Finding Peace by Writing about Cancer

Finding Peace by Writing about Cancer

T. Fox Dunham

When I write about cancer, especially my horror work, I employ metaphors. These metaphors explore the various forces a cancer patient must endure through treatment and life after remission. I have used my writing to heal, writing such work as my novella New World for May December Books or my new novel, Mercy—a horror novel about the life of a cancer patient in hospital. The many stories and novellas I've written about cancer have served as a catharsis, a way to process my experience and understand it. I work to explore the emotions I've felt and to share those emotions with other patients and their family members. In my story, Welcome to the World Mister Smiles, I cover these component themes of living with cancer. Welcome to the World Mr. Smiles is a means for me to heal and to help myself and others find expression through symbol, theme and metaphor.

First, we start with the story conflict. Jai Chropra is a young man facing a death sentence. For all of his life, he believed that cancer happened to other people; and he'd be immune. Now it's happened to him, and as it did with me. It shifts his perspective in to a state of spurious reality. The world no longer feels. The laws physics don't make sense, yet he's under constant threat of death. To endure this mind state, he detaches from reality and numbs himself. 

He begins undergoing preliminary treatment testing, including a Gallium scan. The technician injects you with a radioactive isotope dye that is absorbed into cancer cells then scans the body with a receptor plate. This is a way to determine if you have tumors in your body, and they show up as white blobs on the monitor. When I had to go through this test, I thought the white blobs looked like clouds, nebulous and formless; and the mind sees patterns. I saw faces swirling in the hoary masses, and I realized that the cancer was alive, maybe possessing dark spirit. I had assigned it vindictiveness; darkness, evil, yet these were human qualities I personified the cancer with. It felt easier being a menace, something with an evil plot, because then I could fight it. Really, it's just a disease, and there's nothing I could personally do to fight it. But I needed to feel some kind of control, some way I could influence. In the story, the cancer begins to talk to Jai, and he responds. The cancer has a face. It has a name. And it can be killed. He no longer feels out of control. Cancer patients need to feel they have some kind of control of their disease, and they often trick themselves into believing it. Really, it's entirely out of our hands.

And it is alive. We personify things, contribute spirit and animation and personality to forces like disease. This too is about control. What can be controlled can’t hurt us. The reality is that almost everything in this universe is out of human control, so we live in this fantasy that somehow we can affect reality, change the course of events, even stop our death. This story is not so much a horror as it is a fantasy. I would love to give my disease a face and hands and a heart in which I could stab it. I want to be able to fight it on my terms, to argue with it. In my story, the cancer has will and a soul—and an appetite. Its nature is to feed. Even though it is horror, this element gives me some peace. Jai finds a way to evict the offending appendage from his body. It wants to be free. It speaks to him and demands to be free, to feed on life, to hunt. They make a deal, and he cuts his body wide and releases it. Their deal made, he goes off to try to live a normal life, but it haunts him. This is another reality for the cancer patient. Even if the caner is defeated, it sleeps, it waits, never too far from the mind of the patient. We don’t stop thinking about it. It never gets easier. We just find a new way to life with it, but always it’s never far. In Jai’s situation, he learns that the tumor he shed from his body is now killing and eating children. It is his responsibility. He birthed the monster. He gave it away even though he knew what it would do. It wasn’t wrong of him. He wanted to live. He wanted his life, his chance. It may not have been noble, but we can forgive him that.

And then he’s haunted. Oh yes. I had my radiation at Penn. They had many of the severe cases down there, especially children suffering this disease. I saw many of them. I played with them. And so many didn’t survive. And it haunts me. I feel guilty for living. Survivor’s guilt, as if I shed my cancer, and it killed them. Survivor’s guilt compels so much of my life, and whatever I do is never enough. The ghosts haunt him. They ask him why? And they intrude on the spurious security he’s created as he goes on with his life. No matter what he does, the children return night after night, and he’s going insane.

Finally, he decides to take action. This is another fantasy for me, something for which I wish I had remedy. The cancer is alive. It has a soul. He determines to trap it, using a mechanism he learned of in their encounter. They’re both living on borrowed time. This too is a metaphor. I was never supposed to survive my rare cell types of lymphoma, and I can’t help feeling like this is extra time—time that’s running out. If he can bring the monster back into his body, time will catch up, and they’ll both sicken and die. He can’t endure the guilt anymore, and the burden of the fantasy of his long life is too much to live with. He decides to give himself peace and take the monster with him.

This too is my desire. I long for the peace of ignorance. I’m tired of carrying this monster, and I wish I could do something to resolve the guilt. I have poured these emotions into a metaphysical script. That’s the heart of modern magick, and it doesn’t give me peace; however, at least it helps the pain for a little while.


And I keep writing and running from it. 

BIOGRAPHY

T. Fox Dunham lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Allison. He’s a lymphoma survivor, cancer patient, modern bard and historian. His first book, The Street Martyr, was published by Gutter Books. A major motion picture based on the book is being produced by Throughline Films. Destroying the Tangible Illusion of Reality or Searching for Andy Kaufman, a book about what it’s like to be dying of cancer, was recently released from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing and Fox has a story in the Stargate Anthology Points of Origin from MGM and Fandemonium Books. Fox is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, and he’s had published hundreds of short stories and articles. He’s host and creator of What Are You Afraid Of? Horror & Paranormal Show, a popular horror program on PARA-X RADIO. His motto is wrecking civilization one story at a time. http://www.facebook.com/tfoxdunham & Twitter: @TFoxDunham