Thursday, May 18th, 2006

Since my search for healing led me to leave my home in June of 04, I have been housed by Grace and the kindness of friends; I have lived in everything from a palatial, walled estate, to a Winnebago motor home, and now dwell in a new city the site and name of which is, like so much which has evolved from my altered perspective, irrelevant.

As I write this it is exactly three years since I first entered the hospital and my family was told “…any treatment would only prolong his suffering.” They chose, as I would have, to prolong my suffering. It was the first of at least seven, official, written prognostications over time that I would be dead in a matter of hours to months. The physical suffering continues, at a much-reduced intensity; along the way I have experienced a range of agonies from physical and psychological to perceptive and spiritual. That “suffering” has also become irrelevant.

What is now significant has more to do with silence, Divine Mystery and a new understanding of Love, although within that embrace are also laughable absurdity, deceit and the morphing story of my truth.

On Your Mark… Personal research has shown me that most people who experience the kind of suffering and profound “near death experiences” I have known go, within about six months, from a renewed sense of elation and hope right back to the previously rutted story of their. Of the small percentage who maintain and take continued action to manifest a new vision of life, about half apparently become so enamored of their new story as to border on what I perceive to be zealous idiots, self-deceived hustlers, or well-meaning fools. They become celebrities speaking for the dead, or they found cults that feed on the desperation of others to “know” about an afterlife. (My judgments exist because I am still evolving, finding deceit in others and myself a most common behavior.) Other survivors move from appreciative and less materially obsessed to an evolving spiritual introspection that manifests itself in a variety of positive ways.One woman I have spoken with quit her job as a corporate executive and has devoted her life to Hospice volunteer work where her peers and clients alike, consider her to be the most compassionate and calming of individuals. Another man chose to use his considerable, corporate power to begin creating what he calls “the compassionate workplace.”Prior to my various dances with two craniotomies, three cancers and seven flat-line events I was a public speaker and, depending upon whom you to talked to, everything from a self-obsessed egoist who bordered on being a pathological liar, to a gregarious and helpful man. (Probably all of those descriptions were fitting to a degree.) What has changed? The first thing I noticed was the overwhelming content of deceit in human interactions, beginning with my own. I had an abrupt awareness of how barely a sentence came out of my mouth that did not contain some element of deceit. I had always had difficulty with “white lies,” I.E: acceptable deceits such as “dinner was terrific, Aunt Marge, “ when one would have rather eaten live snails dipped in rancid butter; or, “Fat? No, that dress makes you look quite seductive. I grew up a liar in a house where lies were commonplace: “Daddy is face down in his soup because he is tired,” rather than “Daddy is drunk,” I attended public schools and churches where I was acutely aware that the same people who professed high moral conduct were also those who sexually molested me. Then there were the standard locker room lies, and constant proof that the leaders of our country were non-stop liars.Okay, so I lied, but it was to spare you being hurt (a clever disguise for not feeling my own potential pain) or to make myself seem more than the loser I feared being. That habit pattern continued until I got clean and sober in 1982; still, it was so ingrained that when I made an attempt to become more honest my modest progress was tempered by the fact that I achieved cleverly sublimated forms of self-deception. The two craniotomies, in 1996 and 2002, stripped away more of the excuses and I was convinced that I had become a more honest man. Then the Cancer Bear grabbed me for a slam-danceathon that took everything God, my friends and I had to survive. The Dance became a slow and painful Gavotte after my release from the hospital just before Christmas of 2003. Honesty was less an issue than simply surviving, or so I thought. Not so slowly, those things that I had felt were precious to me were stripped away. First, I had to leave my family to seek treatment. I have not lived at home for nearly two years, and I miss my young children so much that to write of it still dissolves me to tears. Second, the avalanche of expenses combined with my limited, and eventual inability to work, reduced me from a paper millionaire to a literal pauper within a matter of months. Third, The Dance oscillated between apparent triumph and disaster so often that my sense of hope was often impaired. It was not until I made the decision to live, and cease focusing on out dancing the damned bear, that I experienced a depth of spiritual awakening which had evaded me.

Get Set…. My new and trusted oncologist asked that I apply for disability as travel and being around large groups of people, which was central to my work, threatened my compromised immune system. So much time was being spent on paying the monthly bills I had accrued, trips to and from various clinics and simply getting through a day that I was focused on staying alive but I was not living! I decided to live. I would work, although I would not pay myself for such efforts, but would make moves toward establishing an investment or non-profit structure that would offer me just enough in dividends or management fees to offset what disability pay I might qualify for. I would simplify my life even further to make more time for working with others, meditation, the world of streams, deep woods and languages of wind; I would open myself up to the possibilities of a social life which I had avoided. At present, I am beginning to manifest all of those changes. Which returns me to what has changed.

STOP! The story of my life has changed. It was, as are all the stories we make up about ourselves, mutable to begin with but I had failed to realize that. The wisdom of Thomas Szas has come home: “The self is not something one discovers, it is something one creates.” The self I am recreating gets honest more quickly, is more tolerant of the deceits I see manifest in human existence, and is focused more on living a life of service than staying alive and waiting to see what I will do if I live. Silence is more a daily part of my life as I practice a form of Buddhist meditation called Za Zen; physical exercise, which I had avoided out of fear of injury, is now manifest as a way of making myself stronger and more useful to others. The story of my life is just that, a story, and I see it from a bemused place of detachment, a form of what writers have dubbed “infotainment,” that teaches and entertains. Where, what and who I am becomes less relevant than what I am being at any given moment. I like this story and will continue to observe and report on it. I invite anyone who cares to do so to submit their stories for possible inclusion in a community of stories that might help us all to be of service to one another.

In Love, Light and Mystery, C.W. Metcalf

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Dancing with the Cancer Bear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.