Life Challenges

People Tell Their Stories:
Healing/Illness/Caregiving

Grappling With Destiny Merrily Bronson

As any of you who have recurrent cancer know, the experience changes. I am sure that people on their first round know that, too. It is very much an up and down ride into despair and back into hope again. Not so unusual, at the beginning I did conventional and unconventional treatments. My idea was that the more I did, the more chance I would have never to have to face the beast again.

So I did everything I could find. I did the conventional treatments, surgery and chemotherapy. I did acupuncture, herbs, diet, and a whole lot of soul searching. And bottom line, this has been a spiritual journey for me. I think that is what is hardest to talk about because it’s the most numinous, but it is also the important part of this experience for me.

I find that when I am in periods of rest, in between facing the cancer moving in my body, that I think I have found answers. I think that I can look at my experiences and say, “Oh yes, I did this and this right, and therefore I am here.” And then it comes back and I think, “Well, maybe I didn’t do this and this right.” What I find is that facing cancer as it returns brings up questions. And the questions are deepening questions for me, and that is why it’s a spiritual journey.

From Human Doing to Getting Quiet

To give you a little perspective on me, before I had cancer, I was what I call a human doing. I was trying to be a recovering human doing, but failing. I thrived on being busy all the time, and I did really well with solving problems using my mental abilities. We are all trained to do this well in our culture. In a sense you can think of that as the masculine expression – the rational, the expressive, the doing. I was good at relying on that in my life, and it had done well for me.

But I found when I got cancer that this expression didn’t work for me as well anymore. I went to many experts, got many points of view, and found that none of them agreed. I couldn’t find treatment decisions that added up and made total sense to me. I was left to make decisions from some different place.

What I found was that some treatments work for some people – all treatments work for some people. No treatments work for everyone, and I could find experts, who could defend to the death all the different treatments for me.

I realized I had to find a new place in myself to make my decisions from, and that is what had taken me in deeper. I also gave myself permission during my healing time to go off-line, to stop my doing, and be quiet. I discover the real beauty of having quiet time. Just time for hangin’ out.

The Recurrence

In 1992, the first time that the cancer recurred, it came back to my liver. The doctors to whom I was going to complain about the symptoms I was having, kind of kept soothing me and saying, “It’s just your nerves. These feelings you’re having in your solar plexus.” When it was finally diagnosed, it had taken over 80% of my liver. One doctor that I went to said “If you don’t start chemotherapy within ten days, it will be too late, and you will be dead within two months from liver failure.”

Well, that got my attention. I had been really determined not to do anything toxic to my body again, but everyone to whom I spoke, and I spoke to a lot of non- conventional therapists with nontoxic alternatives, said “Your liver is too far gone for our treatments to work for you.” So I was called to stretch my acceptance of God’s work to include, once again, chemotherapy.

I had always been Ms. Natural and never even took aspirin. I had natural childbirth, the whole thing. I ate a vegetarian diet – I have been on the cancer diet for 25 years. So what I did with that for myself was tell myself: God works through human beings, the intention of chemotherapy was to heal. It is not my choice of method, but I will know when I need to stop it – my doctor won’t.

This whole process for me has been a series of taking charge of my life as I take charge of my treatments, and realizing that while all the doctors and their expertise are my consultants, I am the one expert about myself. So I go for information to the doctors, and then I go to my quiet place inside me, and I find the answer that brings me peace at that time. For that moment it was chemotherapy.

Everyone’s Journey is Their Own

During the winter of 1992, I came very close dying. By Thanksgiving, most of my medical professionals which included an oncologists, a Chinese medical doctor, an acupuncturist, an herbalist, all kinds of support – were saying quietly behind my back that I would not make it until Christmas. Well, I did make it until Christmas— and then I got sicker.

I would like to share a little bit about that experience, because I want to emphasize once again that this experience of having cancer is very unique.

Everyone’s journey is their own. So something that works for me doesn’t necessarily work for anyone else and visa versa.

I just want to encourage you – as you listen to other people’s healing stories: Listen with your heart, and listen with openness, and don’t listen for answers for yourself. It is a process that you want to hear. I think that it is a process of involvement, of acceptance, and of going ahead—whatever that takes.

Just Breathe

Anyway, before I got really sick, my friends assigned me the job to just breath. They said, “That is all you need to do. You don’t need to be doing things all the time. In your recovery, the mantra you need to repeat is, Just Breathe.”

Well, that winter I got really sick. I was on IV nutrition because I couldn’t eat. I lost so much weight that I look like a starvation victim, except my belly looked like I was 9 months pregnant with twins. I got very, very weak. I called myself “the houseplant.” People would feed me and move me into places in the sun, and generally take care of me. “Just breathe” was about what I could do, and even that was hard because my lungs were filling with water.

I remember one day sitting out on the deck, watching the leaves and the trees and thinking, Do I want to fight my way back? I was in what I called the void. I think we often go through a deep valley facing possible death. For me it was a spiritual crisis. I had always believed that life continues after death, and I had been called to see if it was head belief or a core belief.

What I found was, as I hung out in that deep quiet place, just breathing, that I felt two things. One thing was that God, Great Spirit, Life, whatever you want to call it, did not care if I had skin on or not. That the reality of my life on that level would go on if I was in this body or not. I wondered then, Who chooses? Who chooses? Do I get to choose if I live or is that the will of something greater than I am? I never got an answer to that one; I am still working that one out.

A Choice for Love

But I really got to a place where, aside from a tug of sadness about leaving my loved ones, I could see that both choices were viable. I could either live, or I could go on living without my body. Either way was okay. So I was sitting out on the deck this day and feeling the pain of human life, feeling the pain of the world, and feeling totally overwhelmed by it. I have always felt that the world needs fixing and I need to fix it, so I was really overwhelmed. At that moment, I thought, I don’t think so, I don’t think that I do want to fight my way back. It is just too painful out there. I think I will just let go, and go on.

I had this thought, I won’t call it a voice—it was a thought that popped into my mind that said, You don’t need to do anything. You just need to be an entry point for love – that’s all.” And I realized sitting on my deck chair wrapped in blankets, breathing that I could do that there. I didn’t have to do anything more than just open to love and let it pour through me. It would benefit the people around me and who knows, it might ripple out, across the world. There are spiritual traditions that say a butterfly’s wings on this continent will affect the weather in China. Certainly if I aligned myself with love, it would make a difference.

With that realization I thought, Okay, I could come back. I began to get better. I reached a point where I am not going to do anymore chemotherapy. I wanted to do something that has more hope, because chemo didn’t offer a whole lot long term for someone in my situation.

The Clinical Trial

My husband had found a clinical trial using monoclonal antibodies. When we called to see if they could take me, they were just starting their next round. The timing was perfect. What I learned from that again is that I am the one who knows when I can start treatment, when I can stop treatment, what treatment to take. I just need to have people who can consult with me along the way to give me the information I need for that.

I got on the clinical trial. It was a non-toxic biological trial. It was one of these incredible things where they genetically engineer antibodies, then infuse them in your body. It goes and ties up the cancer cells. For sixteen months I improved. I got better, stronger. I got back to nearly total health. And then for some unknown reason in August, the cancer started to progress again.

One person I know says cancer does that. It has quiet time, and then it has active times. My tendency is to say, “What was I doing wrong? What can I change?” Because naturally I want to control it, so if I can figure out something I can do that will affect it, then I will do it.

Preparing for Death and Life

What I am doing as I grapple with my relationship to my destiny is that I am finding nontoxic treatments. I am doing shark cartilage right now. I am looking for other kinds of things that I can do to support my immune system. I’m working a lot with prayer. I find that my appreciation for the mystery of life has grown so much since I have been on this journey. I find it hard to pray for healing, because we have such a small part of the picture that we can see. We never know when our experience can be helping others that we love, or who are around us.

Anytime that I pray for my healing I add, “But not my will, this or something better.” And I pray for the strength, the courage, and the clarity to align with God’s will for me. Whatever that is, wherever that takes me. I find that what is important to me as I go through life now, is strengthening my atonement to that place in me that is hooked up to the universe. That place in me that knows, that place in me that is quiet and wise, the place in me that can go into the darkness and hold the questions and not fall apart at not having answers.

As I live with that, I realized that I am preparing just as well for death, whenever that happens, as I am for life. I think, bottom line, that is what everyone needs to be doing. If all of us, in our whole culture, not just people who are sick, lived our lives as though we were preparing for death, I think our lives would be much richer and wholer. I think our world would be a better place.

One final thought – I think that cancer is in part sort of a karmic thing that humanity has generated. People with cancer have been volunteered; we are the mine canaries, to show that this is a toxic environment that we are living in. Not just toxic chemically, but toxic emotionally and psychologically. I feel that as we learn to heal ourselves, as we learn to go into the unknown, as we learn to go into the silence and create spaces for that silence, as we learn to align with goddess—as we go into the parts of our being that culture has forgotten, we will not only be healing ourselves, our lives, but we will be helping to heal our society.

© 1994 Healing Journeys. This talk by Merrily Bronson is from a San Francisco conference, Cancer as a Turning Point—From Surviving to Thriving™ put on by Healing Journeys. Permission to use this transcript was given by Jan Adrian, Executive Director of Healing Journeys.

Merrily Bronson was a member of the board of directors for Healing Journeys. She died two months after making this tape.

Healing Journeys (www.healingjourneys.org) sponsors a free annual Cancer as a Turning Point, From Surviving to Thriving™ conference in Northern California and other locations. The purpose of the conference is to celebrate, empower, awaken and network all those whose lives are touched by cancer or any life-threatening illness, including people experiencing illness, healthcare providers and people supporting friends or family with cancer. If you would like more information about Healing Journeys and its conferences or to find out about videotapes of past conferences, call 800-423-9882. You can also e-mail Jan Adrian of Healing Journeys at jan@healingjourneys.com

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