Refuge

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While there are things on which author Terry and I greatly disagree, I can't shake the way her words reach into my heart. She and her mother were obviously very close, and the way she links her grief over the loss of her mother with the environmental loss of bird habitat provides a new perspective of looking at both. Cancer is a beast, regardless of when it hits your family and friends, but thinking of losing either of my parents at age 55 is just heartbreaking. My dad went through the second of his three battles with cancer at 56, my senior year of high school, and if I had lost him then, I can't even imagine the person I would be now. The inevitability of losing him now, at 76, is hard enough to comprehend, and so I read.

Nature is the sanctuary in which Terry processes and heals, in the open air, with the sounds and the scents of the earth as her comfort. The solitude is soothing, and that commune with nature becomes her refuge.

Some people might think it strange or morose that I've been reading so many books about cancer journeys this year, but it has been really vital for me in processing all the various emotions about my own impending loss. Terry puts it this way: "Perhaps this is the compassion and courage that comes to us when we realize we are not alone in our suffering." I don't always have the words to explain how I'm feeling, and sometimes I don't even have the energy to try to find those words. But I can read the words of others, and see myself in them, and say, "Yes! That's it!" As Terry says, "In the act of reading, words touch our hearts, relationships are forged, we breathe a book alive."

A few other notes regarding the environmental issues Terry raises. I have no doubt that the extreme rise in cancer in Utah, specifically in Terry's family, is specially linked to nuclear testing in their deserts throughout the 50s. It's a travesty that our government decided that testing weapons without knowledge of their fallout was more important than the lives of their citizens. Moreover, the fact that they refuse to admit their culpability in the matter is unexcusable. My dad's situation is similar: there is ample reason to believe that his prostate, colon, and brain cancers are all linked to his exposure to Agent Orange while serving in Vietnam, yet the army only officially recognizes their culpability in one of those types. I would not be surprised if it is also proven in the future that my oldest sister's death from leukemia and my dad's first wife's death from uterine cancer were also linked.

The time period Terry covers in her book highlights the way the rising waters of the Great Salt Lake threatened to destroy not only the natural habit of the birds living on it and migrating through the area, but the homes and industry that we as humans have placed upon its shores. What we are facing now, though, is almost the most extreme opposite: the lake is at an all time low, receeding 22 feet in 25 years, and shrinking from 3,300 square miles to less than 950. As drought and global warming continue to worsen, how long do we have until the lake as we knew it no longer exists? Terry notes, "we will survive our personal loses; they are ultimately what give us our voice. I know they gave me mine. But the losses of the larger world-call it the pain of a grieving Earth-threaten our sanity and survival." Terry's takeaway is that we must remain engaged, vigilant, and proactive in campaigning to protect our Earth.

As I mentioned at the start, Terry's words really effected me; I think I underlined more statements in this book than I have in any other. Having gone back through my notes, here are my some of the lines that meant to most to me.

"In the same way that when someone is dying many retreat, I chose to stay."

"Restraint is the steel partition between a rational mind and a violent one. I knew rage. It was fire in my stomach with no place to go."

"It's strange to feel change coming. It's easy to ignore. An underlying restlessness seems to accompany it like birds flocking before a storm. We go about our business with the usual alacrity, while in the pit of our stomach there is a sense of something tenuous. These moments of peripheral perceptions are short, sharp flashes of insight we tend to discount like seeing the movement of an animal from the corner of our eye. We turn and there is nothing there. They are the strong and subtle impressions we allow to slip away. I had been feeling fey for months."

"You know, I hear the words on the outside, that I might have ovarian cancer, but they don't register on the inside. I keep saying it to myself, this isn't happening to me, but then why shouldn't it? I am facing my own mortality--again--something I thought I had already done twelve years ago. Do you know how strange it is to know your days are limited? It have no future?"

"In the long run I didn't think one month would matter. In the short run, it mattered a great deal The heat of the sandstone penetrated my skin as I lay on the red rocks. Desert light bathed my soul. And traveling through the inner gorge of Vishnu schist, the oldest exposed rock in the West, gave me a perspective that will carry me through whatever I must face. Those days on the river were a meditation, a renewal. I found my strength in its solitude. It is with me now."

"We wait. Our family is pacing the hall. Other families are pacing other halls. Each tragedy has its own territory."

"The curse and charisma of cancer: the knowledge that from this point forward, all you have is the day at hand."

"What is it about the relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us?"

"I asked her if she thought my life was selfish without children. "Yes," she said. "But I'm not saying that's bad. By being selfish a woman ultimately has more to give in the long run, because she has a self to give away." "Do you think I should have a child?" I asked. "I can't answer that for you," she said. "All I can tell you is that it was the right choice for me."

"Suffering shows us what we are attached to--perhaps the umbilical cord between Mother and me has never been cut. Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does."

"We are all anxious, except Mother. She says it doesn't matter what they find, all we have is now."

"Why couldn't I have respected her belief that the outcome mattered less than the gift of each day. We had wanted everything back to its original shape. We had wanted a cure for Mother for ourselves, so we could get on with our lives. What we had forgotten was that she was living hers."

"I have refused to believe that Mother will die. And by denying her cancer, even her death, I deny her life. Denial stops us from listening. I cannot hear what Mother is saying. I can only hear what I want. But denial lies. It protects us from the potency of a truth we cannot yet bear to accept. It takes our hands and leads us to places of comfort. Denial flourishes in the familiar. It seduces us with our own desires and cleverly constructs walls around us to keep us safe. I want the walls down. Mother's rage over our inability to face her illness has burned away my defenses. I am left with guilt, guilt I cannot tolerate because it has no courage. I hurt Mother through my own desire to be cured."

"Death is not the enemy; living in constant fear of it is."

"It brings life into focus one day at a time. You live each moment and when you see the sunset at the end of the day, you are so grateful to be part of that experience."

"Don't be so strong, Tammy, that you won't cry when you want to. Let people help you and love you. I can't tell you how important it was for me to let people do things for me."

"Sometimes you have to totally rely on the arms, tears, and loving hearts of others, that this is truly where God's love lies, in the support of family and friends."

"I feel like a failure because I am losing my compassion. We are spent."

"A person with cancer dies in increments, and a part of you slowly dies with them."

"Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires. Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact."

"But the feeling I could not purge from my soul was that without a mother, one no longer has the luxury of being a child. I have never felt so alone."

"An individual doesn't get cancer, a family does."

"Do not squander time, that is the stuff life is made of."

"Since Mother's death, I have been liberated from my optimism. I have nothing to hope for because what I hoped for is gone."

"The world is in motion. We are in motion. We have all lost loved ones. We have all danced with grief and we will one day dance with death. We embody the spiral, moving inward and outward with the loss of fear, a love transcendent, and the courage to create new maps."

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