By Natalie Jacewicz August
25, 2017
Earth, wind, sky, clouds, rocks
Have me,
If you will.
This body — no longer young
Not quite old.
From the Earth we come, (capital E)
To the Earth we’ll return.
Have me,
If you will.
This body — no longer young
Not quite old.
From the Earth we come, (capital E)
To the Earth we’ll return.
When
Lynn Scozzari wrote the beginning lines of that poem, “The Offering,” in
2013, she was staring at a photo of a naked woman seated on a rock, her arms
thrust open to a valley below. Scozzari herself was in a conference room of the
cancer center at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, Calif., seated at a table
stocked with coffee and tissues.
The
year before, Scozzari had finished treatment for stage 4 breast cancer. Now,
she was meeting with other patients and survivors who were also writing about
their cancer experiences. Their assignment was to pick a black-and-white photo
from a collection of images spread out on the table and write about it.
“I
remember I was very guarded because I had felt extremely vulnerable during my
treatment,” said Scozzari, describing how she felt when she joined the writing
group. “The whole experience of being shuffled from doctor to doctor and poked
and prodded … left me self-conscious and very protective.”
But
she quickly relaxed — and then she found her inspiration. She still keeps an
electronic copy of the poem she wrote that day. “The photo spoke to me, and I
was able to express something inside of me,” she said. “The group helped me
open up.”
Scozzari
credits the group’s organizer, Sharon Bray, for that. Bray, a woman in her
early 70s with a soft, gray bob and glasses, has led cancer patients and
survivors in “expressive writing” workshops for more than 15 years. She has
founded writing programs at three health care facilities in California.
She
shares with her students a passion for writing, as well as that more harrowing
kinship: In 2000, she learned she had a preliminary, noninvasive form of breast
cancer known as ductal carcinoma in situ,
in which abnormal cells appear in the breast milk ducts.
After
writing throughout her radiation therapy, Bray now helps others write through
their illnesses by leading workshops, authoring a column and
maintaining a blog.
During
her time in radiation, “I was asking big questions like ‘Where do I want my
life to go next?’” Bray said. “And I think that in the cancer groups that I
lead, people are also asking, ‘What will my life be about if I survive this?’
and ‘What will my life be about if I don’t survive this?’”
Bray
believes writing can help people cope with these difficult questions.
Expressive
writing is about emotional disclosure, said Dr. Adrienne Hampton, an assistant
professor of family medicine and community health at the University of
Wisconsin. “It can be trauma-focused, or it can be aspiration-focused,” Hampton
said. “Really, the key is just that it involves either conscious or
subconscious emotional processing around a given topic.”
Expressive
writing gained the attention of psychologists and medical doctors in the 1990s,
when psychology professor James Pennebaker wrote
a series of articles about the value of disclosure and writing in the healing
process. Since then, multiple studies have revealed writing’s salutary effects on
people who are combating illnesses.
In
a study of 107 patients with asthma or
rheumatoid arthritis, participants were asked to write either about the most
stressful event of their lives or their day-to-day experiences. The group that
wrote about a traumatic experience had less severe symptoms four months later.
Researchers
have found writing can reduce symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, speed healing of wounds and improve the chances
of quick re-employment after being laid off.
After
her breast cancer diagnosis, Bray began reading about the work of Pennebaker.
“All the light bulbs went off,” she said, “and I thought, ‘This is my work.’ It
was like a calling.” She began by leading programs pro bono in 2001 at a Palo
Alto nonprofit now known as Bay Area Cancer Connections.
In
2004, she founded a writing program at Stanford Cancer Center,
and has since launched programs at Scripps Green and at the University of
California-San Diego’s Moores Cancer Center. She has also published two books
about writing and cancer.
Cancer
was not the first challenge Bray tackled with writing therapy. In 1968, she
left her native California for Canada to protest the Vietnam War and accompany
her husband, Larry, during his doctoral studies. He drowned while swimming one
night about 13 years later, leaving Bray alone with their two young daughters.
She began seeing a therapist and, as a result of her sessions, started writing
poetry about her marriage and her husband’s death.
It
helped that her therapist looked like Robert Redford, Bray mused. But she
especially appreciated a ritual they developed, in which she would write a poem
and read it aloud at the beginning of a session, after which the therapist
would say “thank you.”
Bray
found that simple response unobtrusive and affirming. She would later adopt it
in her own workshops.
In
1989, eight years after Larry’s death, Bray remarried and moved back to
California with her new husband — also a native Californian.
Writing
seems like a natural fit for Bray, who has some of an essayist’s peculiarities.
She begins an interview by warning that she may “wax eloquent ad infinitum”
about her work, and she responds to bullet-pointed emails with long, narrative
paragraphs in a fanciful Candara font.
But
it took a while for Bray to become a full-time writer. She went through a
string of occupations first: elementary school teacher, doctoral student in
applied educational psychology and employee at an international career
transition firm.
Most
of Bray’s workshops have 10 to 12 participants, run from two to three hours per
session and last for 10 weeks. Participants learn about the groups in different
ways, including online searches, physician referrals and fliers Bray puts up
around the hospital.
People
undergoing any kind of cancer treatment are welcome to attend, as are survivors
up to five years out of treatment. The only people Bray discourages from
participating are the newly diagnosed, because they are usually too overwhelmed
with the immediate decisions confronting them to focus on a writing group.
Bray
starts each meeting with a short, guided meditation and a quick warmup writing
exercise. Then, the participants engage in a longer writing session based on a
prompt. Afterward, Bray invites volunteers to read aloud what they’ve written
and picks out one thing she especially likes about each person’s work. Then she
says “thank you.”
Bray
uses a wide variety of prompts: childhood memories, what you want most in a
doctor, how you would approach cancer if it were a country. For the first
class, the prompt is always the same: Write about the moment you learned you
had cancer.
Tom
Friedman, a licensed clinical social worker at Scripps who worked with Bray,
said participants often told him how much they loved her program.
“It’s
not just a support group; she has a real curriculum that she’s developed,”
Friedman said. “It requires a high degree of sensitivity and professionalism.”
Sometimes
workshop participants write essays, and sometimes they turn to verse. “I’ve had
some of the most extraordinary poetry from people who are dying,” said Bray.
“When they read aloud, it brings the entire group to tears.”
Some
participants publish their work. One of them, Ann
Emerson, was published in The
American Poetry Review a few weeks before she died.
Bray’s
sessions often enhance the physical and emotional well-being of the
participants. Cathy, a patient with breast and bladder cancer who asked to go
by a pseudonym to protect her medical privacy, said she slept better on nights
after the writing sessions. Scozzari said she felt more comfortable opening up to
people about her cancer than she had throughout her treatment.
Cathy
and Scozzari say the members of their respective groups have stayed in touch.
This
summer, Bray moved from California back to Canada to be close to family.
Friedman said Scripps Green has been unable to find a suitable substitute to
lead its writing program.
Bray
hopes to start a similar program in Toronto, helping new groups of patients and
survivors explore their feelings about the most challenging — and in some
cases, the last — chapter of their lives.
Ann
Emerson, in the opening lines of one of her poems, summed up the grim yet
hopeful perspective of many cancer patients:
I stand at the window where
the world ends, barely breathing,
reciting a poem to myself:
I believe in this ordinary day,
a day I can still make it outdoors alive.
the world ends, barely breathing,
reciting a poem to myself:
I believe in this ordinary day,
a day I can still make it outdoors alive.
This
story was produced by Kaiser Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially
independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.
No comments:
Post a Comment