"When Breath Becomes Air": The Heartbreak of Cancer

*A note on the picture and my cat, Hamlet: Hamlet does not enjoy having his picture taken, nor does he enjoy having a book placed next to him while he is trying to sleep.  I miss my office pug, Loki, so very much with his happy energy.  He was always willing and excited about having his picture taken for this book blog.  Stay tuned! We are slated to get a pug puppy before the end of summer 2016.  Cute baby pug pictures will be forthcoming :)

"In a world of asynchronous communication, where we are so often buried in our screens, our gaze rooted to the rectangular objects buzzing in our hands, our attention consumed by ephemera, stop and experience this dialogue with my young departed colleague, now ageless and extant in memory.  Listen to Paul.  In the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back.  Therein lies his message." quoted from the forward by Abraham Veghese in Paul Kalanithi's book "When Breath Becomes Air"

I hesitated when my good friend who always loves the same books that I do suggested that I read Paul Kalanithi's book "When Breath Becomes Air." She told me the short memoir dealt with Kalanithi's diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer when he was just about to complete his decade's worth of schooling and training and striving to become a neurosurgeon.  At the end of his journey he became a patient rather than a doctor.

Why did I hesitate?

I've been marinating in sad cancer stories for years, and I didn't know if I wanted to read another where I already knew the outcome was not favorable.  Cancer is a sad topic.  Almost everyone knows someone or has been personally affected by some sort of cancer.  My aunt died from breast cancer that came back in her lungs.  My grandmother died from pancreatic cancer.  My sister recently finished her treatments for tongue cancer (and no, she never smoked or did anything that would be considered cancer causing).  My husband's boss just finished his treatments for a rare form of leukemia.  My neighbor has cancer of the esophagus and is currently undergoing treatments.  My other neighbor's sister has brain cancer and was just told the devastating news that there is nothing else that they can try and to get her affairs in order.  My other neighbor's mother is undergoing treatment for throat cancer.  And my other neighbor just found out that her dog has cancer in his gums.

Cancer sucks.

Sometimes the signs make sense.  Behavior A caused Cancer B.  Sometimes it's the sticky finger of fate that points at an unsuspecting victim who has trouble getting up stairs, or just feels like something is off in their bodies and all of a sudden it's treatment time.

The burning away with the radiation.

 The poisoning of the body with chemotherapy.

The never ending cycle of other medicines that ward off the side effects caused by the burning and poisoning.

So, the prospect of reading the sad tale of a promising doctor whose life ended way too early at the age of 37 due to stage IV lung cancer wasn't super appealing.  I read it anyway, and just as Abraham Veghese says in the forward about the dialogue that Kalanithi presents as he wrestles with his diagnosis, the impending birth of his child, what actually gives life purpose and meaning . . . it could be anyone's story who has ever suffered from cancer or watched a love one suffer.

Being a neurosurgeon who has been on the other end of devastating diagnoses his whole professional career, his perspective goes even deeper than those with no medical background.  I know his book helped me see inside what was happening with my sister and the thoughts and feelings she must have been wrestling with as she underwent her complicated tongue surgery and subsequent 35 radiation treatments and 4 chemotherapy appointments.

The uniqueness of Kalanithi's story stems from his extraordinary writing ability and the way he presents his feelings with such unflinching honesty.

I cried.  If you read this book, there is no way not to cry.

But it's worth it to read it.

Cancer doesn't suck any less because I read this book, but the insider's perspective has helped me make sense of the process of treatment, the trial and error that needs to occur, the devastation, the ability to let go, and the hopefulness of moving on.

"Brown Girl Dreaming": Changing the World, One Story at a Time

how to listen #7

Even the silence 

has a story to tell you. 

Just listen. Listen. 

I truly believe that sharing life stories with others can connect people together in a way that nothing else can.  It's the reason that we started Stageoflife - to change the world, one story at a time.  Over these last 5 years, I have read so many amazing stories from our writing community that have made me smile, cry, think, and above all connect with people who I would not have known if they had not taken the time and conjured up the courage to submit a true, personal story to a larger audience.  When I started this book blog, I wanted to share my love of reading with our writing community.  Most of us become writers because we read a book that we connected with in some way, or because we love words.  I wanted to help people discover great books or to steer them clear from the not so great ones.  Because this is my 100th book blog post, I hoped to read a good book that had a meaningful story to share and serendipitously I chose Jacqueline Woodson's "Brown Girl Dreaming." It's Woodson's memoir - the story of her childhood, her search for home, and her own unique gifts, but it's more than that; it's a validation to me that stories really can transform the world.

Written in free verse poetry, Woodson's memoir follows her childhood journey growing up in Ohio, then South Carolina and then finally Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s.  Her poems are simplistic and complex, poignant at times and other times funny, but always honest and real.  As she grows up, she searches for a place that feels like home - is it with her grandparents in South Carolina where her grandfather gardens and her grandmother bakes biscuits and preaches the strict Jehovah's Witness religion? Is it with her mother in Brooklyn where "there is only gray rock, cold / and treeless as a bad dream"?  She always feels in between homes (as many of us do or did as children), but she learns to find the comfort in each place and overcome the struggles as well (as many of us do).

In her search for home, she also searches for herself and what "small gift from the universe" is "waiting to be discovered" inside of her.  She knows she is a storyteller, and that even if the words don't always come or if she can't read as fast as her sister or the other kids, she loves the feel of writing.  In the chapter called "composition notebook" she recalls:

Nothing in the world is like this-
a bright white page with
pale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencil
the soft hush of it
moving finally
one day
into letters.

In her specifics she speaks of the universal truths that those of us who love reading and writing know.  I love the smell of new books and often flip the pages to my nose to breathe it in, just like I love the smell of a used book shop with all of it's stories waiting for me to take them home.  Woodson's words helped me to know that I am not alone.  I may not be a brown girl, but I was a once a girl who held books like I was holding a best friend's hand and dreamed about the places I read.  I know what it means to be home and not home and to feel in my soul that there is more to me that I need to share with others. For me connections have always come from sharing the stories of my life.  In the act of telling, they become real - regardless if I am writing them down or sharing them with a group of friends while drinking a glass of Pinot Noir and decompressing after a hard week.

Most reviews of Woodson's book compares it to other books such as the fictional "Out of the Dust" by Karen Hesse which follows the life of a little girl living through the Dust Bowl.  That book broke my heart a little bit more than "Brown Girl Dreaming," but both were written in verse and both showed the strength of a little girl who struggles to be who she is despite the odds.  While I was reading "Brown Girl Dreaming" I thought of "The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros whose main character Esperanza grows up in a poor Latino community.  Esperanza also struggles with the definition of home, and she also shows promise early on that she will be a writer who transcends the lives that are almost predetermined for the girls from her community. Cisneros writes with a lyrical touch and soulful wisdom just like Woodson.

Regardless of comparisons, Woodson's book deserves all the awards that have been bestowed on it - National Book Award, Newbery Honor and The Coretta Scott King Award.  It's beautiful and simplistic, and complicated and soul-searching.  Mostly, it's a story that will connect others together when they read it.  Author and reader, culture to culture, mother and daughter.

I couldn't think of a better book for my 100th post.

how to listen #10

Write down what I think
I know. The knowing will come. 

Just keep listening . . . 

"Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild": Searching for her Dad and Finding Herself

"Looking back on my struggle to find my father, I began to understand my quest as part of a bigger human drive.  My journey triggered by my desire to have children, but whether we reproduce or not, the need to understand where we come from is universal.  It's just part of the human process, like learning to talk, or to jump.  We have an instinct to tell the story of our past, to understand what came before, to try to make sense of it." - Novella Carpenter

I love to read memoirs that chronicle the searches that people undertake for healing and understanding in their lives.  In Novella Carpenter's "Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild" she searches to better understand her elusive, erratic father, George Carpenter, whose moods, beliefs and lifestyle baffle her.  Her parents divorced when she was only four years old, and she spent a lifetime becoming more and more estranged from her father.

Novella's search for her father begins because she gets a message from her mother that her father is missing.  Her mom's commentary on George's disappearance is "weird, huh?" Novella reasons with herself that she "had always accepted, or at least didn't dwell on, his absence, but now that he had disappeared in such a dramatic, tangible way,  [she] felt compelled to find him." After days of worrying over never seeing her father again, Novella receives an email from him that he's alive and well in Arizona, but as she processes the news of her father's unintended disappearance, she decides that she needs to "make things right with her dad" because she has a "breeding plan" and wants to figure out what happened with her parents.  Why was her dad the way he was? Could they reconcile or rebuild a relationship? 

She crafts a quick email to her dad which says, "This whole missing person thing made me realize how much I would regret it if we don't have some meaningful time together.  I would love to stay with you and learn some mountain man skills, or just go fly-fishing.  I love you dad and love your spirit, I know it flows in me." 

In this story of discovery, Novella discovers ugly truths about her father - his hot temper, his suicidal tendencies, his ramshackle life in a run down shack of a cabin, and his increasingly crazy and anti-social behavior.  She also starts to see herself more clearly - how her mom and dad's ideals are also some of her own.  She starts to take a harder look at the life she lives surrounded by goats, urban farming and her love of growing plants on a plot of abandoned land next to her rented home,  her hoarding tendencies, and her uncompromising viewpoints.  She realizes that the life her parents dreamed for her when they were young parents - a feral existence of living off of the land, and how they arrived at their beliefs about how to raise two little girls off of the land in Idaho - mirror some of her own philosophies about life.  She sees this as "rhyming the past" rather than repeating it. Our parents run through our veins whether we like it or not.  

I loved Novella's search for her father which really led her to a discovery of herself and more of a clear picture of not only her parent's paths in life, but how she became who she is. She notices the subtleties of life around her and has a keen sense of the natural world (just like her father and mother), and she can profoundly declare the truths of existence in a way that clarifies life.  My favorite passage of the book comes close to the end: 

Families are like ecosystems.  They begin looking one way, but as the years tick by, the inhabitants change. Some grow and flourish, others are wounded.  They might rebound, or die.  Nests are built and young are raised, then the fledglings leave.  When disaster hits, only the adaptable survive.  In my family, there were constants that added a certain texture to our family's ecosystem: love of language, of reading.  A tendency toward living on the fringes.  A hot rage that burns inside of us, and sometimes threatens ourselves and others. Sensitivity, a sense of the incredible power and beauty in the natural world.  A love of the numinous so powerful that it mesmerizes and inspires us.  We are craggy and hard; intense and uncompromising . .  . Every movement, every act, is a meditation on those who came before us.

These are HUGE realizations that many people choose to ignore in their lives.  As I read this book I thought about my own father and mother - who they are as people and how they shaped the person that I am and the person that I still hope to be.  

If you've never asked yourself what constants are in your family or who you are because of (and in despite of) your parents, this book will make you confront those questions and take the journey to discover yourself as you discover what you love and despise about your mom and dad equally run through your veins.  

"Yin, Yang, Yogini": Don't let the title turn you away

I fell in love with this book.

Not only did I fall in love with the story, but Kathryn E. Livingston's 'Yin, Yang, Yogini: A Woman's Quest for Balance, Strength and Inner Peace' made me fall in love with the power of yoga all over again.

I first must confess that I am a yogini, and I intend to take my practice to the next level this fall and go through yoga teacher training.  Non-yoga people might be totally turned away by the title (it's not the best title to make non-yoga people want to read it), but it's more a story of finding yourself in a dark place and discovering the power within to gain healing and lightness in your own life.  It's a story that yoga people or non-yoga people can relate to, and Livingston's writing style and stories make you want to know her and read more about her experiences.

I didn't know anything about Kathryn E. Livingston before reading this book, but I feel like she is my friend now.  She is insightful, funny, honest, and smart.  Before this book, she wrote columns for parenting magazines and Working Mother magazine, and she has co-authored books about parenting. In this memoir, she turns her keen life observations from parenting to her opinions and experiences as she ventures into the world of yoga.

At the age of 51, Kathryn feels stuck.  Stuck by fear of living.  Stuck by the grief over her mother's death.  Stuck by the unknown of her three sons who embrace life and are at the crossroads of adulthood.  She goes to a therapist who suggests Kathryn tries yoga to help her reach a more peaceful place in her stressed out existence.  Rather than turning to anti-depressants or medication to help her through her anxiety, Kathryn decides to try the yoga studio that recently opened just a block away from her home.  Her experiences are transformative and she discovers that maybe just as yoga philosophy preaches, there are no coincidences in life and that yoga can help her through some of the most difficult moments she will ever encounter with a peaceful awareness and calmness that she has never possessed.

Each vignette that Kathryn shares about her yoga classes and her inspirational teachers made me think of all my wonderful yoga instructors who have each taught me so much about myself and the world.  I think of Pat and his Thursday night classes that I called "Thursday night therapy" and how each class would start with Pat's take on the atmosphere of the room.  Some nights were about change and growth, and how even though periods of change bring uncertainty, we can reach out and say, "Why not?" and enjoy the changes we encounter.  Some nights were about acceptance.  Some nights were about challenge.  I think of gentle Dayna and her ability to make me really aware of the space I created in my body through my movements, and how each breath allowed me to lengthen and elongate.  I've changed through yoga as a person, and seeing it through Kathryn's experiences was a huge validation for how much love and appreciation I have for yoga and all my fellow yoga devotees and my instructors.

Kathryn's insights in the two years that this book spans are inspirational.  Through her growing love of yoga, she starts to see the interconnectedness of things around her and she starts to have some huge realizations about life.  As she works through her feelings about her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment she realizes, "I always thought it totally unnecessary for bad things to happen to appreciate what we have; but the truth is, we do sometimes need to step into the darkness to understand how bright our light really is." I think about that from all of the hardest times in my life.  After going through the dark period, I realize how strong I really am.

I also really related to her ability to see that she receives exactly what she needs, exactly when she needs it.  It's like in the book 'The Alchemist' by Paulo Coelho where the main character just needs to be open to the universe for the universe to open up to him.  Kathryn's yoga instructor, Jill, gives her class the message that "We get what we need." It's like that Rolling Stone's song.  We can't always get what we want, but we just might find that we get what we need. Kathryn adds, "If we need to be awakened, something will open our eyes."

By the end of the book, Kathryn waxes philosophical on the two overarching life lessons that yoga and her bout with breast cancer taught her.  "The first, that when you're in the darkness, know that the light will come.  We are light and dark, sun and moon, male and female, yin and yang; life is composed of opposites, in a continuing cycle of change. The second, when you are in the light, don't step back into the darkness. Live in the light, and breathe it in fully."  I took deep breaths while reading this book and felt that it was like oxygen or like ujjayi breath in yoga.  It helped me to feel alive and invigorated by life's possibilities of balance, strength and inner peace.

"The Paris Letters": A Fresh Burst of Wonderful

I'm pretty sure that I need to go to Paris. NOW.

I've been to Paris twice in my life.  Once when I lived in London, my roommate Deni and I hopped on the Chunnel and spent a three day weekend in Paris.  We started together visiting his brother and going to museums.  Deni got bored with that, so I continued on by myself which suited me better.  I reveled in my alone time, popping into cafes and wine stores, stumbling upon my favorite museum EVER, the Musee d'Orsay, a beautiful art museum in an old refurbished train station.  Deni and I would meet for dinner in the evenings, talking about our days of getting to know Paris in our own way.

About six years ago, my husband and I took a five day trip to Paris.  It rained the whole time.  Not just a little bit of rain, but the soaking kind.  It didn't dull our experience at all.  We walked everywhere huddled under one small umbrella, stopping for cafe creme when we needed a break.  While on top of the Eifel Tower, we saw a storm moving in and ran to the bottom narrowly missing the gusty rain as we sought shelter in a cafe.  We went to jazz clubs, and wonderful dinners, museums and parks.  We walked until our feet hurt, got lost on the winding streets and loved every second of it.

After reading Janice MacLeod's "The Paris Letters" the pull to Paris with it's beautiful parks, museums, shops, markets and different pace of life gets hard to resist.  Even more hard to resist is MacLeod's infectious creative attitude towards life.  After realizing that her face paced, LA life complete with stressful career in marketing, does not satisfy her and isn't very fun, she makes a plan to get to Paris and become an artist. How does one begin the process of getting to Paris? Follow MacLeod's ingenious plan to either make or save $100 a day.  She begins by using up the things she already has and stops the endless cycle of buying more and more.  She sells her car, her bike, asks friends to meet her for coffee instead of pricey dinners, and sells paintings on Etsy (the rest of her list appears in the back of her book).

Rather than starting her year with a thin resolution to Lose 10 pounds, she challenges herself to write in her journal every day. She never forgets the saying on the card she bought when she was 20 years old that said, "Write to learn what you know." She needed to know that she was in charge of creating her life (don't we all?).  In her wisdom from her journey to Paris she reflects that, "We must know how to design our lives. We are all artists, and each day is a canvas. Writing in my journal each day was how I redesigned my life.  I became conscious of just how much I disliked my day-to-day existence.  I would get up, react, and repeat. I had created a fast, busy, messy life. There was no one else to blame. I designed it, tried it, didn't like it, and had to erase and redesign."

How many times in your life have you felt this way but didn't do anything to change the "get up, react, and repeat" part? Maybe you are stuck right now in your daily grind and don't know how to make change.

What I love about MacLeod's book is that she used her creativity to find out how to make money by doing what she loves - writing letters and painting.  She combined those two talents and developed her Paris letters concept.  She also found love, found contentment, learned to love herself more, and learned a new language.  Not a bad year.

This book inspired me, and it was another reminder of how important writing is in my own life.  I do make excuses for how I don't have time to do it (when I have plenty of time to watch Master Chef and House Hunters and the occasional episode of Chopped).  We all have the time to do the things that will free us from the lives we created that we don't like very much.  What do you want to do that you have never thought you could do? Why not do it?

It also reminded me that traveling and getting out of our daily grind can make a huge difference.  We build routines of drudgery and don't always know how to break the cycle especially when it is a cycle of necessity or one that revolves around our children, or our spouses, or jobs that we think we need because we are too afraid to take the leap and change.

If you read "The Paris Letters" you might just get the motivation that you need to create a fresh burst of new wonderful in your own world.  And, I bet, you might just want to go to Paris. NOW.

"I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia": Do our memories really make us who we are?

I read memoirs to meet incredible people with incredible stories.  Su Meck's memoir "I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia" tells the incredible story of how at age 22 she was struck on the head by a ceiling fan and suffered a traumatic brain injury.  In her memoir, she pieces together her treatment (which seemed inadequate for the extent of injury), her life at home with two her two small boys after the accident, her marriage to her ever absent husband, Jim, and her survival without any memories and without the thinking ability that she had before the accident.

I will never look at ceiling fans the same (the day I started reading this book, my husband stuck his head under our ceiling fan in the bedroom that was recently installed to check if it was wobbling and I freaked out a bit until he moved his head away from the blades). I will also never take my intact memory or ability to learn or function in my life for granted.  Su Meck's story reminded me that we can really do whatever we want to do in our lives even when we are presented with seemingly insurmountable obstacles to success.  After her accident, Su mimicked those around her without understanding the "why" behind actions.  She would frequently have what she terms "lightening" episodes where her brain would almost do a system shut down when she was presented with too much information or things got too intense.  Sometimes these "lightning" episodes would happen when she was alone with her two boys, and even when she was driving.

As she coped with being misunderstood by her husband (who is brave for allowing his wife to share their story since he comes off as a villain in many respects), her family,  and the medical community's lack of understanding at how severe her injuries were and the extent of her memory loss and functionality, she achieved so much every day.  Even getting breakfast, lunch and dinner together for her family was a huge task for her not to mention that she went on to teach aerobics classes, volunteer in her son's classes, move to Cairo and learn how to function as a mother in a new space, and she even goes on to achieve a college degree even though she basically had to relearn everything including letters, colors, numbers, reading and writing at the age of 22. After applying to be on the Phi Theta Kappa board at Montgomery College, and being selected as an officer, she and the other members were asked to bring in a bag of significant objects to aid in getting to know each other.  Su brought her "Hop on Pop" book and explained to the group that it was the first book she had ever read. She shocked everyone when she told them she read it at age 22.

Because she opened up to that group, her life began to change again.  Being accepted by her fellow Phi Theta Kappa members helped her to see that she people needed to hear her story. Daniel de Vise from the Washington Post wrote a story about her (and eventually went on to help her write her memoir).

Although this book wasn't the best written memoir I have ever read (there are so many exclamation points in this book), but I overlooked the lack of style and graceful writing knowing that the author's incredible story of climbing her way back after a traumatic brain injury led her to write a book about her experiences in order to help others who might be suffering in silence like she did for so many years.  Su Meck's book is a great reminder for me why I love memoirs - they show me that nothing is impossible and they connect me to amazing people who I would have never met otherwise.  Stories truly do connect us to other people, and Su Meck is one person that I feel honored to be connected to after reading her memoir.

'Little Failure': Coming of Age as a Jewish Russian Immigrant

It took me some time with this one. I don't know what my barrier was to Gary Shteyngart's memoir "Little Failure."  It has everything I love - humor, an almost unbelievable coming of age tale involving immigrant parents and the less than perfect son, wanting to please and separate from parents all at once, embarrassing moments in elementary school and middle school, underachieving in high school and college, and then the quest to become a writer and lover and human being.  I love that stuff.  I love memoirs that are raw, honest, and ache with the quest to find one's truth.

It's all there, but something stopped me from jumping up and down every time I picked up this book.  Something stopped me from laughing out loud in the funny sections (and there were so many that sometimes it's easy to overlook just how funny this book is). Now that it's over, I can appreciate the journey of the book even more as it meanders from Gary's Russian roots to his family's immigration to Queens, New York. From there it travels beyond his childhood to Gary's high school and college years where he decides he wants to be a writer and even beyond that into his adulthood of failed relationships and failed decisions.  Finally it travels back to where it started, in Russia, as Gary sees new aspects of his father's life and puts together pieces of his own.  This book truly is a triumph of a memoir even if I felt like I had to slog through it in order to finish it.

There is no doubt in my mind that Shteyngart possesses an amazing writing gift.  These essays have been strung together in dizzying literary heft.  At times the writing is dense with details and others light with humor and then back to a dark sense of self-deprecation.  That self-deprecation (as the title suggests) stems from Gary's childhood.  His mother's nickname for him was "Little Failure" (how sweet) and his father's lovingly called him "Snotty" due to Gary's serious asthma issues.

I loved portions of this book like when his family receives the Publishers Clearing House that they won $10,000,000 and they believe it until they "find out the truth quickly and brutally"and he ponders that "In Russia the government was constantly telling us lies . . . but we cannot imagine that they would lie to our faces like that here in America, the Land of This and the Home of That." I also loved his descriptions of The Solomon Schechter School of Queens and his painfully funny retelling of his circumcision at age 8 ("In school, my penis is trying to put on a brave face. It can't tell anyone what happened or they'll make fun of its owner, Igor, or Gary, or whatever").

At times, though, the writing felt a bit too dense with too much meandering back and forth and then the repetition of some details due to the essay format being pieced together into a memoir.  The self-deprecation part of the memoir gets a little old, but honestly, that's just Gary coming to terms with himself.  He isn't all that likable, but at the same time there is a quality of sincerity in "Scary Gary" at Oberlin College where he spends most of his days drunk and high and underachieving as much as possible as he listens to Beatles records for college credit.  He's brutally real about his shortcomings and his life disappointments.

What I ultimately can take away from this book is that even our little failures (and in Gary's life there are many) can become huge successes when we are real about them.  I learned Jewish Russian history and saw a side of New York City that I never saw before - the plight of the modern immigrant, the hopes and dreams of his family, their struggles, their failures, their intimate moments as a family trying to discover their new identity while retaining their culture and history.  Gary sees himself as a flawed human being (as we all are) and can also recognize his own talent as a writer.

Did I laugh the way that I do when I read David Sedaris? No.  Did I emote the way that I do when I read Frank McCourt's immigrant experiences? No. Did I feel that I had read an amazing literary voice that will be considered one of the greatest contemporary voices.  Absolutely.

'Until I Say Good-bye: My Year of Living with Joy': A Reminder of Appreciating the Simple Things in Life

I cried several times reading 'Until I Say Good-bye: My Year of Living with Joy' by Susan Spencer-Wendel.  Her memoir chronicles her battle with ALS and her resolution to live the last years of her life with joy, hope, love and beautiful moments with all the people she loves most.  At one point in the book she thinks about her funeral and says, "Till then, I will live in the Taoist way: peaceful, not strident about wants or beliefs.  I will live in the now.
As Lao Tzu wrote:
'Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.'"

When faced with the knowledge that you will no longer have the function of your body as ALS melts away your nerves and muscles but leaves your mind completely intact, how would you choose to use your days? Would you as Susan Spencer-Wendel decided to do, use your only functioning finger, your thumb, to tap out an entire book in four months? Would you choose to reconnect with your birth father's family and find your biological mother? Would you choose to take trips with each member of your family and your best friend knowing that the damage done to your body on these adventures would only make you weaker?  Would you choose to live with joy or wallow in the injustice of being struck with a terminal illness that has no cure when you are only 44 years old with three beautiful children, an amazing husband, and a career that you love?

Susan Spencer-Wendel chose joy again and again and wrote a life affirming book that made me want to tell my daughters and husband every minute how much they mean to me.  When I look in the mirror and see a healthy woman staring back at me, I feel lucky.  In yoga class, even in the most challenging moves, I am free because I can move my body.  My limbs are not dead weight.  I can still hug my husband, and take my dog for a walk unfettered.  I don't need someone to help me on a toilet, or push my wheelchair.  And yet I still frown on things I don't have or what I haven't accomplished or why my body isn't the way I want it to be.

Just like when I read and taught 'Tuesdays with Morrie' by Mitch Albom which recounts the lessons Mitch learns from his old professor who is dying from ALS to my students over the past 15 years, Susan's inspiring life lessons about living with joy snapped me into the now and reminded me to be present in the simple gifts of every day moments with my two daughters, my husband, my home, and my friends.  When I drink wine, eat great food and am able to carry a conversation at the same time, that is a gift.  When I get to brush my daughter's tangled hair in the morning, that is a gift.  When I get to carry my 4 year old to bed at night, that is a gift.  And when I get to type with both hands and write my truths, that is a gift.

What are the simple gifts in your life that you haven't paid attention to lately? The time is now.

I'd like to thank Susan for having the strength and courage to write this book even in her weakened state.  Reading her adventures with each of her children especially the trip to NYC with her daughter, made me cry.  She knows that she won't be there to see her daughter walk down the aisle, so she took her 14 year old to Kleinfeld's, the famed "Say Yes to the Dress" bridal shop, to see her daughter in a wedding dress.

With humor and reverence, Susan recounts the year she spent reconnecting with her family in Greece, spending time with her friend, Nancy in the Yukon, taking her son, Wesley, to swim with the dolphins, spending a romantic trip in Budapest with her husband, taking her son Aubrey to Captiva Island, and taking her sister on a cruise.

She chronicles these trips with grace, love and, of course,  joy for the simple gifts that each person she loves has given her.  While visiting her birth father's family, her friend, George played a video of Susan showing her young, vibrant and healthy.  Watching the video gave her one of those "bright-line moments, where [her] handicap whomps [her] over the head" and what does she do?  Fuss? Cry? Mourn?

No. Susan chooses instead to "dwell in what there remains to be grateful for." She says, "My hands are snarled, but I can still touch.  I cannot hold, but I can feel. I have my connection to the world, which ALS will never take away." If she can be this way in the face of so much loss and find the beauty in life, why can't I? Why can't you?

My profound thanks to Susan Spencer-Wendel for reminding me to be grateful for all the gifts, big and small, that I have every day.

Brain on Fire: When Bodies Attack Their Own Brains

As I have said many times before, memoirs are by far my favorite genre.  I love reading the true life stories of brave people who overcome ridiculous odds.  I love peeking inside someone else's world and gaining hope for my own struggles in life knowing that someone surely had it worse, and persevered through their circumstances.  Susannah Cahalan's memoir Brain on Fire - My Month of Madness took me into the realm of a young woman on the edge of a promising journalism career at the New York Post who inexplicably went crazy.  One day she seemed fine and the next as she walked through Times Square to her office, the colors hurt her.  She believed bed bugs infested her apartment and even after the exterminator told her there was no evidence of bugs, she made him spray again claiming they were crawling all over her at night.  She suspected her boyfriend of cheating on her and tore apart his apartment looking for evidence.  Her behavior at work drew worried expressions from her friends, and when she was unable to complete interviews or write, she knew something was wrong.  At first her family doctor told her that she was suffering from stress and that she drank too much.  Unsatisfied with those results and after a seizure, the testing got more intense.  Every test came back negative.  All the doctors told her she was "just fine" that her illness was all in her head even as her health deteriorated.  She lost her appetite, couldn't concentrate and started to show more and more signs of psychosis almost as if she was possessed.  She fought against those who loved her most - her mom, her boyfriend and her father, but she was eventually admitted into the epilepsy ward of NYU hospital after a second seizure.

Spanning the time right before her illness got serious and the recovery from her ordeal, Cahalan sheds new light on the new world of neuroscience, and gives hope to those who suffer from unexplainable brain disorders by paving a path for new tests and treatments for a rare brain disorder called NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis.

With horrifying details pieced together from hospital video, her own journals, hospital records, interviews with family members, her boyfriend and her doctors, as well as her father's personal journal of the ordeal, Cahalan shows that her illness didn't stop her from being a brilliant journalist, it may have propelled her to a different status as a human being - a superhero who lived through somethingt she almost didn't make it through, but she lived to tell about it and help others.

Her article "My Mysterious Lost Month of Madness"which spurred the book's development may have saved the life of countless others.  This was confirmed when Cahalan learned that one father used her article when trying to get doctors to save his daughter's life as she suffered through a similar brain disorder.  Here is a video from Susannah Cahalan on The Today Show with the father / daughter that she saved:

I loved this book and was unable to focus on life outside of it.  As the snow poured and the winds blew and the polar vortex (another strange phenomena) showed the power of nature, I silently cheered Cahalan to victory over an unknown nemesis.  The big question that her book comes right out and asks is how many others over history and in the present have suffered from this same illness without a diagnosis? Once the diagnosis was made for Susannah the illness was relatively easy to treat even though the recovery period was arduous.  She was lucky, and had the best care available.  How many others were left in a comatose state without an explanation to their family members?   The brain may just be the final frontier of medical science and Cahalan illuminates the mysteries of the brain in touching and thought provoking short chapters that will keep you entranced until the very end.

Funny, Creative and Honest: Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

I love memoirs more than any other type of book.

When I searched "great new memoirs" Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half: unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened kept appearing.  It looked promising, so I ordered it.  Unlike many of the reviewers for this book, I had never read Allie Brosh's blog titled "Hyperbole and a Half", but I did hear her interview on NPR last week where she started to cry as she talked about her bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts.  I was more than intrigued and did a bit of a happy dance when my Amazon box arrived at my door.

The book reads like a graphic novel because Allie Brosh illustrates her stories.  The drawings are rudimentary, but hysterical (especially the dogs).  I read the whole book in an evening and laughed out loud and reread her chapter "The Helper Dog is an Asshole" to my husband.  He laughed, too, because it is funny and when you read it, you can't help but laughing.

Here's a tip, though - you may want to just check out Allie's blog (which is an award winning blog) since most of the stories in this book are taken directly from her blog posts.  This book really is a compilation of her best blog posts, so you don't even need to buy it UNLESS you are looking to buy a funny (and sometimes sad and disturbing) book for someone this Christmas.  I realized while perusing her blog, that the posters the English teacher put up about the A LOT came from Allie's blog.

Brosh's sense of humor and her ability to show her stories through the pictures is worth reading and discovering and passing along to friends and family members you know won't be offended by the stick figure with the triangle pony tail.