"With or Without Me" by Esther Maria Magnis

When she was 15, Esther Maria Magnis learned that her father had terminal cancer. He was given anywhere from three weeks to three months to live. 

Magnis was the middle child of the family, with an older sister, Steffi, and a younger brother, Johannes. The three of them spent the next two years (their father lived longer than the doctors’ prognosis) trying to be supportive, dealing with their own pain, supporting their mother, and often taking care of themselves as their parents tried everything to find a cure, including traveling to doctors and clinics both in Europe (the family lived in Germany) and the United States. 

 

But With or Without Me: A Memoir of Losing and Finding, translated by Alta Price, is not so much a cancer journey as it is a story of a faith journey. Magnis had had faith as a child, lost it as a young tee, and then struggled, and struggled mightily, once the family knew her father’s diagnosis. 

 

This is a journey that is often raw, angry, hopeful, searing, sacred, and profane – and often all at the same time. Magnis would come to cling to God even as she screamed at him, doubted his existence, and raved and ranted at him. It’s not an easy story to read, but then it was almost an impossible story to live. 

 

Esther Maria Magnis

Several years after her father’s death, her beloved brother Johannes was diagnosed with melanoma. Things looked promising after a surgery on his face; they doctors had gotten it all. But there was more to come, and she would eventually lose him as well.

 

Most of us can’t even imagine a journey like this, the pain of losing both a father and a brother to a harsh disease that seems to offer no pity or respite. She experiences when it didn’t even seem like she was enduring. “If God is love,” she writes, “it’s a kind of love I do not understand.”

 

Magnis, born in 1980, studied comparative religion in Germany and Italy and has worked as a journalist. She now lives and works in Germany. 

 

With or Without Me is intensely personal. It will tear at your heart, mind, and soul. It will bring you to tears. And it will astonish you with its honesty and depth.

"A Monster Calls" by Patrick Ness

Conor O’Malley, all of 13, is having nightmares. The yew tree at the back of their house becomes a monster. And the monster comes looking for him.

Conor lives with his divorced mom; his father has remarried and moved to America. Conor is increasingly taking care of himself; he makes his own meals, gets himself ready for school, and cleans up around the house, maintaining as best he can a degree of family normality. It doesn’t take long to understand why: Conor’s mother has cancer. 

At school, Conor had always been an overachiever, first to raise his hand in class to answer a question, always do well in his subjects. But his schoolmates and teachers learned about his mother, and they began to treat Conor with kid gloves. The more they do, the more he withdraws. Only the bullies pay attention to him now, except when the monster shows up.

The monster wants to tell Conor three stories. And he wants Conor to tell him a fourth story. The sicker his mother becomes, the more frequently the monster is showing up.

There is also the specter of his grandmother, who tightly manages her own world as much as Conor is trying to manage his. The two do not get along well.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is based on an idea by the late children’s and young adult writer Siobhan Dowd (1960-2007), who died from a severe case of breast cancer. Ness, himself a children’s and young adult author, wrote the story in honor of Dowd. The book was written into a screenplay for the movie of the same name, released in 2016, and was also a play produced at the Old Vic Theatre in London this summer. 

Patrick Ness

The movie starred Felicity Jones (Conor’s mother), Sigourney Weaver (the grandmother), Lewis MacDougal (Conor), and Liam Neeson as the voice of the monster. It received high critical ratings but did poorly at the box office in the U.S.

Ness is the author of several works of fiction for both young adults and adults, including The Crane Wife, The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, Monsters of Men, and The Crash of Hennington. Born in Virginia, he received a degree in English Literature from the University of Southern California. He lives in London.

A Monster Calls is a moving, gripping story of a young buy trying to deny, deal with, and understand the collapse of the only world he knows. 

Top photograph: A scene from A Monster Calls at the Old Vic Theatre.

The Poetry of Illness

This post was originally published at The Master’s Artist. I’m periodically reposting some of the articles here.

Can poetry speak to illness? Can poetry speak to something as personal, terrifying and life-changing as breast cancer? Poet Anya Krugovoy Silver says yes.

Silver is an associate professor of English at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. Her poetry has been published in such journals as Image, New Ohio Review, Witness, Prairie Schooner, Christian Century, Christianity and Literature and Anglican Theological Review. And it’s also been published in a collection entitled The Ninety-Third Name of God: Poems.

The heart of this volume is a series of extraordinary poems about breast cancer, from biopsy and diagnosis through mastectomy and recovery. These poems are about shock and fear, heartbreak and hope, and all the clinical trials and details in between. Like the illness they describe, these poems find their own discoveries, their own processes and flows, as the mind and the heart tries to make sense of what is happening.

After the biopsy and confirmation of diagnosis, Silver begins with a blessing that is simultaneously a kind of mourning.

Blessing for My Left Breast

Your skin slit round with a scalpel:

be brave.

Rise to the aluminum tray, the biopsy needle.

Go, nipple, go, milk ducts, go, veins.

Take with you my lymph nodes,

canaries of illness, blood cells’ puff balls.

Blessed be my chest wall for surrendering.

Now you will never shrink and wrinkle with age,

clove-studded orange, bittersweet.

Taken in your beauty, let the last hands

that hold you

be gentle.

She survives the surgery, but now comes the follow-up – the procedures like radiation and chemotherapy which sound so “medical” and yet are personal, invasive and themselves destructive. Yet even here she finds a dignity and even an unexpected intimacy, a pouring of grace upon the terrible.

 

Everything is Perfect

If my cancer recurs,

if I vomit from chemo,

help me follow the one who knew

she was dying, who turned

to the man wiping clean her face

and said, Everything is perfect.

Scrape me like a nutmeg, Lord.

Release my fragrance.

And then later, post-recovery, a kind of normalcy resumes, but it is only a kind of normalcy, because what was cannot be recovered; only what is can be grasped, and only what will be can be hoped for.

Ash Wednesday

How comforting, the smudge one ach forehead:

I’m not to be singled out after all.

From dust you came. To dust you will return.

my mastectomy, a memento mori,

prosthesis smooth as a polished skull.

I like the solidity of this prayer,

the ointment thumbed into my forehead,

my knees pressing hard on the velvet rail.

If God won’t give me His body to clutch,

I’ll grind this soot in my skin instead.

If I can’t hold the flame that burned my breast,

I’ll char my brow; I’ll blacken my pores; I’ll flaunt

with ash this flaw in His creation.

She finds comfort in the familiar Ash Wednesday ritual of the forehead smudge, simply because it is familiar and she’s alive to recognize the familiar. And while the last five lines of this poem seem almost jarring, like a fist being shook in God’s face, they are also a declaration of survival, in spite of the “flaw in His creation.”

These poems are a journey from despair to hope. Poetry does speak to illness, in profound and yet very human ways.