My Eye Fell Into the Soup

By Denis Ledoux

"I regret to inform you your pain is due to cancer," said the doctor. Can there be words more chilling?

My Eye Fell Into The Soup is a poignant story about living with cancer, stage-four intraductal breast cancer. Soon, the disease loomed larger every day.

This memoir, via journal entries written as events unfolded, takes us through the process of coming to terms with the diagnosis and the struggle to survive and finally to adapt.

This book offers a glimpse in the life of a couple, much in love after three decades, facing the end of their lives together. My Eye Fell Into The Soup, a phrase derived from a dream written in Martha Blowen's journals, is a story of courage and of the deep plunge into the psyche when "real life" happens unexpectedly and intraductal breast cancer threatens. This is a book about how to live with cancer and how to die from it.

WHAT READERS HAVE SAID

   ~ "...a courageous book."
   ~ "…eloquent and most inspiring to see the public sharing of a life, love and loss. "
   ~ "…direct, clear and sensitive writing."
   ~ "The writing almost took my breath away!"
   ~ "The relationships in this memoir is portrayed honestly and vividly."
 
WHAT YOU'LL FIND

In My Eye Fell Into The Soup, you will also read about
   ~ searching for a healer instead of a mere technician.
   ~ making sense of changing family relationships necessitated by an advancing cancer.
   ~ how to live with cancer as 50-50 doesn't work any more.
   ~ experiencing what it felt like to be a talented artist, a woman dying of cancer, who now languishes without art making.
   ~ appreciating the searing beauty of the life they once had and hope to have again.

But My Eye Fell Into The Soup is more than a rough ride through the country of illness that metastatic cancer brought this couple to. You will observe moving scenes:
   ~ the fox following the hay thresher in the newly-tedded field, hunting for field mice.
   ~ the glazed snow that reflects the light of the full moon.
   ~ the octogenarian neighbor who needs help with daily life.
   ~ a mother whose descent into dementia must be taken into account.
   ~ young adult children just setting out in life who must now confront mortality.

These—and more—stories, told artfully and insightfully, will keep you reading long past when you should be asleep.

Download My Eye Fell Into The Soup now.  The financial investment is small, and the satisfaction is great. Scroll to the top of this page and select the "buy" button.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Denis Ledoux
• Release date: Dec 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223746492

Book preview

copyright © 2017 Denis Ledoux

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission, except in the case of brief quotations.

First Edition, First Printing

Printed in U.S.A.

Soleil Press

Book & Cover design: Sally Lunt

Publishers Cataloging in Publication Data

My Eye Fell Into the Soup / A Memoir Journal /

Living with Stage Four Breast Cancer

—Martha Blowen & Denis Ledoux

1. Memoir writing. —2. Writing Craft. —3. Creativity.

I. Title.

ASIN:B072Q4T29C

For more information on how you can write a

memoir—yours or someone else’s, contact:

Denis Ledoux

The Memoir Network

95 Gould Road, Lisbon Falls, ME 04252

http://thememoirnetwork.com/

mailto:[e-mail]

For hundreds of stimulating and informative writing posts:

http://thememoirnetwork.com/memoir-blog

As a thank you for reading My Eye Fell Into the Soup / A Cancer Journal, please accept our gift of free ebooks, MP3s, and e-courses:

http://thememoirnetwork.com/write-and-complete-your-memoir/

Soleil Press is the publishing arm of The Memoir Network.

My Eye Fell

Into the Soup

A Memoir Journal

Living with Stage Four Breast Cancer

DENIS LEDOUX

I.

Denis Ledoux won the 1989 Maine Fiction Award judged by Elizabeth Hardwick and the juried 1991 and 1996 Maine Individual Writing Fellowships.

II.

Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to have people speak well about The Memoir Network, about Memoir Network products  and about Denis.

~ Time magazine wrote of Denis in an article on memoir writing in April 1999: Since 1988, Denis Ledoux has helped thousands of people get started writing their memoir.

~ The Christian Science Monitor ran either roundups or feature articles on Denis. Three times.

~ His Turning Memories Into Memoirs was deemed by Booklist (American Library Association) as very beneficial…helps writ ers get off to a great start.

~ Rhonda Kanning Anderson, co-founder of the early premier scrapbooking company, Creative Memories, said of his Photo Scribe: "The Photo Scribe has inspired me to a new level of photo-journaling. This practical step-by-step guide can enable anyone to discover the depth of their memories."

~ Bottomline Publications acknowledged Denis’s work (in a feature article) as a memoir ghostwriter, editor and writing coach.

~ The Cincinnati Post kindly praised Turning Memories Into Memoirs / A Handbook for Writing Lifestories as: …a step-by-step manual, lots of examples, a fine appendix and a detailed index, making it a useful reference over time.

III.

Denis has also been interviewed on a variety of radio shows in cities as far flung as Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Montréal. He has been interviewed by NPR affiliates as well as Radio Canada.

     Email: mailto:[e-mail]

    Twitter: twitter@denisledoux

    Facebook: http://facebook.com/MemoirNetwork

    My blogs: The Memoir Writer’s Blog

The Memoir Professional’s Blog

Table of Contents

Introduction: How This Book Was Launched

Chapter 1: Our Journey into Difficult Days Begins

Chapter 2: I Am Sorry to Tell You This

Chapter 3: We Return Home

Chapter 4: Our Lives Have Stopped

Chapter 5: We Try to be Normal

Chapter 6: Living With Chemicals

Chapter 7: Being Thankful Is Not Easy

Chapter 8: Alone Again

Chapter 9: Preparing For the Big Letting Go?

Chapter 10: Maine Winter Settles In

Chapter 11: Christmas Is a Week Away

Chapter 12: Are Things Getting Better?

Chapter 13: Will This Be a Really New Year

Chapter 14: Dear We Hope

Chapter 15: Deciding On The Next Step

Afterword

Lifewriting Resources

Memoir Professional Resources

About the Author

Gifts

Introduction:

How This Book was Launched

Martha began writing a journal before I knew her, and she wrote consistently for the 31 years we were together. My own habit of writing a record of my life began in my early twenties—in 1970. We might have said, as did Anaïs Nin in the first volume of her published diary, I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.

Sometimes, usually on the weekends, we would sit together in our living room to journal, morning coffee steaming on a low table between us, but most often we wrote separately as I was an earlier riser. In the last years of Martha’s life, her writing time was likely to be at the Central Maine Medical Center’s Infusion Center, as she spent interminable hours receiving a weekly dose of some "chemical du jour."

Our children, Zoé and Maxim, saw us writing, and it took little encouragement for them to take up journaling. It began when they were young. For Zoé, it came sooner than for Max as she learned the mechanics of writing at a younger age. (As homeschoolers, they acquired school skills during teachable moments. Max preferred climbing trees and creating snow forts to reading and writing. His teachable moments, when it came to literacy, occurred when he was slightly older.)

In our family, we always left our journals lying around. In this way, any of the four of us could pick ours up anytime to continue recording our life’s narratives. I am not aware of any incident of snooping in someone else’s journal because you shouldn’t have left it around if you didn’t want me to read it!

The privacy of the journal was an explicit, articulated agreement we all adhered to.

How do you presume you have the right to share Martha’s journal with the reader? you rightfully ask. How do you take upon yourself to make public her private, and surely intimate, writings?

Well, one day in mid-August 2008, a day that was to be Martha’s penultimate day with me, she lay in the hospice bed with her eyes shut, but she was not asleep. It had become her habit to keep her eyes closed—I sensed it was perhaps to conserve her energy, and perhaps too, she no longer needed to see the outside world as much as she needed to gaze inwardly.

I sat on a rocker close to her on her right. The night before—the sixteenth—when I had gone home, I had asked myself what I needed to discuss with Martha if I were to survive her at peace with myself. While it was now clear that Martha would not continue to be with me long, I could not yet imagine a time without her, a time without her voice reaching out to me to offer sage counsel. Denis, I was thinking… How many times had she prompted me into action or induced me to hold back with that phrase!

That afternoon, as I sat next to her, her voice had not yet been silenced.

I had two questions that insisted on being asked. One will remain between Martha and me, but the other is important for you to know.

I asked her if I could use her journals to write a memoir about her illness and our experience of it.

Yes, she said, opening her blue eyes wide. Perhaps it will help you to heal—and perhaps it will help others, too.

Then, she smiled slightly. You’ve got to remember that I often wrote to vent my anger or frustration. I hope you will read the journals with some sense that it was often therapy—not necessarily how I felt about you in the long run.

My journal’s got a lot of that, too, I answered. How could we both not smile? In 31 years, there is a lot of venting necessary if two people are to stay together.

She looked at me, her lovely eyes—the eyes I would soon see for the last time—penetrating into mine.

I love you, and you love me. That’s all there is.

Yes, I replied, and she closed her eyes again.

During the hours while she lay eyes shut or while she slept, those last days she was with us, during the days she was beginning to be gone from us even before she died, I sat next to her, often writing in my journal or meditating. It was not easy, during those days, to stay in the present, to resist running away to some other place in my mind, to some fantasy where my Martha was healthy and we had a long future together.

But, that day, our future together was to be very brief.

Martha died early Monday morning, August 18, 2008. In the weeks that followed, I wrote in my journal and I spoke my memories into a digital recorder. The writing and the speaking assuaged the pain, but nothing could take it away.

In November, knowing that Martha was right, that writing about our experience of her cancer would help me to deal with her illness and death, I opened one of her journals. Never in our 31 years together had I ever opened one.

Her writing voice was clear. Reading her journal, I felt again as if she were with me and I were listening to her, but it was terrible to have her with me and not with me. I read only a few paragraphs before feeling the weight of loneliness pressing down on my chest, feeling how the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. In those months, after her death, the air was often sucked out of me, leaving me frightened, desperate to fill my lungs with life.

Lest you think this is a metaphor, let me be explicit: in my grief, I used to feel the air disappear and I would gasp for breath.

I both wanted to not live without Martha and to live somehow this precious life that was still mine to live. I felt shame in surviving and a desperate longing to live again.

After that first foray into Martha’s inner life, all that winter and the following spring, I put off reading the journals. They were piled on a table in the bedroom Martha and I had shared. Sometimes I would touch one of them, place my hand on a cover or perhaps hold a journal book, but I would not allow myself to read what she had written.

How could I expose myself to having her so close and so far?

Zoé, Maxim and I held a memorial ceremony for Martha on August 22, 2009. I wanted to contribute something special to this event, and I knew instinctively what that had to be—a memorial booklet of her last months.

It was early July—almost a year after her death—that I set to this task. Although anticipating the difficulty living in her words would continue to present, I began transcribing text. In this way, I was with her words without feeling their significance. I would not let them affect me. I was intent on merely transcribing.

But, of course, (surprise!) as I transcribed her journals, I found myself beginning to read them consciously. It was as hard a task as I had feared—and had tried to avoid. Once again, as in November, her literary voice, present and vivid in those pages, brought her to me so clearly that I would often break down, weeping. Being with her words was so traumatizing that, after a few days, I would have to put the task aside and take many days off—often more days than I had spent transcribing. Then, I would pick the task up again, knowing I wanted this booklet for the memorial service on August 22, 2009.

Martha had said, If you think my journal can help other people to go through this experience, then, yes, make use of it.

My Eye Fell In the Soup is not a prescription for how anyone else might live the experience well, but if it can help others to make decisions that are appropriate for them, then it will have succeeded.

These pages which cover the first year of Martha’s struggle with cancer also offer one man’s experience of living with a woman who went through the cancer experience. It draws from both of our journals as well as from new composition which you will recognize as coming from the voice of the narrator who is trying his best to explain the context of the story as you go from one entry to another.

This memoir covers the first year of Martha’s cancer experience. A second volume that deals with Martha’s last year will follow.

Perhaps this book and the one to follow will help others who accompany their loved one on a cancer journey. It is not easy to be with someone in this way, but then any commitment to love to the end—for better or for worse—never is.

Whether you are on a cancer journey or you are accompanying another person, I wish you first the gift of strength and courage and, if necessary, the gift of acceptance.

May we all eventually also know peace.

Denis Ledoux

Lisbon Falls, Maine USA

Chapter One

Our Journey into Difficult Days Begins

September 2006

The call was for Martha.

Parkview Hospital, I said as I handed her the receiver. Martha had a mammogram taken the week before. Her face grew serious as it always does when she receives a test result. It has been fourteen years, this month, since she had been diagnosed with cancer and had a lumpectomy. Since then, she has had clean mammograms. You’re supposed to be beyond a recurrence of cancer, she has read so many times, after five years with a clean bill of health—but you never know about a recurrence.

Oh, that’s good, I heard her say, her face brightening up into a smile. I, too, relaxed. Another clean bill of health. We can go on with our lives.

Every time Martha has a mammogram scheduled, it’s a tough time. She gets nervous: distracted, short in her responses. Understandably. How could the cancer experience in 1992 have been any harder! It’s difficult to imagine how it could have been. She doesn’t want to go through that again—and neither do I. I used to go in with her to Parkview Hospital in Brunswick, Maine, every time she had a mammogram, but it’s been years now since she has asked me to accompany her. So, although she is still nervous, she is no longer terrorized by check-ups. Most of the time, the cancer seems a thing of the past, something from long ago, from another life.

Fourteen years!

How vivid September 1992 still seems to me.That month, Martha had a lumpectomy on her right breast. We thought that the surgery, early in the month, was the end of it, but a week or so later, the lab where her tumor had been sent for analysis concluded that the margins were not clean. That is, the tentacles of the tumor reached beyond the margins of the excision and so she would have to return for another surgery. This second surgery was slated for early October.

But, before then, I had been scheduled to speak at the Université du Québec à Rimouski, in late September, as part of a conference on The Regionalism of the Mind. My topic was to be the state of mind that hyphenated identity produces—that is, how does one live in two cultures and in two languages? In my case, I was reviewing the cultural regionalism of Franco-America as lived in New England. I had been looking forward to the event.

Since we had found out the previous spring that I had been chosen to present, we had planned to have Martha and our children, Zoé and Maxim, accompany me. The conference was picking up my expenses, and we would cover the extra cost to have the family with me at l’auberge Sainte-Luce.

Keeping our plan to make this a family trip, determined not to let the second surgery cast its doom over our lives, we drove north. As we entered Aroostook County, already four hours from home, the forest that had walled in I-95 since just north of Bangor gave way to broad vistas of potato fields. Two hours later, we crossed the Saint John River into New Brunswick. Eventually, the bilingual signs of New Brunswick gave way to French-only, as we entered into Québec. After another two hours, we came into sight of the wide, wide Saint Lawrence River—the river the Québecois call le fleuve—which flows northeasterly towards the Atlantic Ocean. The city of Rimouski was below us. The university, where I had been a guest speaker some time back, some time when we had no way of knowing we would return in such gloom, was on a bluff overlooking the city but we were not going there. We were going to a conference center the university owned to the north of Rimouski. As the cool autumn air descended on the Saint Lawrence valley, we reached the town of Sainte-Luce.

The auberge, situated next to the conference center, was housed in what must have been a nineteenth-century seigneurial manor. A porch on the street side ran its length. Along the porch’s skirting were well-tended autumn flowerbeds. When we arrived, there were still comfortable rocking chairs set out for guests, but the air was decidedly cooler than one would wish for sitting.

Crossing the porch, seeing its lace curtains, I felt a certain thrill, as I anticipated the days away from illness we would spend there.

Inside, however, l’auberge Sainte-Luce surprised us. The rooms were finished in wood lathes, a common 19th-century working-class practice. The furniture appeared mismatched and chaotic—although one could easily label some of it as antique. The floors were covered with linoleum squares. The effect was somewhat spartan, reminding me of the convents and rectories of my youth. It was hardly the luxurious bed-and-breakfast we had anticipated. Our large double room, on the second floor, for all that its appointment was wanting, delivered an expansive view of the Saint Lawrence. The river is wide at this point, its north shore—some 30 miles distant—often lost in the horizon. Gulls, terns, cormorants flew overhead or alighted on the stone beach at the water’s edge.

Beginning the morning before the conference convened, we walked the shore. The tide was out on the mornings we walked, and so we could stroll a long way on the pebbly beach. Maxim, at ten, ran on ahead, while Zoé, at twelve, alternated between following him and staying with us. (Her pull between adult and child behavior was fascinating to witness. She did not always know in which world to place herself.)

Once back from our walk, we drove into Sainte-Luce. The breakfast the auberge offered was only pastries and juice or coffee. We felt we needed a more nourishing fare and we found a restaurant to which we returned daily. Then, in mid-morning, I would leave Martha and the kids for the conference, and she would take Zoé and Maxim for another outing. Rimouski was not far and the three of them wandered its streets. The mid-day sun was warm enough to enjoy the café-terrasses that remained open far beyond the season in which Maine restaurants, far to the south, would consider a terrasse appropriate.

When we had planned the trip, the previous spring, we had envisioned a lighter time, not one sandwiched between two surgeries. The conference finished, the time which we had hoped would be a reprieve over, we retraced the long miles across Témiscouata County in Québec and across Aroostook County in Maine. With every mile, the inevitability of the impending surgery, which we had never stopped thinking about, induced more and more silence, more and more heaviness of spirit.

The days and the winter that followed the surgery were difficult, sad. Martha had much pain—from the trauma of surgery, from the healing.

So, fourteen years later, we are both relieved to have a phone call telling Martha she has a clean mammogram.

But, Martha is not feeling well. Her doctor, Sarah Ackerly, continues to believe that she is having allergenic problems and is prescribing naturopathic remedies and specifics of diet. Her interventions do not seem to be improving Martha’s health.

Is it time to move on to another doctor? I ask.

Who? asks Martha. Who is better than Sarah Ackerly? She says this not out of blind faith in Dr. Ackerly but out of a certain distrust of the medical profession.

We went to a specialist. He said there was nothing he could see that was amiss. He was such a technician—looking only for his little area of specialty. He was a man with no sense of intuition, no sense of trusting his inner eye.

Why do such people become doctors? Where are the healers in medicine? Our frustrations are growing. Technicians are all we find.

Chapter Two

I Am Sorry to Tell You This

November 8, 2006

Martha has been complaining about her back. Something is out of whack—perhaps from doing so much work at the computer? This has been a very busy fall that has kept us attending to tasks that seem never ending. There is no other way but to sit at a computer day after day, and this is not a particularly healthy activity. Working at a keyboard demands a lot of small motor movements that are not at all natural.

I’m also feeling stress from too much time at the computer, I