Читать книгу Close to the Bone - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 28

One out of seven women will get cancer of the breast and one out of three people will get cancer in their lifetime. Often the diagnosis is made in prime adult years, way before it feels as if it is time to face the possibility of dying.

Appearances make the parallels to being in the midst of a holocaust graphic. Patients with either progressive disease or those in the throes of aggressive chemotherapy or radiation therapy often lose appetite and weight. They can begin to resemble inmates of concentration camps, where Viktor Frankl learned about choice and survival of spirit in the midst of pain, deprivation, malnourishment, and suffering. Between the illness itself and treatment, there is often pain and suffering. There are times when food cannot be kept down, or cannot be absorbed. Malnourishment is common. While there are no barbed fences, the necessity of being in a hospital linked to an intravenous bottle is as confining. In a hospital as in the concentration camps, people live in a valley of the shadow of death, susceptible to feeling powerless and in danger of giving up.

In radiation-therapy waiting areas in large medical centers, patients become aware that they are not alone in their suffering, that they are not the only one. Just as Frankl noted the way inmates responded, similar observations can be made in hospital settings. One such observer, Phil Head, a contributor to a series of essays in When the Worst That Can Happen Already Has, described what he saw. “You watch the ones who sadly give up. They don't walk into the room and say, ‘I give up, I have cancer,’ but in the way they accept the treatments and the way they relate to the other people, you know they've given up…. Then there are the people who try, to the best of their abilities, to spread a little fellowship and humor. From the very beginning, humor for me was a big help. As long as I was able to laugh at myself, the treatments, and my circumstances, there was hope.”⁴

Humor is an expression of spirit and fellowship in the midst of a descent into the underworld. It's a means of commenting on reality and getting through uncertain times of risk and pain. (Frankl described humor at Auschwitz and Dachau as among “the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation.”) When one has been stripped of the outer garments of dignity and there is no visible means of security, humor comes from the soul's perspective and laughter changes our biochemistry and psychology.

While humor may seem irreverent and far removed from a five-thousand-year-old goddess myth or the two-thousand-year-old Easter story, myth and humor have much in common in helping us through a period in the underworld. Both feed the spirit and are expressions of the unconquerable element in us. Humor and myth provide perspective on our suffering and make pain easier to bear. Each also is a commentary on there being something more to what is going on than meets the eye.