Cancerwords

By Ellyn Peirson

Poetry is the only way to touch upon the experience of cancer. It is also the only way to find beauty in the beastliness. And for me, it was the only way to express my grief and allow healing into my life.

cancerwords is a record of Glenn Peirson's three year battle with a rare sinus cancer. Diagnosed at stage 4, Glenn did his elegant utmost to stay here for his wife and children, the joys of his life. As mother of this remarkable man for all seasons, I was seized by a need to write poetry and take photos on my prayer-walks. These media became my prayer forms. For me, they reached through the madness to a silence where pain is transformed into resilience. I was sustained, and enabled to be what Glenn, Mary, Theodora and Henry needed me to be.

It is my hope that this book will speak to others, particularly parents. I learned that I could survive what I had always said I couldn't, and learned that I will never cease to be wondrously proud of and inexplicably connected to my son, in whatever dimension he happens to be. And I learned that artistry is the soul of healing. There is a way for everyone. This is mine.

A profoundly moving journey through one man's battle with cancer, cancerwords is a sharply articulated and devastatingly raw story of grief and healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Feb 4, 2022
• ISBN: 4867525421

Book preview

Approaches of the Madonna

How am I to approach this walk with you?

How am I to bear it?

You ask too much of me.

I will not, cannot let this happen.

I will not walk into your death

Am I, who laboured fiercely to give you life,

now required to labour impossibly cruelly to let you die?

No! No! This was not the promise of conception

the reason for my song.

I will not walk into your death

You ask too much of me.

beginning, February 2007

glossary: cell

sell

cell

fundamental unit of life organized protoplasmform

of tissue

membrane nucleus cytoplasm

cosmos sells seacells down by the

lifeshore

lifewhore steals seacells

substitutes

c-cells

up by the

deathshore

nomore

dna

the c-word

he calls

he knows now

it's Mary's worst day he says

and can't finish

you're going to make it Glenn

i say—

or some other voice says

over the pounding of hearts and nails

i'm not sure

he says

and i see him forty years ago

lying on my breast

a big, healthy son

they said

i want them to say it

again

to melt the beginning

ice-age of my heart

we have not spent these forty

years in a wilderness

we shall stay Here

and allow only side-trips into

desolation.

glossary: cancer

kan'-sir

cancer

offerings proffered to a body

(souls excluded)

primordial leftovers

in malignant assortments of

neoplasms

disorganized free-ranging

home on the range cells

lacking passports

boundarybusters

ay'-lee-uns

seeking

proliferation detonation explosion

nuclear

of anaplastic un-dif'-er-en'-shee-ayt-ed

protoplasma plasmascreens

highdefinition morphing

invading

tissue-contiguous

glom

seduceforce it to metastasize

metasize to new body sites.

drooling

glutton

singular journey

i would take your place

you know that don't you?

i see a prairie freight train

locomotive steaming

shooting soot

into the air

and onto fresh white laundry

fresh white teeth

fresh white eyeballs

roaring through the intersection

of my head and soul—

of national railways—

and i am back-but-older, the playing chicken kid

this time a mother alone—

i hear and my eardrums split.

hurtling, steaming, shrieking it comes

and i step…

i know, mum, he says—but

this is my solitary journey.

glossary: newnormal

nu-nor'-ml

newnormal

the condition achieved after

encounters with

the unmapped territory of non de-enay cells

effervescently insidiously

bombarding

changing

requiring great mutations in those who

need a map

particularly associated with

the state of numbed dumbed

acceptance

unmappable unpalpable

unpalatable

posthistoric

branchflail sunday

hosanna heysanna day

we're family balconysitting with the stained glass,

stained life at our backs

and

i hear you peopletalking

i think in mothercode sanna don't you say—

god said, you say

so you like lent, do you?

you're peoplecaring and i've heard you say it's

draining paining to think of others in their

face-of-death fear

in the just now of this

season of

extinction resurrection

the people wait for the word of the

lord

well then, try this god said

and the people amenlaugh

marvelling

oh, how well he's handling this

and go for coffee in the bowels beneath

the sanctuary.

glossary: recovery room

ree-cuv'-eh-ree room

recovery room

technically not a room. seen by some as a

womb. by others a tomb. recovery romb. in

real terms a large area set

aside and equipped with state

of the art apparati—beeping wheezing 'wake up' coughing

'whatsyourname'—

for monitoring patients immediately

following various surgeries for copious bodily

malfunctions. staffed. specialized. in essence a safe

place and a platform from which a surgeon can

emerge to deliver news to waiting

family

ours emerged to say proposed treatments will

now be backward and miracles do

happen sometimes with new blends of

chemoradiation

there seems to be no

recovery womb for family. one would help families

defibrillate

glossary: squamous cells

skway'-muss sells

squamous cells

primordial barbaric leftovercells

hubbub barbarcells

evolution's missedcells

stealthcells. crawl and

laythemselves over and over and

clusterlike snakescales

carnivorous.

good Friday

(inspired by Glenn's choice of George Herbert's The Sacrifice for the Good Friday service he helped craft)

was ever grief

like yours?

like yours? how dare you

ask

the question you could

reverse

put on the

inktip of the poet's

tonguefinger

how dare you?

how dare you compare

yours to here?

you—who wanted

demanded

commanded

your son home to yourself

bosom of the universe

you willnot maynot cannot

have mine

no—he will stay and wrap your

light around his thorned

features, weakened frame

until your radiance

counterkills the enemy

you will not have him

in the face of the

shadow of doubt

we will march him out of the valleys and

into the glens

you will not have him.

was ever grief

like yours?

yes!

mine

i give it

back to you.