People can be very clever with what they say and think they are making you believe that they are their words. Recently, a woman at work told me that she had a stronger work ethic than me. She said, “I would resign myself if I wasn’t doing my best.” She mentioned this when I was talking to her about a problem I was having with another coworker. It was clever of her to slide in an arrogant remark, meant to impress me and insult me at the same time. When I started talking about my cancer she said, “That’s treatable.” She made it clear that she knew everything. In what she said there was always a wall that kept her arrogance far from my humanness. And she did it all with words. It was simply what she said.
I belong to a support group of cancer patients. It’s been one of the most amazing parts of having cancer because I have become part of a community. We help each other, we laugh together, we try to solve simple and complex problems, We share our fears, joys, successes… This exchange of thoughts and feelings creates a deep, rich, wonderful connection that is so satisfying. By sharing my deepest feelings and by others sharing theirs, we experience "intimacy" as group. I feel like they actually know me and I can’t say that about many people. Yet, at the same time, I know very little of the superficial things about them. Everything is turned around: We are close in the closest ways, and superficial in the superficial things. We don’t ask each other what do you do for a living or what kind of car do you drive or where have you traveled to this year – those things don’t matter – such things will never create a real bond between people. This group provides me with the human experience I wanted in life – to share real feelings and completely be myself with a group of people where we all accept each other for who we are.
When my mom died a friend of mine gave me a book on grieving. I was in such shock that I was in shock that I didn’t really know how to deal with her death, but the book was exactly what I needed. I took time to cherish that my friend, “Gave this to me to help me. She wants to help me.” Knowing I had a friend helped me feel safe in the face of death, but to have a friend who really thought about me, what I needed, what it must be like to lose a parent, a friend who wanted to help me, was the start of my healing process. It was like someone had wrapped a blanket around me and said, you are going to be OK. And I could believe it because of her friendship had already helped me.
Words are an important way to communicate, but communication more than the words we say. The words have to show what we mean, what our intentions are, and show some truth about us. Those things are a big part of what we say and easily forgotten when the speaker conveys certainty or demands attention. One of the blessings of cancer for me is that I can better see people who just use words as a means to convince me of something, usually some lie. The woman who said she had a better work ethic than me, spent that afternoon clipping her nails at her desk. She isn’t fooling me or impressing me with statements about who she wants me to think she is. She appeared unbelievable, unreliable, and selfish. She did help to remind me that I want to share my life with people who have experienced life, who live richly, who value people, honor the individual, and who stand behind the words they say.
