I am often asked what it takes for
me to do this work, massage with people with cancer.
My answer is nearly always the same: It takes other
people's
words.
Some people think regular contact with cancer and pain and disease would be especially
hard. Some days are more challenging than others, but I think lots of things that humans do are hard, and most are harder than what I do.
Short quotes, poetry and prose offer survival tips along the way. 
Other people's words have sustained me during long seasons
of my own confusion and pain, and they have brought me great joy. Other people's words have a way of welcoming me into my own life--"this way has been traveled before."
Even the briefest quotes can inform my hardest choices
and my best plans. Prose and poetry deepen the discussion in my classrooms.
I collect other people's words because they fuel my work with people with cancer.
This website is littered with some of my favorite quotes. I offer a few more here, plus a story or two of my own.
Animals Watch by Tracy Walton
Sometimes teachers appear when
you ask for them.
Sometimes they appear anyway.
True teachers are often
different from what we expect.
Messier, strangely
packaged or achingly familiar, insistent or just passing
through, teachers nevertheless transmit whatever we
need and are ready to learn.
In my experience teachers
run in packs.
The phone rang on a glorious autumn morning. A local
woman wanted to schedule a massage for a friend of
hers who was in the final days of metastatic cancer.
Hospice had just been started and her friend was dying
at home.
I made arrangements with the client's husband to come
over and provide a massage that day.
A few hours later,
I made my way to their house through a classic, brilliant
New England September afternoon. The drying leaves
sharpened their orange edges on the blue space above
me. I arrived at the house and moved into the soft,
quiet interior.
A home where someone is actively dying is like a different
culture, with its own rhythm and code of behavior.
The house has a palpable pulse: slower, deliberate,
everything organized around the vigil.
Conversations
may be hushed or hollow, or may be especially warm
or reflective.
Pretense is often scrapped for the
mean, authentic moment.
Meals are skipped.
Unopened
mail lies in piles.
Calls are screened and dishes
pile up in the sink.
Emotions tumble out in surprise
attacks, or they are held close and dear until it's
over.
Necks grow stiff from sleeping
in odd positions, then snapping to attention.
Meaning stands out in sharp relief and can be found
anywhere-in
the patient's mumbled words, in the Luna moth
hanging from the screen door, in the weather or the
movement of the moon across a room.
Voices are husky with unshed
tears or strained with fatigue.
Whenever I enter this world I am acutely conscious
of being a stranger to it.
I enter with my clipboard,
my lotion and a degree of openness. I try to move
unobtrusively and wait for the right moment to weave myself
in with the larger rhythm.
It's a bit like calculating a jump from a
fast-moving vehicle to a slower one in the next
lane.
That first afternoon, I checked in with a few family
members about the client's status.
Then I warmed
my massage lotion in the microwave, removing
a cold, forgotten dish of food from within, and washed
my hands.
I climbed the stairs to the client's room,
greeted her softly and began to set up the room for
the session.
Suddenly two gatekeepers appeared.
A huge gray cat
flew in out of nowhere. It hurled itself onto my client's
bed and parked between us, an effective barricade.
A half-grown silky black dog skittered in and stood
firmly in front of me, shadowing my knees as I tried
to move about the room.
I gently nudged the dog aside and peeled the cat away
to insert a pillow under the client's knee. I draped
and bolstered her thinning body and heard her
soft sigh of relief as she rested heavily on the pillows.
As I began the massage the dog put a paw on my leg,
which stopped me. He looked into my eyes, barked once,
growled quietly and stared at me for about a minute.
His deliberate gaze seemed to say it all. Pay attention.
Don't mess with her. For everyone's sake, be careful.
Seeming satisfied that I had heard, he then dropped
the stern guard dog persona and became a puppy again.
He lowered his head to my ankles, carefully licking
them while I stroked my client's back.
He and the
cat kept watch at each visit.
I was especially stirred by the dog's attentions.
Only five months old, he had joined the family just
a month before, the day her hospital called to release
her from an experimental treatment and told her they
could do nothing more. He landed in the family in
the middle of this news.
Once in their home, he sniffed
the scene and acted as though he understood immediately what was needed.
What was needed was help, real material help to get
through what had to be gotten through. What could not
be gotten around, but must be met, managed, and survived.
He seemed to know they needed not only his love during
this time, but also his strong sense of duty and his
humble offer of distraction. Barely more than a puppy,
he took his responsibilities seriously and rarely
left my client's or
her husband's side for long.
Upstairs with my client, I learned that her lower
back gave her pain, that in addition to me and the
animals, she saw other figures in the room, and that
she was terribly parched but unable to drink without
vomiting.
Her body was drying to a thin film, to be
borne away by the season.
Her family, friends and
animals kept watch and cared for each step of her
passage.
Around the edges of her sessions I would
sit on the porch and chat with her husband.
At the
first visit, I learned that it was his ten-day wedding
anniversary. Partners for more than a decade, they
were married in a small garden wedding at her mother's,
when she was still able to stand.
My last session with her was on a Thursday night,
a point in her journey when regular massage would
have been too stimulating.
She was barely responsive
so I simply held her head, her shoulder, stroked her
arms.
When someone is trying to leave their body,
hold it quietly. Touch should not ask too much of
the body, nor pull it too close. It should cradle
it instead, letting it rest between efforts.
I sat
at her head. A friend of hers sat holding her feet
dearly, saying goodbye. Curtains fanned us from the
open windows. When I left, my client slept in her
darkening room, a luminous moon sliding across her
feet.
She died two mornings later.
I learned a great deal from these brief exchanges.
There were teachers on every surface - the bed, the
porch, the floor at my feet. The animals taught me
that love and duty prevail in the toughest situations.
My client and her husband taught me that beginnings
and endings can be in the same sentence, such as, "They
married two weeks before she died," or even, "the
puppy joined the family to help us help her leave."
My client's husband showed me dignity and a bottomless
connection to his wife, to everything that had ever happened
and was about to happen to her.
At the center of this vigil, my client taught me
that dying is hard work - that
it's not for the faint of heart - and that a well-placed
pillow matters in the scheme of things.
Intent on her labors, she let everyone do their part.
By her still, quiet example, she named herself beloved.
She also taught me to name what you love and to let it
surround you. She seemed to say, "Do this, even - especially
- as you let it all go."
Copyright © 2005, Tracy Walton.
