MSI Press Blog

  They weren’t close before. Just two of my neighbors, one downstairs, one in the next lot. Young mothers in their mid-thirties, each with two children, each newly diagnosed—one with uterine cancer, one with lymphoma. Now they spend long evenings together. Drinking. Laughing. Talking about men, though both are married. Not about cancer. Never about cancer. They slip into a kind of fantasy hour—where the diagnoses don’t exist, where their bodies haven’t betrayed them, where they’re still the girls they used to be. Or maybe the girls they never got to be. It’s not denial in the dramatic sense. It’s something softer, sadder. A shared numbness. A counter-life. They get drunk too fast to talk about anything real. And maybe that’s the point. The rest of us—neighbors, friends, watchers—feel the pull. We want to speak. We want to say, Please don’t wait too long. But we also know they won’t hear it. Not now. Not in this fragile world they’ve built together. So we hover in the silence...

  Not everyone wins their battle with cancer. As painful as that is to say—and even harder to write—it's true. For those of us walking this road alongside someone with cancer, we carry hope, strength, and belief for as long as we possibly can. But sometimes, the ending isn't triumphant. Sometimes, it's simply… the end. That was the case with Carl . Carl had Cancer of Unknown Primary ( CUP ), one of the most elusive and aggressive forms of cancer. With no known origin, it hides in plain sight and resists targeted treatment. Fewer than 15% of patients with CUP survive beyond one year, a statistic that, while low, has improved considerably since Carl fought his battle. When Carl knew the miserable odds, he believed he would be one of the rare exceptions. He expected to win. That expectation, though inspiring in the early days, slowly became a barrier. As his body declined rapidly over five short months, the signs were all there: treatment wasn’t working, strength was fading, ...

There are salt lamps glowing in the bedrooms again. For five long months, their light bulbs burned out one by one, quietly surrendering to the dark as I didn’t have the time — or the clarity — to replace them. There was no time for anything outside the urgent, consuming task of caring for my husband Carl as he moved through the final stage of his life. It started with a fall. A routine day, until it wasn't. Tests led to more tests, and the doctors came back with something I wasn’t prepared for — stage 4 cancers. Not one, but five: liver, lung, skin, bone, and stomach. Cancer of unknown primary. Nothing they could point to. Everything failing at once. He lived five more months. At first, we tried chemotherapy. When it failed, we shifted to palliative care. I say “we,” but it was me who made those shifts, who bore the weight of each medical decision, each adjustment, each indignity he faced. And it was me who stayed awake at night, while others slept, making sure Carl didn’t fall, di...

  Today's book excerpt comes from  An Afternoon's Dictation  by  Steven Greenebaum . This book has been in the Amazon top 100 among interfaith and ecumenical books on many occasions. PART TWO: DEALING WITH DEATH AND DYING CHAPTER SIX   For me, while the thought of a soul being with God forever was indeed warmly comforting, the idea of a soul dwelling in, or confined to, a gated heaven was not. I’d grown up and indeed lived most of my life surrounded by people who talked about heaven’s “pearly gates.” Heaven as a gated community? The image was perfect—perfectly horrible. Only the “anointed” need apply. And who was the guardian of the gates, checking off who would be admitted and who would be turned away? Peter, a white male Christian saint. No, thanks. I’ve never liked gated communities on Earth. I certainly wasn’t interested in one for our souls. So, what to do with, “You cannot live forever, but you can be with Me forever.”? If religion is but a language for sp...