Hello, I thought this week I would post another excerpt from my memoir Love Trust Gratitude Healing: Turning a Battle into a Dance and Making Peace with Cancer.
At this point in the book I was through my radiation treatments and near the end of my second round of chemo. My physical recovery was slow and uncertain but with my meditation on Love Trust & Gratitude, emotionally and spiritually I was healing. Here is the excerpt.
With time all things disintegrate on the physical level. Cancer can be an accelerated form of that process. Time is always running out. Treating the physical body may add to that time but what then? It is still winding down and this is true for everyone. Cancer takes what for us is an ambiguous thing and makes it definitive. Our mortality appears before us as if to say, “Here I am as always, now what?” Like I’ve said, everyone is in need of some form of healing. It can be emotional, spiritual or physical. It makes sense to me to expand the focus from just healing the body, which can go either way, to healing emotionally and spiritually as well which I think is the most effective use of Love Trust Gratitude Healing. The two graphs below illustrate this point.
The above graph illustrates the typical journey our physical body takes over our lifetime. Hopefully we enjoy at or near peak health for as long as possible but inevitably our bodies breakdown over time.
The above graph illustrates the potential of our spiritual and emotional healing all the way to our death. Even though our physical bodies breakdown our spiritual and emotional healing can continue and even accelerate. As well, this healing can be passed on to our loved ones and so on. Healing that continues long after we are gone.
I now believe that spiritual and emotional healing can occur right to the end of our lives and continue on through our loved ones after we pass. This is something my dad failed to do in his lifetime. Even when he had the chance on his deathbed he denied himself and me intimacy and healing by lying in an attempt to save face. A face that would soon be gone. A history of pain and suffering in a family can turn on a word or meaningful gesture. It can be as simple as saying, “I’m sorry.” My dad couldn’t or wouldn’t do that. His life remained unresolved emotionally and spiritually. It’s his great tragedy but affected me as well.