Life's Afternoon, Part 2

Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age with Hillary's Class - Wellesley '69
by Miriam Horn

(Page 2 of 3)

Through it all, Nancy felt an unexpected, wonderful peace. "It was a kind of religious conversion for me, which transformed something that most people would find unbearable into a profound experience. People don't know how you can bear it. They don't think they could ever muster the grace of acceptance. I couldn't, the first time. All I could think was, Why are you doing this to me? But this time I felt chosen, given a deliberate message. I believe in reincarnation, and that you choose the life you need for your consciousness to evolve. In this lifetime, illness is my teacher. Most of what I will learn I'll learn because of my illnesses. The moment I got the diagnosis, I knew I was looking at my life from its end. From that vantage, for the very first time, I had clear knowledge of what mattered to me.

"I finally understood that what's important to me is the spiritual life, finding a path that keeps me aligned with God. Not that God is ever out of sync with us, but your actions can bring you closer or pull you away. If you expose yourself to all the junk that tells you over and over again all day long that what's important is being young and beautiful and having lots of money, if you're bathed in that, with nothing that guides you to compassion, to being sensitive to other people's sufferings and not turning away from them, then your ability to feel close to God is going to be compromised. It takes work and a supportive community to be a tranquil and kind person. So while I could never say this illness was good, it has been an illumination, a great spiritual challenge."

Nancy has a deep, sonorous voice, which, as she tells her story, is dry and matter-of-fact; it neither breaks with tears nor works too hard to prove her uplifted state. "I'm not like an enlightened being, where all the terror and anger goes away. I'm afraid of dying - the actual physical process. It's hard to imagine there won't be panic at the moment of giving up, losing absolutely everything. I don't think there's a beautiful light you follow and feel no pain. But I do believe that you can die well. Thich Nhat Hahn [in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying] says that the monastic path is preparation for death. When I was in the hospital, I realized I was not prepared, that I must become prepared. I started reading about death and went to a workshop with hospice workers and people who'd lost friends to AIDS. I saw that some people die in an inspiring way. To die that way myself, and maybe help other people do so, seems important. And to savor the life I have, the prospect of good work. Thich Nhat Hahn says that every time he wakes, he celebrates that he can breathe."

Though she had been absorbed in her adult life mostly with Hinduism and Buddhism, in crisis Nancy found herself turning back toward Christianity, "the religion most deeply imbedded in me." Buddhism's universe of emptiness offered too little comfort. "It doesn't have the same heart quality as Christianity. There have been great, good Christians, even if it has become a withered affair in most churches, obsessed with people's sex lives, a haven for bigots. It moves me with its dramatic stories and tenderness." After her experience with the Rajneesh cult, she had no desire to join another religious community; "the conformism would drive me up the wall and a lot of those people are crazy." But she found an Episcopal church with an interfaith spirituality institute, "where they were not fazed by a Sunyassen who had hooked up with Rajneesh. One priest said, 'Oh, he had wonderful meditations.' I felt my sins forgiven for having dipped into this and traipsed into that. They saw it as a natural seeking."

Nancy wished her husband, Steve, would join her in her spiritual search, but in vain. "My husband has been very loyal and very stoic. He has kept most of his fear to himself. He believes life is as it is, that you can't measure it by what's fair, that you have to make the best of what you're given. But he's not interested in my meditation groups or retreats. He's skeptical and doesn't like groupy feelings and is not a person of great spiritual yearnings. I sometimes wish he were. I know people who pray with their families every day, and would like it to be part of my home life."

The integration of her spirituality into her work life has seemed to Nancy more urgent. "Certain things that were never good for me, like corporate work, are now out of the question. Most of those jobs were an immense waste of my time. They gave me nothing but money, and time is too precious now. I probably couldn't get hired anyway. Not many employers value the wisdom of a cancer survivor, someone who has faced death. You have to do your best to conceal it; they worry you'll rack up their insurance bills or take off too much time. But I've had to face the question: How do you make a living in this world knowing more than it wants you to know?"

Her solution was to apply for a joint degree in social work and pastoral ministry at Boston College, with the intention of working with the dying. The college turned her down, explaining, with no apparent irony, that "she didn't have recent experience working with the target population." They advised her to spend a year doing volunteer work and reapply, so she began visiting the chemotherapy ward at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She was well suited for the work: Where others might have shrunk in horror from tipping juice into the mouth of a man who'd lost an entire shoulder to lymphoma and spoke through a voice box, or tucking in the sheets around another, who was having bone marrow transplants and had to be completely covered except for his eyes, for Nancy it was a familiar environment. She spent her days greeting patients, helping them find a place to sit, and bringing them food, all of which gave her "a tremendous high." "It did not feel like work, but an opportunity to have a powerful experience. Illness called me out of my small self."

Harder for her was listening to cancer patients tell their stories. "My own story is in there, which leaves me tongue-tied. I have an overwhelming reaction to people who are in late stages of treatment, having bone marrow transplants. I see my worst fantasies played out. It stirs my dread: the paralyzing fear of the unknown. I do keep trying. Thich Nhat Hahn says you should seek out suffering to grow. I guess I feel there's no way out but through."

When Nancy finally began Boston College, she again felt as she had at Wellesley: deeply alienated. She was briefly thrown out of the school after dropping a mandatory course in racism, which she saw as "an opportunity for black faculty to get up and revile white people." She was also put off by what she thought to be an excessively politicized perspective in the pastoral program. "They were busy with feminist and Marxist liberation theology; their concern was justice, not spirituality. Their Old Testament was not about a personal relationship with God but about a people working out their political problems, with God just a player in those politics. They would get angry if I asked about the soul. But I kept wondering: If the Bible is just about some third world country two thousand years ago, why would it be of any use to us?"

The feminist analysis was somewhat less alien to Nancy. "We were taught by ex-Catholic nuns who had left the order because they couldn't find a way to be a woman in a church that excludes them from the priesthood and magisterium and consigns them to a life much poorer and more obscure than men's. They were trying to redeem the Bible and Christian tradition from its patriarchal orientation. I could relate to that. The woman thing is why I'm not a Catholic; what do a lot of dried-up old men have to say about my life?" Nancy read Sandra Schneiders's Beyond Patching on the exodus of women from the church for the goddess movement, and Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenzo's argument for a woman's church and Bible. "I do question Christianity's androcentrism, with God the Father and His only Son. The Virgin kind of fades out of the story. Mary Magdalene is central, present at the Crucifixion and the tomb, but she has been terribly slandered by being called a prostitute. I realize the power of symbolism, and that the basic stories in my religion give women second status. So I tried to read people who would help me re-image this stuff, like Elizabeth Johnson, who argues that Jesus is the incarnation of Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, or John McDarr, who shows how we project our own family dynamics onto God. Until I got sick, my God was authoritarian and remote with bursts of love just like my father. Now, like my father, he has come closer. But again, it was more about politics than transcendence, which brought a lot of confusion in my mind."

Nancy was still less at home with the medical model employed in the social work school, where she spent half her time. "They taught us to listen to a patient just to pull out their symptoms and then look at the diagnostic manual, which is like a big reverse cookbook: You have all the ingredients and try to find the recipe, then do the prescribed drug and behavior therapy. They viewed as suspect any behavior that was too religious; psychotic people are always having religious experiences. I discovered I'm not comfortable approaching people as insects, pulling off that leg and an antenna to figure out what kind of bug it is and then make a better bug."

Copyright © 2000 by Miriam Horn

About the Author

Miriam Horn writes for U.S. News and World Report. She lives in New York City with her husband.