Month: September 2013

09/09/2013

Here On Earth With You

Picture 2This evening I was cruising around on WordPress, reading blog posts by other writers. I stumbled across a post that especially caught my attention, titled The Cancer Book. It’s written by the wife of a cancer patient.  Her personal anger and emotional fragility are all too familiar to me.

I’ve walked that same path alongside loved ones battling cancer.  And, I found myself providing comfort to my husband as he walked that path beside me while I myself battled cancer.

That was almost 10 years ago now…but the journey is as fresh in my mind as if it were just yesterday.  After reading her post, which detailed the anguish of having to purchase a notebook to help her keep all cancer-related paperwork together, I decided to leave a reader comment.  I told her what I tell everyone who asks about my own cancer journey;  keep your eye on the horizon and take it just one day at a time.  Don’t stress over the weeks/months ahead.  Just keep your eye on the horizon, stay steady and take it day by day. Only one day at a time.

Here On Earth With You is a poem I wrote early in my cancer journey, when it became clear that the best chance I had for survival  was not going to be the 8 weeks of radiation I’d been told would follow the initial surgery.  In my wildest dreams, I’d never expected to face the kind of battle strategics that cancer served up.  Too many trips to surgery in a matter of weeks, and then the final surgery was a drastic one. It left me with no choice but to be reminded, on a daily basis, that my life was in exchange for body parts.

For me, it’s been easy to keep it in perspective.  It’s just body parts.  Living isn’t about body parts, it’s about HEALTH.

I hope the blogger who wrote about her cancer book can soon write about the joy of celebrating with her husband over his renewed health.  Life is so unpredictable, but here on earth is where I hope he will remain for decades to come.

The sunshine’s warmth upon my skin on a brisk autumn day

brings good feelings to my heart,

for I know it’s nature’s way.

The sobering news of malignancy brings clarity to mind

for appreciation of battle,

of facing moments in time.

The smile on my children’s faces, no matter what their age

and the way their warmth envelops me

in every single stage.

Their laughter and their triumphs, their special little ways

that make me feel so blessed

with each passing day.

The joys I share in marriage, our love endures the years.

The support we share for each other,

no matter what the fears.

The way he looks so pensive, lost in thoughts of distress–

The way I reassure him,

our tomorrows will be the best.

I step up, front and center, to see how the facts unfold

and I face what lies before me,

choosing what the future holds.

Decisions hard to fathom, in order to pursue

a lifetime of more love,

here on earth with you.

Picture 3Blessings to all who have their own cancer journeys to endure.

09/01/2013

Perseverance, Thick Skin and Debbie Macomber

This is NOT my mom, but this is how she looks when she's reading!

This is NOT my mom, but this is how she looks when she’s reading!

My mom just FLEW through Debbie Macomber’s new book, called ‘Rose Harbor in Bloom’. Mom tends to power through any book if she finds it engaging.  She can read cover to cover in a matter of hours, or days, as she did the hefty book about Steve Jobs.  She’s been reading book after book on her iPad, which I purchased for her about two years ago.  I loaded the Kindle app on there and then set it up using my own Kindle account, so anything I read she can read too. (I didn’t set up her own Kindle account because she watches her pennies and feels indulgent purchasing a book).  Now, using Amazon, I can purchase and download  any book she’d like to read, whether it appeals to me or not, and it appears on her iPad within minutes. Which is how the book by Debbie Macomber materialized.

At almost 91, she has been managing the world of the iPad quite well over all.  Every now and then, she calls asking me for some Genius Bar assistance.  Even though I myself don’t own an iPad, as a rule I am able to help her out by phone, but occasionally it has to wait until I can hop a plane for the 4.5 hour flight that will take me to her place of residence.

As she was telling me this morning about the plot line on this book (and how quickly she got pulled in), I decided to Google the author, thinking I may have read one or two of her books over the years.  None of the titles on her list of published books rang a bell, but I then decided to read up on her career as a writer.  According to Wikipedia, here is how she got started:

Although Debbie Macomber is dyslexic and has only a high school education, she was determined to be a writer. A stay-at-home mother raising four small children, Macomber nonetheless found the time to sit in her kitchen in front of a rented typewriter and work on developing her first few manuscripts. For five years she continued to write despite many rejections from publishers, finally turning to freelance magazine work to help her family make ends meet.

With money that she saved from her freelance articles, Macomber attended a romance writer’s conference, where one of her manuscripts was selected to be publicly critiqued by an editor from Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. The editor tore apart her novel and recommended that she throw it away. Undaunted, Macomber scraped together $10 to mail the same novel, Heartsong, to Harlequin’s rival, Silhouette Books. Silhouette bought the book, which became the first romance novel to be reviewed by Publishers Weekly.

I’m not a reader of the romance genre, so although her name sounded very familiar to me when Mom mentioned it, now I realize it was only because I’ve seen her paperbacks in every book store, grocery store and airport hub for decades. Turns out, there’s over 170 million copies of her books in print, and her titles have spawned four made-for-tv movies.

What really caught my eye in her bio was the determination to persevere EVEN in light of the fact that an editor from a highly respected publishing house trashed her work at the very early stages of her writing journey.  Now let me tell you…romance novels are the LAST thing my mother would be reading now (or EVER).  ‘Rose Harbor In Bloom’ has been categorized to the ‘contemporary women’s fiction’ genre, and if my mom says it’s a great read, I’ll be reading it next (just as soon as I finish the lengthy book about Steve Jobs).

The Wikipedia bio goes on to report:

Macomber is a three-time winner of the B. Dalton Award, and the inaugural winner of the fan-voted Quill Award for romance (2005, for 44 Cranberry Point). She has been awarded the Romantic Times Magazine Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award and has won a Romance Writers of America RITA Award, the romance novelist’s equivalent of an Academy Award, for The Christmas Basket. Her novels have regularly appeared on the Waldenbooks and USAToday bestseller lists and have also earned spots on the New York Times Bestseller List. On September 6, 2007 she made Harlequin Enterprises history, by pulling off the rarest of triple plays—having her new novel, 74 Seaside Avenue, appear at the #1 position for paperback fiction on the New York Times, USAToday and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. These three highly respected bestseller lists are considered the bellwethers for a book’s performance in the United States.

Isn’t it nice to know that the success of a writer doesn’t lie within the opinion of an editor…even one from a highly regarded publishing house?  It seems to me that the success lies within the effort put into the journey.  Perseverance, thick skin, and having the determination to NOT look back unless you’re going that way. Those are the surely the cornerstones of success, don’t you think?