags":[372,374,373],"class_list":["post-1603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-experiences","category-medicine","category-memoir","tag-cancer","tag-friendship","tag-tent-camping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1603"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1605,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions\/1605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}